Life Talk With Craig Lounsbrough

We Like Things to Be New New.  We like new things, or things to be new, or to do away with the old to make a place and a space for something new.  The idea of ‘new’ is appealing.  And because it is, we chase it.  But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better,’ and I think that quite often we associate the two way too much.  We tend to automatically think that if something is ‘new,’ the fact that it’s ‘new’ somehow guarantees that it’s ‘better.’  Certainly, some things that are ‘new’ are clearly ‘better.’  But many are not.  And at some level we know that.  But I think that we rather casually (and maybe unconsciously) associate that which is ‘new’ as somehow, someway, through some degree of some sort of magical thinking, as always being ‘better.’  However, ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’ And because there’s this natural association of ‘new’ as being ‘better,’ we often focus on making something new, or doing something new, or trying something new, or inventing something new without really being thoughtful about whether this ‘n

“Right now, it’s Saturday for me.  I’m between what was and what is yet to be, living squarely between a death of sorts and the unknown of the ‘what next?’  It is my Saturday.  If the ‘yet to be’ is nothing more than what is transpiring right now, my future will be shrouded in the thick cold of bitter hopelessness.  A shift in a slightly different direction, and there may be jubilation.  Either way, right now it’s Saturday for me.”   An Intimate Collision  Ever been in the “in-between?”  You know, something’s gone (whatever that is), but whatever’s coming next hasn’t showed up yet.  Or, life shut down in one place and it hasn’t opened up someplace else.  Or, there’s this huge hole in our lives where some ‘thing’ or ‘someone’ used to be, and now that ‘it’ or ‘they’ are gone, we’re waiting for what’s going to show up and settle in that gaping hole within us.  We lost a friend, or we lost a job, or we lost a home, or we lost a parent, or we lost our confidence, or we a lost a goal, or we lost a sense of self, or

What Is Right and What Is Not? What is ‘right?’  What provides our guiding function?  What is our “north star?”  Our constant?  Our set of rules that keep us civil?  Our code?  Or… is our code the commitment to the absence of a code?  What is ‘right?’   The question, “What is right,” must be asked without our efforts to choose what is ‘right,’ or to think that we actually have the power to do that in the first place.  The question, “What is right” needs to be probed without exercising some sort of non-existent license that leads us to believe that we have the right to decide that ‘everything’ is right.  It is a question not of opinion or bias or cultural trends or vogue ideals.  Rather, it is a deeper question.  Much deeper.  It is not a question of how we grant ourselves the greatest leeway by building the widest moral highway we can possibly build.  It’s not about scripting out the boundaries for ourselves that are boundaries in name only, so that we might delude ourselves into thinking that we are walking

Why Is the World Like This Anyway? Why is the world like this anyway?  Why is the world so much of what we don’t want it to be like, and a whole lot less of what we do want it to be like?  Why is it so incredibly difficult to create the kind of world that we all would love to live in?  How is it that we’re able to visualize what we would actually like the world to be like, yet we seem so incredibly incapable of actually creating the very world that we visualize? Musicians have penned thousands of magnificent lyrics about such a world.  An untold number of novels have spun inspiring stories about it.  Endless movie makers have produced captivating films that have brought it to the big screen and have enthralled us with the possibility of it all.  Poets have extolled its virtues in rhyme and pulpiteers have spoken of it in words both beautiful and compelling. We know what we want.  We’ve immersed ourselves in the idea of it.  We sing about it, write about it, make movies about it, pen poems and preach sermons a

What Are We Focusing On? We can be very focused people.  We can decide that there is something that we want to do, or not do, or get, or not get, or complete, or not complete, or argue, or not argue, or whatever it is that we want to focus on.  Indeed, we can be very focused people.  In fact, we can be focused to the point of being quite stubborn about whatever it is that we’re focusing on. The issue is not about being focused, as that’s simply part of our nature.  The issue is what we’re focusing on.  What has captured our attention?  What has challenged us, or captivated us, or made us angry, or riled us up and incited us to some kind of action, whatever that action might be?  What is it that we have latched onto, or what is it that has latched on to us?  What is it that’s seized the whole of our imagination and inspired us to throw off all caution, step up and run after dreams of the most magnificent sort?  Or, at the other end of that spectrum, what’s frightened us to the point that we’ve turned away from

We Reap What We Sow We reap what we sow.  In other words, what we do is never free of an outcome that will be shaped by what we do.  The ‘cause-and-effect’ of life is such that what we do will always cause an outcome that is fashioned directly by what we do.  Despite the fact that we often think (or would prefer to think) that what we do is somehow isolated to the action or the choice itself, by doing something we have, in fact, set the stage for a future outcome that will reflect whatever the action or choice was that we made.  We reap what we sow.  And that is an immovable reality. And if we look around us, what we see today will tell us, quite clearly, the stuff that we sowed yesterday.  The events of today grew out of the choices of yesterday.  We can complain about the world today.  We can bemoan our lot in life, or we can find ourselves becoming deeply hopeless and darkly dismayed about the state of our culture.  We can grieve deeply over tragedies that seem to befall us at every turn and that leave us

Repentance Reconfigured Standards We all have standards, even if our standard is not to have one.  We all live by something, even if it’s the denial of that ‘something.’  There’s some sort of inherent code that creates a framework that provides direction to our actions.  There’s a paradigm that we all work within.  Call it genetics, call it cultural, call it greed, call it fear, call it upbringing, call it faith, call it whatever you want…but we all have standards shaped by something.  We each have them. But the thing that shapes them the most is us.  We want standards because we’re supposed to have them, or they were inbred within us, or we just picked them up growing up, or whatever the case might be.  But we want standards of convenience.  We want standards that are fluidly permissive and that grant us ample free reign to do what we want when we want.  We want standards that won’t hold us back if we hold them up.  At times, we want standards that give us permission to do what, in fact, standards tell us no

It's Time to Listen We hear a lot of things.  A whole lot of things.  We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information.  It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that.  Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy mosaic about the life around us and the world within us.  And as insidiously dangerous as it is, in time this rather indistinct and somewhat dubious mosaic becomes our reality.  In essence, it becomes our existence. It seems that we tend to be busy about a whole lot of nothing.  We can meticulously tally the tasks of the day only to be inordinately perplexed that for some reason the sum total doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the sum total of everything that we expended in accomplishing those things.  So consumed are we in the tasks of ‘nothing’ that we don’t have time to think about ‘something’.  Therefore, we have irreparably fallen in lo

Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To? Who are you giving yourself away to?  To what propaganda have you come to subscribe?  To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb?  Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached?  What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you into some sort of comatose complacency where you no longer engage this rare, but incredibly precious thing that we call common sense?  What podium have you obediently sat in front of that has led you to believe that you cannot think for yourself, or maybe that you can, but that you don’t need to?  Who has told you that facts are irrelevant, and that the truth is simply an irritating obstacle to be quickly discarded if they don’t neatly fit on the preferred end of some ever-changing political spectrum?  Who are you giving yourself away to? We would likely say that we have not given ourselves to anyone.  That none of these things are happening, and if perchance they

Where Did All The Time Go? “Rush often results in waste and moments forever lost.  Attention to time is inattention to the life that fills that time.  So much can be lost.”  “Where did all the time go?”  We ask that all the time.  However, it’s not where the time went.  It’s what we were doing with the time while it was going. Think about this.  When it comes to time, we only get a certain amount of it.  We get this block of time that has a distinct beginning that we’ve already experienced.  We’re done with that part of it.  But as for the ending, we’re not all that certain when that’s going to show up.  All we know is that sooner or later, it’s going to show up.  And we can’t buy more time to push that date out.  Time’s not renewable so you can’t use it a couple of times over to stretch it out.  You can’t manufacture more of it.  You can’t store it away so you can go grab a bunch of it when you’re about ready to run out of whatever amount of time you had.  Time is what it is.  And whether we use it wisely, o

What Is Success and What Is It Not? “Success”.  People chase after this thing that we call “success.”  But in the pursuit of this elusive thing that we call “success”, maybe the better question is, “What is success”?  How do we define it?  How does the culture define it?  How do the people that we spend our time with, or live with, or work with, or play with define this thing that we call “success?” Certain things are considered more valuable to achieve, or we grant them more weight, or we give them precedence over other things.  There’s this pre-determined hierarchy of sorts that’s established by the culture, or by a certain industry, or a particular profession.  There are things that are granted an elevated status by virtue of their longevity, or the difficulty involved in achieving them, or the sacrifices that have to be made in order to accomplish them.  There are things that we define as success because few people achieve them, or maybe no one’s achieved them.  Whatever the case, there are an array of de

There Is No God - Evidence There is no God.  It’s not an unfamiliar statement.  In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’ I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God.  Therefore, out of convenience, we simply declare that there is none, for we fear that the experiences that we crave will be snatched from us, the pleasures that we wish to indulge in will be made taboo, that we will somehow be punished if things feel too good, and that this doting judge-like figure will frown on most everything that makes us happy.  So, we decide that we don’t want a God.  And subsequently, we declare that there is no God. Subsequently, we then become our own gods, for the absence of a God does not eliminate our need of one.  So, we fill the role.  But because we demanded that we be these little gods and become the captain of our own ships, sunken ships litter the seas

“After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit, and testified, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’” John 13:21 Betrayal is intentional…ruthlessly so.  It is the deliberate choice of someone to hold their interests as so superior to our well-being that the cost of crushing us in order to advance their agendas is deemed as entirely reasonable and indisputably acceptable.  In this horrifically devastating scenario, we become fodder in someone’s blind pursuit of objectives that such an action will, in fact, never achieve.  Once the perpetrator comes to understand that both the agenda and the means chosen to achieve it accomplish neither, they will quickly fabricate a distorted narrative crafted to sustain the acceptability of what they’ve done.  Such a short-sighted effort will demand repeated editing as the narratives cannot keep step with the ever-emerging realities of the betrayal.  And herein the betrayal multiplies as the increasingly frustrated perpetrator fruitlessly att

Trust.  How do you define it?  Typically our definition of it is terribly basic and somewhat shallow.  We seem to define it as that ability to rest fully and completely in something or someone.  That's about as far as we take it.  Yet, the incredible power of trust suggests that it is more . . . much more. Remove trust from a relationship and that relationship simply cannot survive.  Extract trust from whatever situation we're in and we will doubt that person or that thing or that event to the point that we withdraw.  Erase trust and we simply don't want to go there, wherever "there" is.  Take away trust and all you have left is the need to rebuild trust.  You might want to think about this as well.  Real trust, trust that does the distance is built over long periods of time with consistency, honesty,commitment and the relentless exhibition of integrity and self-sacrifice.  Yet, trust can be destroyed in a matter of seconds. It can come crashing down based on one single action, one errant choice, one impulsiv

We all throw around the idea of having a purpose, or not having one, or wondering if we’re supposed to have one, or whatever we’re wondering.  We wonder if we really need a purpose, and if so do we create it or does it already exist and we just haven’t happened to happen upon it just yet.  For some of us, we think that the whole idea of having a purpose suggests that life is much more intentional than maybe we thought it was, and that maybe we’re all part of a grand design of some sort.  For others of us who tend to see life as more happenstance, it’s more about figuring out how we can figure ourselves in to whatever’s being figured out around us.  In that sense, we create a purpose if what’s around us appears to make it worthwhile or possibly necessary to do so.  However, or in whatever way we go about it, we all ponder this whole idea of having a purpose.  For having a purpose gives us a desperate sense of purpose when our self-esteem would tell us that we serve none. There’s something about life that doesn

Success has been accorded an endless array of definitions.  Some of them are crafted to make failure seem more like success so that we can limp through life and fail without remorse or guilt.  Other definitions are quite lofty, written to give us opportunity achieve in a manner that has little to do with the achievement and everything to do with restoring blunted self-esteems.  At times success is defined by whatever will accord us the accolades of others or advance us socially or professionally.  At yet other times, the definition of success is more about giving ourselves a sorely needed boost when our spirits have been lagging. Sometimes definitions are crafted as we go along, granting us permission to fluidly and rather nonchalantly alter the definition of success in order to form-fit whatever the outcome of our choices have been.  In doing that, we have granted ourselves full license to define the outcome in whatever way suits our choices.  We can craft a definition of success to embolden a faltering caus

“Who Am I?”  What the Question Evidences “Who am I?”  The question seems a bit overused these days.  It’s something more like a vogue, trendy kind of question that pulls us out of the doldrums of living among the masses and plants us in the more desirable currents of the intellectual mainstream.  In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are as a means of living in awe of what God wrought within us.  Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to the contrivances of whatever trend is currently trending in the culture.  It’s the creation of a self suitable to the world rather than discovering who we are as both in and above the world.   The question of ‘who we are’ suggests that we’re exercising our intellectual acumen to probe our existence.  That exercise itself lends weight to the fact that we have an intellect to exercise and an existence to live it out in.  By its very nature the question of ‘who we are’ poses the th

The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem “We’re driven.  Whether that’s for our good or our ill, we’re driven.  That drivenness may be born of a free spirit bent on living with unimpeded freedom, or it might be a drivenness used to hold ourselves captive.  It might be a drivenness to face ourselves, or a drivenness to run from ourselves.  We can be driven to do great things, or to hide from great things.  Being driven grants us the ability to fly, but we can use it just as readily to die.  If we are bent under the weight of a low self-esteem, our drivenness is often exercised to our own demise.  It’s used to create places to hide, excuses to run, rationalizations to justify the awful person that we are not, and the freedom to embrace beliefs about ourselves that have no basis in reality other than the reality we’ve crafted from the skewed messages of others.  On the other hand, we might become driven to prove ourselves as worthy through various accomplishments and achievement

Do we realize that the choices that we make today lay the foundation for tomorrow's outcomes?  Do we really think that things just happen, or do we understand that what happens today is the consequence of a series of choices that we made yesterday?  We seem to stand stunned and perplexed by what we see in our culture.  But are these things really happenstance and the turn of fate, or are they simply the consequences of the choices we have made along the way? As the old saying goes, "You reap what you sow."  We are certainly reaping.  While we need to understand and accept that central reality, our time would be better spent asking how we learn from those choices.  Why did we make them?  What was it that we hoped to get out of them?  How do we stop making them?  What would better choices look like?  What ethics, morals, values and principles should guide the choices that we make in the future so the consequences of those choices work for us instead of working against us?  We are the cause.  And since we are, w

I often think about what I would say to the world.  In the pain, confusion, fear, and rampant disorientation…what would I say?  With the deceit, the manipulation, the less than admirable agendas being floated on all fronts…what would I say?  With marriages fracturing under the weight of a culture gone rogue, with teenagers taking their lives before they ever have a chance to even understand what life is, with eyes cast to a hopeless future that seems to become dimmer by the day…what would I say?  What would I say?  And as I speak to an audience of patients that day-after-day sit crumpled and bent, as I speak to those who tolerate my penmanship and read the words that I stitch together, as I come across the innumerable people wounded and bleeding in whatever way they are wounded and bleeding, what would I say?