Craig D. Lounsbrough quotes:

I can attempt to stay on the fence. However, the problem is that the fence is a figment of my fear not a reality of my journey.

Denial is fear gone delusional. Acceptance is fear given to God. Engaging is fear overruled by God. Victory is fear banished by God.

Uncommon solutions can always overcome problems of the most common or uncommon kind if I am sufficiently committed to overcoming them.

To take this one shot at life and live it with God is to take this one shot and have it reverberate across and around my world as if it were a million shots and more.

Judging others is too often escapism dressed in the garb of righteous indignation, whereby I dutifully point out in others that which I probably should be pointing out in myself.

I pray that I am never so foolishly naive or roguishly pompous to think that I can be the captain of my own ship, for if God is not at the helm my ship will soon be at the bottom.

Every tomorrow is an outcome of what I do today, and the beauty of it all is that today is happening all the time.

To dress up today in the threadbare garments of yesterday is to create an impoverished tomorrow.

Mediocrity is the companion of passivity and will not heed the call of great things. Courage is the companion of sacrifice and cannot help but heed the call of great things. And we are left of our own accord to choose one or the other.

Lies are like paper-Mache in a rain storm.

What is life but God's daring invitation to a remarkable journey? And what is human nature but a staunchly inbred tendency toward self-preservation? And because of the rigidly paradoxical nature of these things, the road of life is seldom trod beyond a few scant steps.

Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart.

Worlds of my own creation are erected with walls that are within but a few scant paces of each other. The world that God creates for me has no idea what walls are.

When will I realize that without God my world is draped in shadows between which there is not a single ray of light? And when will I recognize that with God, my world is deluged in light between which there is not a single thread of darkness?

Although we may face untold numbers that by their sheer mass appear to render us as little more than a speck in the face of them, a single person standing with God amidst any mass will always be an indomitable majority.

To assist us in climbing the mountains is marvelous. To level the mountains and altogether eliminate the climb is miraculous. And at times I think that God prefers the latter because it emboldens us to face the former.

How often do I stand in abject terror and raw trepidation before the impossible peaks that soar to impossible heights in front me, when God turns to me and calmly says what mountains?

There is a deep dryness of the soul and all of the recalcitrant contrivances of man to quench his own thirst will bring not a single drop of moisture to those parched places, for God and God alone holds the water that satiates the soul.

If the amount of times we get up is just one less than the amount of times that we've been knocked down, then we're spending our lives lying down.

I can bow to fear and flee the pursuit of great things. I can bow to God and engage in the pursuit of making things great.

The present is too often squandered grieving the past or fearing the future, which makes the present nothing more than a cheap facsimile of what was or what will be instead of what it could be.

Why does not the stunning evidence of the last miracle grant me confidence in the next crisis? Because my immaturity does not permit such a faith, my desperate prayer is that God would grant me a robust faith sufficient to trust Him not for one crisis, but for an eternity of miracles.

The war on Christmas is waged of weakness and fed by vision blinded. It is a war of intellect blunted to stupidity and calling begging at the feet of cowardice.

To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story.

To be an end in myself is to bring an end to myself.

Will I live yearning for a world that I need not yearn for because the message of Christmas is entirely undaunted in its ability to handily penetrate and completely subjugate the very world that I doubt its ability to survive in?

Am I a storm-waster? For it is within the fury of the very storms within which I cower that I find resources for my growth that are entirely absent on calmer days.

I want to stand on the truth that God has designed us to stand, and that the opportunity to stand is the opportunity to live exuberantly and gloriously.

In the deepest darkness God tenderly grasps my hand and whispers that darkness is nothing more than a place that He is preparing for the arrival of light.

And so, it is always the case that the past is irreparably land-locked, and the future has yet to land. And here we are, living out our lives on the precariously thin line which separates the two.

I would be dreadfully remiss not to think that God would painstakingly craft something an intimately ingenious and inexplicably intricate as my life, and that by virtue of such sheer brilliance I should not examine it with the greatest precision and unleash it with the fullest abandon.

I am only one, but that is infinitely better than being none.

Human beings manifesting the fullness of who they were created to be would be inviting and correspondingly transformational in a manner almost mysterious.

To avoid the cost incurred in pursuing great things we opt for ease and blithely abandon great things. The sheer recklessness of such a pathetically apathetic trade-off will eventually cost us a life squandered, which in the end is the greatest cost of all.

Dream extravagantly, for God has imbued us with ample imagination to dream out to and across the very periphery of the impossible.

Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to the precipice of our own limits in any and every situation?

If I am always standing at the bottom of the mountain longingly looking up, in all probability it is because I have heeded the pillaging dogma of mediocrity which persistently tells me that the dream is not worth the climb.

No, I am not powerful nor do I wish to be, for it is God using my weakness that makes me potent and I would never wish to surrender that.

If left to my own simplistic devices and the sorely scant limits of my abilities, would I not die a death of the blandest sort imaginable? And should I not thank God that He graciously gifted me with an imagination that renders such a death entirely unimaginable?

If I wholly unleash my imagination and forcefully stretch it out beyond its own edges, even at such a point I can only imagine a thin shard of this most immense God. And even though it is but a thin shard, it will nonetheless be mesmerizingly colossal.

Without an imagination we would be irreparably shackled to what is, and never be released to what could be.

Faith is the resplendent key that liberates me from the impregnable confines meticulously constructed from the raw material of my disbelief.

Sometimes things that appear completely irreconcilable and mutually exclusive serve a shared purpose that could not be achieved except through their contradiction.

I pray that I am sufficiently stirred by the rumor of great things to seek the God who created this single thread that I am, and to marvel at a vision magnificent enough to cause this God to weave from this single thread a tapestry most resplendent.

I ruthlessly expend my time and my energies seeking many random things, none of which will bless me in the way that I suppose they will, for despite my frequently stubborn resistance to the thought, the single and sole blessing that I can be utterly confident in is found in seeking God alone.

God would have us cherish even the smallest of blessings, for in taking a blessing for granted we are well on our way to taking it to its grave.

And who would dare write their own death into the script so that the rest of the characters in the tale might live? God of course.

Are the returns on my journey equal to the length of the road behind me? And if not, have I realized the pressing need to surrender to God the road in front of me?

The love hidden within is always greater than the hate displayed without.

Hope is oxygen to the soul, and God is the oxygen of hope.

A lie is my attempt to tamper with the truth so that I need not face the truth. Yet as shrewd as I think myself to be, I would be wise to understand that God designed truth as ultimately tamper-proof.

To fully understand how utterly amazing we really are we must first understand all of the things about us that are not, and then we must make our habitation where they are not.

To destroy that which seeks to destroy me, God invites me to stand against it until it stands down and then falls down.

If God created great things with a point of vulnerability, it would lie in the reality that great things die in the hands of great ignorance.

I am what no one else is, and in the hands of God I can do what no one else does. And if I dare set such a truth in motion I will change my world.

One sure way I can avoid facing myself is by refusing to look into the face of God.

Calm for too long begs the question of whether we're in an all-out pursuit of life, or we're all-out of the pursuit of life.

Without unreservedly surrendering myself to God, whatever place I might raise myself to remains nothing more than a step or possibly two off the hard basement floor of life, for of myself I can be utterly assured that I will never step out of the basement.

Happenstance is the myth of the simple mind, for it is the deliberate genius of God that what appears entirely disjointed always reveals itself to be stunningly seamless. And it is in reflecting on such stunning ingenuity that our faith becomes seamless.

A conviction borne of God amply possesses the potency and power to brazenly reach beyond the possible in order to topple the impossible.

The priceless lesson in the New Year is that endings birth beginnings and beginnings birth endings. And in this elegantly choreographed dance of life, neither ever find an end in the other.

I would surmise that we must cherish the resources that God has given us to achieve a goal more than we cherish the goal itself. For if we fall victim to the pursuit of the goal alone, then the goal has suddenly become our god.

Surrender is a choice, it is never a calling.

Every advancing step I take toward my goal of comfort is yet another retreating step I take away from God's goal of the impossible.

Great difficult is the dogged bedfellow of great wealth, which always renders great wealth as less than great. Yet, great wealth as bequeathed by God is robustly free of such travails, which always renders it greater than great.

God has hewn out a hidden path more glorious, tantalizing and adventuresome than the path trod by most, and it is a path seen only through the eyes of our wounds, felt solely through the heart of our losses, and singularly traversed by those with a limp in their step.

The true sign of a robust and mature life rests in how many times that life has been knocked down, for to be incessantly knocked down and yet find oneself still standing means that someone had the resolve to get up that many times plus one.

I will not find myself, nor will I obtain any precarious morsel of life in giving all of life to myself. If I am ever to find these things, I must first be willing to give these things away at the very moment that I come into possession of them.

When we surrender to apathy and expect the world to deliver everything to us, we deliver ourselves to a slow death and we sacrifice the best of our potential to the worst of our decisions.

I can amass countless fortunes and yet stand with empty hands. I can seek God and have fortunes that fill countless hands.

To be careless in making decisions is to naively believe that a single decision impacts nothing more than that single decision, for a single decision can spawn a thousand others that were entirely unnecessary or it can bring peace to a thousand places we never knew existed.

At some point I hope to have grown sufficiently in both stature and wisdom to understand that I cannot deliver myself from myself, and that God alone can save me from me.

We can hide a lot of stuff until God shows up, for when God shows up nothing is hidden, which includes both our embarrassment and His forgiveness.

Forgiving others simply means that you refuse to be a prisoner of a past that you can't change, and shackled to decisions that you didn't make.

Discouragement is the cancer of great things.

I would be an utter fool to let my journey be defined by the denial of the journey.

Are the returns on my journey equal to the length of the road behind me? And if not, have I realized the pressing need to surrender to God the road in front of me~?

If the road behind me is not growing ever longer, then it is likely that the feet underneath me are not moving any longer. And if my feet are not moving, I have somehow, somewhere traded this most glorious journey for lesser endeavors.

Fear says that what God has called me to is blatantly impossible. Selfishness says that the cost is unacceptably prohibitive. My humanity harbors other lesser agendas that seduce me to my own death. And I would be wise to believe none of it.

It is inevitable that I will leave a legacy simply because I cannot walk through life without leaving footprints as I walk. Therefore, I would be wise to consider the path before I make the prints.

God beckons me to exhilarating adventures that are without number, beyond all conceivable boundaries, and effortlessly eclipse the furthest reaches of my imagination, all while I sit languishing in stifling adventures of my own limited creation.

To incessantly blame others for my shortcomings is cowardice borne of fear, fed by fear, and haunted by fear. To be steadfastly accountable for my shortcomings is bravery borne of God, fed by God, and blessed by God.