LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is: “Decisions based on timeless truths will never leave our tomor…

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, c…

"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part One We yearn for security. There is an inherent need deep within the fiber of our being that desires to be able to lean on and lean into the things around us, knowing with steeled assuredness that they will hold us firm and steady. We want life to be safe because…

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 purp…

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is: “I am left with no alternative than to look beyond the efforts…

Fear – How We Create It Fear. We all have it. Sometimes it’s just this slight apprehension, or this bit of inner angst, or this uncomfortable twinge that we experience. At other times it’s utterly overwhelming, leaving us helplessly paralyzed and violently shaken right down to the core of everything that we are. At certain times and in certain situ…

"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Four Did you ever have one of those surreal moments when it seems like something snaps in your head and suddenly you see everything like you never saw it before? Have you experienced those times when things unexplainably shift and they don’t look at all the same …

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 rest…

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is: “Disabling your conscience is like disabling your smoke detect…

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 s…

Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st century America. Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself. We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough to …

“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 thoughtf…

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is: “Love is the essence of our humanity expressing itself in acti…

Better or Worse? Will the choice that you’re about to make, make you better or worse? Will it improve your life, or diminish your life? The fact of the matter is, it’s going to do one or the other. And because it is, it’s worth asking the question, will it make me better or worse? But that question itself can be clouded by a whole lot of things. Fi…

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…

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is: “Running from what we fear is like throwing a bunch of stuff i…

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 int…

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Two Forgiveness often seems to be one of those things that’s a genuinely nice idea, but not really a life liberating reality. Life is full of nice ideas; those trite sayings, gentle stories and brave concepts that would make life a whole lot better if they were re…

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is: “It comes down to 'fear' and 'faith'. 'Fear' of what stands in…

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 c…

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone – Simple Truth’s for Profound Living” Someone once uttered the timeless saying that “timing is everything.” There’s something about things happening in a certain order in a certain time that makes it all fit in a certain way. We sense a natural and correct progression that, if followed, leads to success or happines…

I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark We all create expectations. But how often are our expectations a wholesale surrendering of ‘what could be’ to ‘what is?’ How often are they borne of a discouraged soul and a frightened heart that cannot see beyond the realities of the moment so as to envision a brighter reality standing at-the-ready in the next mo…

What I Would Say to the World 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 teenager…

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues. Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes. All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire. Today's thought is: “Who are you sending into the future and how are you sending t…

“When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?” We dig holes. Lots of them. With all kinds of shovels. But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re diggi…

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…

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Three The concept of sacrifice seems more suited to novels or epic movies. It appears more an ideal; a concept that when observed from a safe distance seems wonderfully heroic, deeply inspiring and chivalrous in a way that stirs up something powerful in us that se…

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…

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 conve…

“The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.” Too often we don’t care, or that’s what we tell ourselves. We work really hard not to care because we’ve figured out that caring is just too risky, in whatever way it happens to be too risky for us. We get the idea in our head that ‘not’ caring is just easi…

“In full uniform, the color guard marched by as part of the parade. And as they did, he forced his horribly slumped and deeply aged body out of his worn wheelchair and stood to ram-rod attention. He held a salute until the guard had passed, and then he feebly collapsed back into his wheelchair. As I stared in ever-warming admiration, emblazoned acr…

How many times have you felt that there’s just no use? There’s just no sense in going on. You know, we’ve made way too many mistakes. Or the hole that we’ve dug, or the hole that misfortune dug is just too deep. And it really doesn’t matter who dug it anyway because, either way, we’re not getting out it. We failed out of college, or we didn’t go to…

People ask me, “Is there any hope?” And there have been times (more than one), where I’ve found myself asking the same question. “Is there any hope?” And I often ask myself, “What kind of world do we live in? How dark has it all become? How bad must it be that we somehow find ourselves driven to some point, or some place in our lives that’s so desp…

You know, I grew up with a lot of dreams. A lot of things that I wanted to do. We all have dreams. Maybe your dream was to have a great marriage. Maybe it was to start a company that changed a community, or a nation, or maybe the world. Maybe it was to raise solid kids, or travel, or write a book, or invent something revolutionary that made life be…

The odds that are we’ve never met, and if we have, I hope that I was able to leave something with you in the meeting as that is my passion and my calling. My life has been devoted to helping people. You know, you start out with a vision to help people, and that vision is often pretty romanticized. In your mind you envision changing people lives, an…

Everybody seems lost these days. People don’t like to admit that, or they refuse to admit that…but everybody seems lost these days. I suppose that the greatest kind of ‘lost’ is to be ‘lost,’ but to deny that you’re ‘lost,’ even though you are. That’s about the worst kind of lost that I can think of, and we certainly see a whole lot of that kind of…

New It Does Not Mean Better What is “better?” I mean, the definition of “better.” When we change something, we tend to label the change as “better,” whether it’s better or not. If we adjust something, or alter something, or eliminate it altogether, we define the changes that we make as “better.” We initiate new programs, or we reconstruct old ones,…

Crafting the New Birthing a New Beginning She was born into an emerging America in 1890. Through the ninety-five years of life that stood in front of her she would watch an Industrial Revolution unfold, Henry Ford roll out the Model T, and Edison light the world. She would read the headlines of dough boys marching off to fight a Kaiser in what was …

The New Year Refusing to Be Relegated to the Sidelines We stand on the escarpment of a New Year. In many ways, it seems that what lies ahead doesn’t rally us with energizing hope, but rather it seems to rattle us with deep apprehension. From the vantage point we stand on at the beginning of this New Year, the landscape that lies ahead looks uncerta…

A Clean Slate The Possibility of a New Start With the New Year we long for a fresh start. We want to wipe the slate clean, removing the smudges and the smears. We want to get rid of the errors, the poor choices, the misguided decisions and the bruising flops that populated the previous year. We want to wipe away old habits, clean up destructive beh…

Great things scare us, as they should. If something doesn't scare us then it's probably not all that great. All of us are called to great things. Those things will likely be different for each of us. However, in whatever way they are great, they are great. We are not here to pass through this existence as some distant observer of whatever's going o…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

Great things are hidden in small things. That sounds terribly illogical. Yet, it's only illogical because we don't really understand the nature of great things and that their greatness is marked in part by their ability to inhabit small things. Greatness is not so much about size or importance as it is about meaning and value. It's not necessarily …

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

If we fictionalize the story of Christmas as some fanciful tale spun in the backwaters of history and people long removed, in that action we have succumb to the debilitating belief that the only viable idea of rescue is fiction. And I can think of few things that are sadder than that.” - Craig D. Lounsbrough…

Rescue. It is hard to admit that we need to be rescued. We think ourselves to be smart enough, cunning enough, strategic enough, and enough of whatever it is that we need to be enough of to save ourselves. We tediously craft an endless array of things to rescue us from the things that we previously crafted to rescue us that ended up stranding us. W…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…