Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

“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 digging holes right in the middle of digging them.  We dig a lot of holes and we have all kinds of shovels to dig them with.  We dig these holes through the decisions that we make, or the people that we tend to spend our time with, or the activities that we engage in, or the lifestyle choices that we've made, or the way that we spend our money, or the belief systems that we adhere to, or the habits that we develop, or the choices that we make to advance our careers, or the people that we marry and the people that we don't.  We dig all kinds of holes with all kinds of shovels. And maybe what we should do with our lives is stop digging holes.  And maybe we should stop all the digging by being thoughtful about what we're doing.  Maybe we should stop the digging by refusing to be reactive.  By rejecting greedy impulses and refusing to get caught up in those impulses.  By starting to ask who we're listening to and why.  Maybe we need to stop digging holes by asking where our ethics went, or who we're hanging around with, or what habits we need to seriously consider getting rid of, or what principles we've left behind us that maybe we need to put in front of us, or the incessant denial that we live in and all of the rationalizes that we create to justify that denial.  Maybe we need to stop all the digging. So take a moment.  Put down all of your shovels.  Be brutally honest with yourself and ask yourself these questions, as well as some others that maybe you should be asking yourself.  Put down the shovels, stop the digging, and get rid of the holes.  Life is a whole lot less stressful when you're not spending the better part of it trying to figure out how you're going to get out of the hole that you're currently in, and what you're going to do to avoid falling into the next one.  Take a moment, get rid of the shovels, and stop the digging.

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 love with plug-and-play and pre-fab.  We like things pre-packaged, prepared, and predetermined.  We're looking for answers that were already ingested, digested and reflexively regurgitated for our reflexive consumption by whatever source we happen to have happened upon.  In essence, we don't think.  And in fact, there are few things as dangerous as that.     We're going to ingest a whole lot of something.  That's inevitable.  And if that ‘something' shapes us with that much force, we might be wise to ask what that ‘something' is.  We live in a world roiling with bias and flushed murky with politically-correct agendas.  We have splintering splinter groups proffering philosophies of every shape and sort.  We've got the thematic propagation of ‘diversity' that's more about a permission to be permissive.  Too often it's about the ‘spin to win'.  It's less about truth and it's more about triumph.  It's about the resolute and rather gritty proliferation of the agenda to the degree that truth becomes the agenda and the agenda becomes the truth.  Therefore, truth becomes negotiable and pliable in a forced and placating servitude to an onslaught of dubious agendas.  However, truth in the service of an agenda becomes opinion.  And too often opinion is bias off the leash and running wild. So, we need to listen for a change.  We need to question…aggressively and responsibly.  We need to ruthlessly investigate and corroborate.  We need to quit being complacent consumers and become invested investigators.  We need to use truth as a steeled template, not as a fluffy convenience.  We need to bring the sturdy compass of ethics to point out the true north in every decision whether that true north is to our liking or not.  We don't need to be worldly wise, for that's an oxymoron of the most deceptive kind.  Rather, we need to be wise in the ways of God and life.  We need to be sufficiently stubborn to reject the pabulum of the masses, yet pliable enough to hear the beating hearts underneath the pabulum.  We need to be bold and brazen in a manner stitched tight by wisdom and lent compelling by reason.  We need to be beacons of light knowing that the crowd is apt to label us as sorely antiquated and ridiculously ill-informed.  We need to listen in the bravest form imaginable.     It would behoove us to remember that to live passively is to live dangerously.  To live inquisitively is to live wisely.  To live boldly is to live robustly.  And to live our lives based on timeless principles is to honor God rather than worship everything else that pretends to be God.  May we choose to abandon the former and judiciously embrace all of the latter.   “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.” Ephesians 5:15-16

“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 easier, because we don't care.  Or it's safer, because we don't care.  We're not in a position to get hurt, because we don't care.  If things don't go our way it doesn't matter, because we don't care.  If something or someone fails us, there's no loss to us because we don't care.  And this whole mindset of not caring is not about not caring at all.  It's about protecting ourselves from the pain that we fear we'll experience if we do care. But, by assuming this self-protective position, we're doing something that we may not be thinking about at all.  We're retreating.  Basically, we're retreating from any situations that have caused us pain before, or from situations that we feel will cause us pain if we deal with them.  And in all that retreating, maybe there's a stance that we should have taken, or some action that we should have engaged in, or some decision that we should have stood in opposition to or in support of.  But we don't.  We don't.  Instead, we retreat.  And we retreat because we've worked real hard to convince ourselves that we don't care, and we've done that so that we won't get hurt.  And therefore, the battle that maybe should have been ours, or the battle that we should have contributed to, or the battle that was critical for us or someone else is fought without us being in it.  Or worse yet, maybe it never got fought at all because we didn't show up to fight it.  And the loss that we incur, however we incurred it, is likely to cause a level of pain far, far greater than the pain that we were working to avoid feeling in the first place.  And in the end, there's a good chance that we'll end up caring that we didn't care.  And because we end up caring that we didn't care, we'll create a battle in the last place that we ever want to fight one…and that's within ourselves.

“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 across his hat I saw the words “WWII Veteran.”  And while I deeply admire his stirring passion for our country, I stood there wishing that my passion for the cause of Christ might someday be strong enough to lift me out of the many wheelchairs within which I sit.” Am I passionate for the right things?  Not just passionate.  But passionate in the right way.  Sure, there's a lot of voices out there.  There's a lot of causes out there.  There's a lot of yelling, and screaming, and arguing, and hostile behaviors, and noisy propaganda, and a bunch of edgy people on more than one rant advocating for these causes.  On top of that, the causes themselves shift depending upon the temperature of the culture, or the agenda of the people pulling long strings behind closed doors.  There are causes that represent the demands of a handful of people who find the foundations of their cause so ill-defined or fragile that constructive dialogue is replaced with destructive actions.  Greed is rampant.  Power-mongering runs wild.  Principles have been discarded because they impede the progressive thinking that end up resulting in regressive outcomes.  And in this mess and in the midst of all of this noise, am I passionate for the right things? Consider this.  There are some things that are timeless.  There are some things that are woven into this existence that you can't remove.  There are principles and ethics that are foundational.  You can try and remove them, but there's a huge cost to that.  Civilizations throughout history have messed with them, or attempted to adjust them to suit a particular cause, or worked to rid their culture of them altogether.  And the outcomes are never good.  History will tell us that rather plainly, if we're willing to be honest about history.  And so, I want to be passionate about something that's timeless, because I want it to live on beyond my life.  Something that this culture can reliably build on both today and tomorrow and for every tomorrow after that.  Something that's certain to sustain my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids.  And nothing that we can create on our own will do that.  What we create is too weak, and too fragile, and too shallow, and too lackluster to do that.  That kind of stuff is only something that God can create.  And so, it's this God and what He created and principles that He built it all around, it's that stuff that I choose to be passionate about.  Not man-made stuff because that doesn't last.  Rather, it's God-created stuff.  It's the principles that shaped this existence at its core that I will surrender my passions to and be passionate about.  Because if I'm not passionate about that stuff, passion won't matter because very shortly nothing will.

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 begin with.  Or our marriage went away.  Or our addiction won't go away.  Or our career goals always stall no matter how much we've invested in what we're doing.  The medical issues just keep happening.  We can't hold onto a friend to save our lives, or our family just can't get along long enough to actually look like a family.  The bills never stop.  It's always bad news.  Our self-esteem is shot, our dreams are dead, the kids won't call us, and we're dreading tomorrow because it's going to be the exact same thing all over again.  How many times have you felt that there's just no use? And when we're at that point, life doesn't really matter all that much anymore.  It's just something that we tolerate until we're tired of tolerating.  It's not about living.  It's about surviving.  And at some point, after we've done it long enough, surviving ‘becomes' our life.  It ‘becomes' who we are.  It ‘becomes' all that we do.  And then, over time, it ‘becomes' all that we think we can do, or should do.  How many times have you felt that there's just no use? And you know, we try all kinds of stuff to fix this.  We immerse ourselves in some self-help philosophy, or we're on a mad hunt for the right podcast, or we've ordered the latest breakthrough book, or we're hanging on the words of some person of prominence.  We try change our diet, or change our attitude, or change our social circle, only to realize that all of that really never changes anything. So, we're in a hole.  We blew college, our marriage is long gone, the addiction keeps showing up, our career is stalled, the doctors can't figure out our issues, friends come and go, the family bickering doesn't stop and neither do the bills, our self-esteem is shot, our dreams are dead, and the kids won't call.  Yeah.  How many times have we felt that there's just no use.  I have.  And I'm guessing you have too. For me, when I've been at those places, the only thing bigger than everything that's laid me flat is God.  Some would say that God has failed them just as much as everything else has.  And in my own life I've discovered that when I feel that way, it's really a whole lot more about the fact that I failed God.  Because God doesn't fail us.  He might not show up in the way that we want Him to.  He might not engage all of this stuff in the way that we think is best.  We might think Him to be too slow in the way that He works.  Or we might not believe in Him at all.  But what I can tell you is that with God, you never have to feel that there's ‘no use' because He's got a ladder for every hole that you're in, and a solution for every problem that you have. So get your Bible out and read it.  If you don't have one, buy one or download a Bible app.  Go to church.  Call a pastor.  Pray.  Listen to Christian music.  See what happens.  Believe me, God's got a lot of ladders, and He's got an endless supply of solutions.

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 desperate that we actually find ourselves asking that kind of question?”  And I'll tell you what, if you're asking that question it's because you're in a really dark place.  And I know how dark they are because I've been there…and so have you. Think about it for a minute.  Without hope, what have we got?  What have we got?  If we can't apply some feeling of hope to our future, or a marriage that's hanging by a thread, or a disease that could go really wrong really fast, or a child who's gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that's eaten up someone's life or someone's family…if there's no hope that you can apply to any of that stuff…what have you got? You know exactly what it's like when life collapses.  We both know what that's like.  When your dream just dies, and they can die for a lot of reasons that are just brutal.  When your marriage vanishes, and you didn't even see it coming.  When you've run into so many walls just trying to get to ‘some next place' in life, (any next place) that all you end up spending your life doing is waiting for the next wall to show up because you're certain that it's going to.  When you begin to realize that the damage is just too much, and as you realize that it begins to dawn on you that it's humanly impossible to ever climb out from under all of it.  If there's no hope that you can apply to any of that…what have you got? If there's no hope, what's the sense in all of this?  Why go on?  Why try?  Why invest?  Why keep moving forward?  If there's no hope, nothing matters.  If there's no hope then this existence, living out whatever this is that we're living out, all of this is meaningless.  It just doesn't matter.  You've felt that.  I've felt it.  The world feels it.  Hope is indispensable.  And I mean…indispensable.  And if we've lost it, as we all have at some time, or some place, we've gotta find it because going on without it is simply impossible.  It just doesn't work.  I know that, and if you've lived long enough, and if you've faced the darkness long enough, you know that too.  Hope is indispensable. But where do you find hope anyway?  I mean real hope.  I'm not talking about someone persons promises (because those break), or some passing fad (because those have no depth), or some vogue philosophy (because those are typically failed ideas that have been dressed up in new clothes), or political platforms (because those typically serve the platform rather than the people), I'm not talking about any of that because life is littered with that stuff.  We're drowning in it.  I'm not talking about the latest book, or some trending podcast, or some ‘woke' idea.  And as far as I can tell, all of that stuff promises hope, but delivers nothing.  If it did, we wouldn't be here. This is my experience.  I've had times where everything seemed hopeless.  Everything was dark…I mean really dark.  Bleak.  When all of the resources and all of the promises that this world made me, failed me…miserably.  And when the world fails you, where do you go?  Well, you go where I went.  I went to God.  Now, that statement won't sit well with some people, but if hope is indispensable and the world can't give it to you, where else do you go?  What other option do you have?  But more than that, what other option would you really want anyway?  I want an option that works, that's sustainable regardless of what life throws at me.  An option that delivers hope for my future, hope for my marriage, hope for a disease, hope for a child who's gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that's eaten up my life.  And there's only one place where you find that kind of hope.  And that's in a relationship with Jesus Christ. Get a Bible and check it out.  Go to church.  Call a pastor.  Give it a shot.  If you do, you'll find exactly what you need in the exact way that you need it, because that's how the God of hope operates.

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 better for other people, or live in some particular place, or achieve some level of financial comfort, or whatever it might have been.  And as you grow older, you actually find yourself kind of refining those dreams.  You tweak them.  You roll them over in your head.  You begin to adjust them ‘here and there' to fit the world as your understanding of the world matures and sharpens and grows and expands.  And as that refining thing happens, you begin to figure out how these dreams might actually work.  How you might actually be able to pull all of that stuff off.  It's a really neat kind of thing.  And in thinking out loud, I would guess that, at some level, you've had those kinds of dreams as well.  That you've played with some really cool ideas.  That there was something that you were excited about, that gave you some sort of energy or sense of excitement.  That you had some sort of vision for your life that added something to your life that you needed.  But then life happens.  In whatever way it happens, it happens.  It happens to all of us.  And many times, whatever happens ends up killing those dreams.  They die.  They just die.  Sometimes they die before they were ever born, or sometimes the dream is actually beginning to unfold and then it dies.  However or whenever it happens, they die.  And sometimes we try to bring them back, or resurrect them in whatever way that we try to do that.  We try to figure out how to do them differently, or modify them, or come at them from a different angle.  Or we decide to fight the thing that's killed our dreams.  We figure that if we can eliminate whatever killed our dreams, (or at least beat it up pretty thoroughly), that maybe, just maybe, we can get our dream back. At other times we just let our dreams die.  We either don't know what to do, or we're overwhelmed, or we can't get past a sense of injustice or unfairness, or whatever it is.  And because we let it die (because we feel that we have no other option but to let it die) we refuse to ever dream again because the death of a dream is just too painful.  It's just too much. The world will kill our dreams.  Life has no qualms about showing up and killing the very things that we spent a large part of our lives living for.  Dreams die every day.  They die at the hands of whole bunch of stuff.  And for every dream that dies, something on the inside of the person dies as well.  The death of a dream is just too painful because a part of us dies right along with it. I've had many dreams die.  So have you.  And every time one died, something inside of us died too.  But when my dreams died, here's I've found.  I learned that God has a dream for each of us that will never die.  Never.  It's just too big to die, it's place in God's plan is just too important to let it die, and it's backed up by a God who never dies.  There are many who would not agree with me.  And that's okay.  However, I believe that God has a dream for your life that's bigger than any dream that you could conjure up.  God's dream for you exceeds anything that you could dream for you.  So, ask Him what it is.  Talk to a pastor.  Get into your Bible and start reading.  If you don't have one, buy one, or download a Bible app.  Listen to Christian music.  Find a church.  God can and will use any or all of these to help you discover the dream that you were fashioned to live out.  And that dream won't die.

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, and because you are, you envision changing the world.  It all becomes kind of heroic, and valiant, and courageous, and all of that. But you soon discover that helping people (truly helping them), will ask everything of you.  It'll drain you.  At times it will drive you to despair.  You will look pain, and loss, and abuse, and hopelessness, and shattered lives, and addictions…you will look all of that stuff in the face, and you will find yourself questioning your ability to do anything about it at all.  Sooner or later, helping people will leave you with some level of trauma, and there will come a time (more than one time) that helping people make you ask if the world and the people in it are simply beyond hope.  Helping people will ask everything of you, and at times it will take everything from you. As I sit with people day-in and day-out, I sit there with my own pain as well.  My own life has been marked by pain, by personal devastation, by losses that I thought impossible to survive, by abandonment that left me devastated, and by disappointments that crushed me to the point that I thought that recovery (of any kind) was simply a fantasy that was too painful to fantasize about.  And so, I live the two sides of pain.  Those of the people that I've served for over forty years, and that of my own pain.  And there's nothing heroic in that, as there are untold millions of people who set out each day to make the world a better place despite the wounds that they carry as they seek to heal the wounds that others carry.  And to all of you who are the walking wounded who have given their lives over to help those others who are wounded, whoever or wherever you may be, you have my deepest admiration. But here's the point in all of this.  Many people mock God as either someone who only exists in the feeble-minded or those who has to find security is some fabricated myth. Or if He does exist, he's someone who's incapable, or incompetent, or irrelevant, or out of touch, or outmoded, or inherently judgmental, or someone who's failed us in entirely unacceptable ways…or however we've labeled Him. But without hesitation, and without any sense of contrived religiosity, or syrupy idealism, or preachy verbiage, I can tell you that God is real.  I can also tell you that I would not be sitting here without Him.  And that's not some cute or inspiring statement that's supposed to trigger some emotion in you.  It's my reality.  Life would have destroyed me without Him.  God is my rock in every sense of the word.  He is sturdy in the storm, both my own and those that I work with each and every day.  He is in the turmoil, but He is above it.  He is not the cause of our pain, but He is the solution to it.  He is not some idealized myth created by weak people who can't face the realities of the world.  He is the greatest reality in all of the world.  He is what you need.  He is the everything in the middle of your nothing. And I know this because I've lived it.  More than once.  In the pain.  In the darkness.  In the loss.  In the confusion.  In those moments of deep desperation.  When hope is something that I just can't believe in any longer because life has left no place for it.  At those times in life when I can't take the next step because I can't get myself off of the ground so that I can try and take it.  I know that God is all of those things because I've watched Him do the impossible in my life, and I've sat next to tens of thousands of people, and I've watched Him do the impossible in lives whose situations were nothing but impossible. Our culture would deny this.  In fact, it would ridicule it and do its level best to declare that all of this is the stuff of weakness, and foolishness, and stupidity, and ignorance.  And all I know is that I've watched it work too many times, in my own life, and in the lives of others to know that it's far more real than the culture that would say that it is not. If you're lost today.  If your pain is deep beyond imagination.  If you're standing alone in the darkness that is always a part of being alone.  If your dreams have died.  If your spouse has left, or your child has rejected you, or your finances have collapsed, or hope has eluded you, or if you've come to the point that you look in the mirror and you despise everything that you see looking back at you…whatever your situation might be, there is a God that's big enough to heal you, lift you up, restore you, grant you hope, lay a new future in front of you and grant you the energy to achieve that future.  It is not impossible, for God is truly the God who pulls off the impossible.  And how do that I know that?  How am I convinced of that?  Because He's done that for me.  Because I've watched him do it for tens of thousands of people in over forty years of walking with wounded people.  It's real, and regardless of who you are and what you've done, or where you're at, or how deep you've fallen, or how dark your circumstances might be, it's available to you.  Right here, right now.  Today, tomorrow, and forever. Grab a Bible.  Find a church.  Call a pastor.  Get on your knees and pray.  It will work.  The road back might be long, but there's a road.  And God will walk with you every step down that road.  Every step.  May God find you in your despair, in your confusion, in your desperation, in your darkness, in your hopelessness.  And may He create in you the life that you thought to be impossible, because that's what He does.  That is my hope, and this is my prayer for you.

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 originally called the ‘Great War'.  Some twenty-four years later she would watch history repeat itself as millions of GI's marched off in similar fashion to fight a dictator in something called World War II.  In-between it all, she would face the economic depravity and emotional ravages of a devastating depression within which her husband would abandon the family and summarily vanish.  She was left to support three children on a meager income of scant dollars earned in the hot kitchen of a small diner. She never drove a car.  She lived out most of her life on pocket change, making what seemed impossible possible.  The furniture in her meager home was old, lending it the enchanting aroma of another era long vanished.  It all was tenderly cared for in a manner that lent her home an indescribable, but wonderfully simple charm.  The few appointments in her small home were tidy, clean, and above all cherished.  She saw herself as marvelously blessed in the midst of manifold need, for Granny understood that ‘need' was more an issue of attitude than a matter of circumstance.  And I was privileged to be touched by this solitary life until her passing in 1985. For over ten years, every month Granny would tease ten dollars out of her meager collection of dimes and dollars.  And she would send it off to a young Hispanic girl whose father had abandoned her, and whose mother had placed her in an orphanage and summarily walked away.  All Granny had was a single photo of a tattered little girl standing in front of a weathered hut.  It sat in a slight frame on her tiny buffet.  At the feet of the photo there laid a handful of yellowed letters that Granny had received from this little girl over that most precious decade.  Some years after Granny had passed, another letter came.  In it were several photos bearing the striking image of a young Hispanic woman in professional attire standing in a small but simple office setting.  On the back of one photo in stuttering script it said, “Thank you for my new life.”  My grandmother didn't live long enough to see the results of her sacrifices.  However, while real sacrifice is committed to the result, it relishes the effort.  Granny relished the effort and birthed something ‘new' into the life of a young woman.   We Are the ‘New' Each of us possess ample resources to be the ‘new' in the life of another.  It is not the execution of some strategy as we might think, or the happenstance of life that births something ‘new'.  It is not about some level of tenacious persistence, or the right choices made at the right time.  These things and many more can bring something ‘new' to our lives and the lives of those around us. But it is the raw power of that single human being stepping up and stepping into the life of another that can bring something ‘new' in ways that nothing else ever can or ever will.  It is the energy of our humanity shared.  It is the hope that is released in the touch of another.  It is the voice of another that calls out when all other voices have long fallen silent. It is an investment that may cost us much, yet it is an expenditure that will cost us much more if we refuse it.  It is pressing against the giant of greed and intentionally raising the eyes of our hearts past our own circumstances to focus on the circumstances of another.  It is a passion that unleashes everything away from us so that it can be drawn into everyone around us.  And it is this that sets the grand stage upon which to birth something ‘new' in another that would never have been ‘new' were it not for such a sacrifice.   Be the ‘New' Might I suggest that this New Year, the ‘new' in our lives is making the choice to become the ‘new' in the life of another.  In whatever manner we choose to do that, we all can change a life and in doing so change a world.  Therefore, let us not contemplate ‘New Year's' resolutions.  Rather, let us formulate ‘New Life' commitments.  And let us begin to do that by becoming the ‘new' in the life of another.

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 uncertain at best and disastrous at worst.  We see a world reeling from decisions that we don't understand, actions that appear to border on the irrational, and directions that seem to have forsaken any mooring that the founding principles of our nation might have given them or a sense of mortality might afford them. We stand on the listing precipice of this New Year with a host of political agendas and secular philosophies promising rosy tomorrows and a year brimming with the brightness of a world throwing off the old and seizing the new.  We hear the words and they tickle our ears, but in many ways we don't see the landscape ahead reflecting what the words say it should reflect.  While many have taken hold of the words hoping that they pan out, deep inside, many of us aren't certain that the promises made and the agendas outlined are deep enough, rich enough, transforming enough or solid enough to really accomplish what they say they can accomplish.  The reality is, we're not all that certain that we want them to accomplish what they say they'll accomplish anyway.   Resting in Hope Because We Can't Rest in Anything Else So, we rest in the hope that hope is enough because we don't believe in the people that are preaching hope.  We hope that hope will be strong enough to drive the political agendas and secular philosophies; bolstering and empowering them sufficiently to do what they grandly visualize in their documented frameworks, but what they can't do on their own.  Or do we hope that they don't work because the disastrous outcome of their implementation is only going to make worse the very things that they claim their efforts will make better.   Often, we don't even believe in ourselves and our ability to bring change, or in any manifestation of whatever this ‘self' is that we are.  Our hope then rests in hope, not necessarily in the viability of what we hope for and who we hope in.  Somehow, we hope that it will all turn out okay. But we might ask why do we do that?  Why do we so often opt for something that's really not going to do what we need done, out of the hope that hope will carry whatever this is when whatever this is can't carry itself?  Why do we settle like that?  Why do we pin our hopes on something that will likely explode in our faces if we pin anything on it, much less hope?   Sidelined Bystanders I wonder if at its core our issue is a fear that is actually a multiplicity of fears.  Fear that we're far too small to do anything but hope for the best rather than fight for it.  Maybe it's an issue of being unable or unwilling to realize that we can actually impact things sufficiently to change things, rather than seeing ourselves as being exiled to some distant sideline of life where we can do nothing more than sheepishly root for a life that's far too far away to touch.  Change is too often seen as an external thing that happens outside of our efforts, so we relegate ourselves to some periphery role where all we can do is hope with no means to exert any real influence.  I wonder how often we see ourselves as hapless and helpless bystanders in a greater drama that we have no ability to impact, whether that's the drama unfolding in our nation, or the drama unfolding in our lives. We look around us at the wild spiraling of a culture relentlessly gyrating in some direction that appears unhealthy at best, and with no direction at worst.  This massive “ship of state” or the various “ships” of our lives seem to be rolling on the churning seas of some wild societal storm with those at the helm announcing that the course is sure and the speed is steady.  Yet, peering out from our obscure place on the deck of these enormous ships, it seems that their courses are entirely unsure and their speeds are anything but steady.  Yet, despite the angst of the journey that we see before us, we feel far too small, far too irrelevant, and far too inconsequential to do anything about it.  And so our best hope is to hang on and hope . . . or so we think.   Can You Make a Difference? Are we simply bystanders living out some periphery role in some larger drama whose stage is far too massive for us to ever ascend?  Are we doomed to haplessly sit by and watch our culture, our businesses, our marriage, our kids, our communities, or whatever it is that we might be watching spiral off into some cold, dark abyss?  Will we engage the coming New Year without really engaging it because somebody else is already engaging it in a way that gives us no room to engage it?   Is it Actually Possible that We Might Have Power? We might ask “what is power?”  Is power derived from a collective of people whose numbers grant them power?  Is it derived from a position of authority that's derived from some established structure?  Is power something granted to people by something bigger than the people to which it is being granted?  Is power a product of social position, breeding, wealth, education, the ability to be relationally savvy, or culturally astute, or outrageously intellectual, or is it held by people possessing an elevated acumen of some sort? Or, is it the average person who takes the ‘all and everything' of what they have and engages their world with what they've got?  That's power!  It's the average person like you or I who realize that it's the “little things” that change “big things.”  It's the small steps that ultimately result in giant leaps.  It's the average person faithfully living out lives of integrity in the everyday grind of everyday living that changes cultures, redirects nations, and rewrites history.  Indeed, that's power.   Ordinary People Who Do Extraordinary Things Daryn Kagan wrote, “Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”  It is ordinary people who change the world because they've stepped up in situations both large and small, believing that whatever their situation might be they can make a difference either large or small. It's not about being ordinary.  It's about being available.  It's not about being ordinary.  It's about refusing to refuse opportunity.  It's not about being ordinary.  Rather, it's about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the back of ordinary people.  It's not about being ordinary.  It about recognizing the power of the ordinary to be extraordinary simply by being ordinary.  As Marco Rubio wrote, “America is the story of everyday people who did extraordinary things.  A story woven deep into the fabric of our society.”  The same story is woven deep into the fabric of our lives.   The New Year – Will We? As we stand on the escarpment of this brand new “New Year,” we don't have to relegate ourselves to some periphery role where all we can do is hope with no means to exert any real influence.  We don't need to be a hapless and helpless bystander in a greater drama that you have no ability to impact.  We can live out intentional lives in our everyday worlds, being ordinary people of integrity engaging the world with integrity, and doing so believing that the smallest changes result in the biggest transformations.  And so, will we dare to understand that it's the average person who takes what they have and engages their world with what they've got?  Will we rise up sufficiently to grasp the reality that it's the average person like you or I who realize that it's the “little things” that change “big things?”  Will we step out on the belief that it's the small steps that ultimately result in giant leaps?  Will we embrace the fact that it's the average person faithfully living out a life of integrity in the everyday grind of everyday living that changes cultures, redirects nations, and rewrites history?  If we do, if we faithfully embrace these truths and live them out, we will change our worlds and we will alter this coming year.  May that be your commitment this New Year!

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

“For the power of Christmas rests in the fact that we will never completely understand the vastness of it, but that will never stop its ability to completely transform the fullness of us.” - Craig D. Lounsbrough

Christmas In a Box As the snow began to quietly début winter's arrival, I made my yearly descent to the basement.  Rummaging through the backwaters of the musty root cellar, I spied the dusty stack of aged boxes with the word “Christmas” hastily scrawled across their cardboard sides.  Inside of them lay the wonder of Christmas embodied in carefully crafted decorations and precious mementos of all sizes and sorts and types.  Staring at the boxes, I suddenly found myself entirely engulfed by the horrifying fact that we spend much of our lives boxing up wonder.   The Abuse of Boxes Indeed, we put things in boxes.  The function of a box is to provide a set of distinct parameters designed to effectively contain whatever needs containing.  A box imposes restrictions.  It sets a limit as to how far something can go.  Things are assigned a defined space where they are on hold, typically because we have no use for them in the active part of our daily existence.  Therefore, they're stored away until our existence grants them whatever tiny bit of space they are granted for however long our existence grants it.  We put things in boxes.   Boxes of Heart, Mind and Soul But the majority of our boxes are not made of cardboard, or plastic, or metal, or any other such rudimentary substances.  Our boxes are not those things stored in the shadowy corners of our damp basements, or shoved into the tight confines of our suffocating attics, or crammed into the five-by ten of some self-storage on the other side of town.  These do not represent the vast majority of our boxes…at all. The majority of our boxes won't be found in basements, or attics, or some self-storage facility.  They are, in fact, within us.  Deep within us.  And we have made them.  We've tediously constructed them to protect ourselves from painful histories, or shut down truths that don't set well with us, or eliminate the people in our lives who we find distasteful.  We build them to shield ourselves from ourselves (in whatever way that we feel we need to do that).  We build them to keep ourselves from the guilt of doing or being what we shouldn't be doing or being.  We build boxes so that we contain those things that we would otherwise be running from, or we build them to give us a ready excuse not to run ‘to' the things that maybe we should be running to.  We put things in boxes.   Why Boxes? Some boxes might make sense.  “But why,” I asked, “do we put great things in boxes?”  Powerful things?  Things that can handily rescue us from the tangled messes that we make with such tedious perfection?  Why do we box up that which can heal our deepest wounds, wrestle our worst addictions into submission, grant us a sustainable hope that will stand against the most sustained darkness of a world gone dark?  What in the world would behoove us to box up the very things that can handily reign in all of the destructive things that we've cut loose that are constantly cutting us up?  What sort of insanity compels us to box up the very things that we spend the entirety of our lives searching for? We are a stubborn bunch of people.  But that's the message of Christmas that's tough to swallow, and that's the very thing that prompted the delivery of that message.  That we are stubborn to our own demise.  That we would be ‘the death of us' unless God was willing to come and give ‘life to us.'  That the enemy is not necessarily something that's prowling around in the shifting shadows that constantly circle us in some stealthy manner.  Rather, that we are the enemy and that it is from ourselves that we need to be saved.  That is the message embodied in the boxes tucked away in the musty confines of the root cellar with the word “Christmas” errantly scrawled across them.  That is the intent of Christmas.  That God decided to initiate the greatest rescue mission in all of human history at the greatest cost that any mission would ever demand…the death of His own Son.   Boxing Up Christmas Despite the sour rhetoric of our times and the efforts of so many to massage us into complacent ignorance, this is the message that we as a culture have placed, pressed and imprisoned in boxes built by self-serving philosophies, special interest groups gone rogue, and platforms born of greed and power.  This is the message that we find so aversive and chafing.  It is our single salvation, but we box it up anyway.  It is the only light in the darkness that we have foolishly come to call light.  It is the only thing big enough to be able to course the turbulent seas of our times and throw us the lifeline that we refuse as we wait for other promised lifelines that never come.  This is what we box up.  And such an action is ignorance of the greatest sort that will insure a death of the most painful sort. We must take Christmas out of the cultural boxes into which we have thoughtlessly crammed it.  We must free it of the confines of our stupidity, we must release if from the filthy hands of our greed that shaped each box, and it must be freed of the bane of special interests that attempt to seal these boxes tight.  And once we've done all of that, we must burn every box to ash and cinders.   Christmas Can't Be Boxed Yet, the oddity of it all is that we really can't keep Christmas in a box anyway.  We might ignorantly presume such power, but it is only an assumption and nothing more.  Despite our most robust efforts to ignore it, deny it, render it a fairy-tale, play it off as the invention of misty-eyed dreamers, and press it far off of the edges of a blind culture, Christmas remains what it is.  It will forever remain the only rescue mission that set out with enough power to actually rescue us.  No matter the propaganda and hype that we grant them, all other missions will fail…miserably.  And I would hate to meet my own death realizing that I was ignorant enough to box up the only thing that could have saved me.  When Christmas has concluded and the celebrations have stilled, when the songs have fallen silent and the parties have ceased, leave Christmas out of the box that you can't put it in anyway.  Let it be what nothing else can be.  Let it rescue you, your family, your children, your marriage, your community, and your world.  And I don't believe that any of us want to put in any box anything that has the power to do that.     Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts.  Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

“Christmas is a vivid and brilliantly revealing lens.  And if we dare to look at ourselves through this rich and telling lens, we are able to clearly see the majesty within ourselves that we've so foolishly forsaken.  But rather than leaving us saddened and forlorn by what we've abandoned, this lens also possesses ample power to give us back what we threw away.” - Craig D. Lounsbrough

Christmas - Our Need for Rescue 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 us stranding us.  We add problem to problem.  Dilemma to dilemma.  Disappointment to disappointment.  The very effort to dig ourselves out of the holes that we've dug only serves to dig them that much deeper.  We preach the commitment to the effort as the victory because the victory that we promised never materialized, and therefore we are left having to save face and salvage the failure by believing that we're accomplishing something.  We fancy ourselves as rather ingenious, but the outcome of our supposed ingenuity is anything but genius, even though we proclaim it as such.  Our efforts to rescue ourselves only serves to enhance our need to be rescued.   Rescue.  It's hard to admit that we need it. But we live in adamant denial of all of this.  We put a good face on it all.  We spin it as the fact that things always get worse before they get better.  We encourage patience.  We preach endurance.  In the prolonged absence of any shred of victory, we shift our focus and hail fortitude as giving a battle lost the sense of a battle having had value despite the loss.  We proclaim the glories of the battle sufficient, so that we can soften the fact that there is no victory in which to glory.  We say that the light is on the edge of the horizon, and if we determine to draw on our last bit of energy, raise ourselves up one more time, and press forward, the light will dawn. Yet, night continues to rule the day as much as it rules the night.  Rescue.  It's hard to admit that we need it. Christmas is the greatest rescue mission in all of human history.  It is a breathtakingly tangible manifestation of the love of God.  The rescue of us meant the death of His Son.  That is a price that few of us would dare to pay.  But God did.  It was about His Son being born in the backwater of poverty to two teenage parents in a place far off of the map of commerce and influence.  It was largely a birth of obscurity.  A quiet entrance possessing nothing of the trappings of a King whatsoever.  This child was inserted into this world at the most impoverished point that can be imagined, so that He would know the impoverishment within which we walk.  And on the other end of it, the irony of it all was that He was executed at the hands of the very people that He came to rescue.   Those He sought to save wished Him dead and fulfilled that wish in a manner brutal, heartless, and excruciating beyond imagination.  Rescue.  It's hard to admit that we need it.  So we killed the Person who came to do it.  And too many of us continue to kill Him today.  Day in and day out, many of us kill the only Person Who can rescue us. Christmas.  It stands as the greatest rescue mission in all of human history, and it came at a cost that will never, and can never be matched despite how long history might be made.  That is Christmas.  And we have the power to reject the only rescue that will ever really matter and therefore succumb to our own pathetic efforts to rescue ourselves.  Or we have the power to accept it and never, never need rescue ever again.  Rescue.  It's hard to admit that we need it.  So, this Christmas, will you be rescued or not? “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16   Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts.  Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

“Christmas was God deciding to do what we didn't deserve in order to save us from what we did.” - Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Thanksgiving is an attitude that must be rooted in the ‘gift of life' if we ever hope to be thankful for the ‘gifts' of life.” - Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It is my hope that despite the gravity of the trials, we will never forget that the privilege to live life always offsets the difficulties involved in the living of it.  This is the essence of thanksgiving.” - Craig D. Lounsbrough

“An attitude of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to give way to a brooding sense of entitlement, the scourge of greed, or any other lesser attitudes that keep company with such things.” - Craig D. Lounsbrough

Being Thankful - Greed or Gratitude We all have personal agendas, and typically we have quite a boatload of them.  Many times when it comes to personal agendas, we can become so entranced and subsequently driven by them that the actual cost of achieving them often becomes a secondary consideration, or maybe not even a consideration at all.  When we're in a feverish pursuit of our agendas, we can, and we frequently will rob, pillage and/or discard many things along the way in order to achieve our agendas.  Oddly enough, we can even destroy the very things that allowed us to pursue those agendas in the first place.  In reality, this kind of self-pursuit is personal and cultural suicide in the making. It seems that's we've done that with many aspects of our cultural traditions, values and foundational principles.  In the apparent insanity of 21st century living, we're ruthlessly gutting out of our society the very things that raised our society as a nation unparalleled in all of human history.  In the wild and ego-centric pursuit of rights, privileges, entitlements, selfish aggrandizements and self-centered agendas, we're killing the very fabric of the very nation that afforded us those very rights and privileges in the first place.  It seems that we're involved in a feeding frenzy that doesn't preserve or extend the precious rights and hard-won privileges afforded to us, but that rather consumes them in our mad grab for all the things that we feel we're entitled to.   Real and Reorienting Thanksgiving I think that we would be quite wise to stop for a moment and take stock of exactly who we've become and exactly where we're headed in this pell-mell rush of greed and ‘right's grabbing.'  It would seem incredibly wise to begin the careful process of comprehensively identifying and reclaiming that which we've carelessly discarded along the way, understanding that reclaiming these principles, values, ethics and morals is not about returning to an outmoded past that will bring the future to some grinding halt.  Neither is it about an aversion to progressive thinking or constricting the scope of human possibilities.  Rather, it's understanding that effectively reintegrating these principles, values, ethics and morals in our present breaks open impossible possibilities for the future in a way that nothing else can and nothing else will.  Despite opinions to the contrary, restoring these values is the most progressive course of action that we could hope to take. Maybe the place to begin that process is right here at this holiday that we call Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is grabbing and hoarding in reverse.  It's not about getting more stuff.  It's about being thankful for what we have without the underlying toxic agenda of being thankful only to get more stuff.  It casts a steady eye toward what we have and not toward what we don't have.  Thanksgiving is not about some antiquated social courtesy or worn tradition.  Rather, it's about a wholly liberating mind-set that probably fits within the wealth and cultural advancements of the 21st century better than any other preceding century in our nation's history.  Thanksgiving is free of greed, absent of agendas of acquisition, it has no hint of hoarding whatsoever, and it's not concerned with conquering.  Thanksgiving realizes that if we're not thankful for what we have, then whatever we have will never be enough.  And if what we have is never enough, we have doomed ourselves a mindset of impoverishment when we actually sit in plenty.   Thanksgiving as a Pause Thanksgiving is a pause of the most precious sort.  It is a time to reflect on gifts, blessings, unwarranted successes and undeserved acquisitions.  Thanksgiving is a posture of both mind and heart where we recognize how terribly fortunate we are, and how much we've been blessed despite the fact that we haven't been the blessing that we should have been.  It's about realizing with a starkly humbling intensity that all of life is a gift, that absolutely nothing is deserved, that everything is an unearned privilege, and that every breath that we take is handed to us with the simple request that we live onto others rather than unto self. Thanksgiving is a pause that reminds us that life is much less about the press of pursuit, and much more about the pause of thankfulness.  It reminds us that thankfulness is not shackled to the crippling confines of only the good things that happen in our lives.  Rather, in the quietness of such a pause we are reminded that even horrific pain and crippling misfortune have within them the unmatched building blocks for unparalleled growth and phenomenal maturation.  Thanksgiving reminds us that no matter what befalls us in life, we can always take the shards and shattered pieces, and from these charred remnants we can reconstruct a life unimaginably stronger and wildly richer than that from which the shards and pieces fell.  Without Thanksgiving, we miss all of that.   Thanksgiving as a Reorientation Thanksgiving reminds us that life is not to be focused on acquisition and accomplishment, but on an attitude of thankfulness that we have the privilege and opportunity of acquiring and accomplishing in the first place.  It's not about what we can get, but that the opportunity to get things exists at all.  It's a mindful orientation that life is not about a mad dash to get as many toys as we can before the next guy does.  It's not about “keeping up the Jones's,” or a three thousand square foot house and a white picket fence, or having two and half kids, or building financially fat portfolios. Thanksgiving focuses on the fact that we have the privilege to envision those kinds of things and that we have the ability to actually seek them.  When we embrace that kind of thinking, life takes on a preciousness.  We recognize that life is not something that we acquire.  Rather, it's about something that we enjoy and savor.  It's not about possession as possession only diminishes the thing that we possess.  It's coming to the life-altering understanding that truly precious things can't be owned anyway.  Truly precious things can only be enjoyed.  And the wonder of it all is not only realizing that we can't we own them, but we don't have to expend the energy in the maintenance of them in order to enjoy them.  Such an understanding is liberating indeed.   Thanksgiving Calls Us Out Make no mistake about it . . . Thanksgiving calls us out.  In life, the greater the principle, the less people there are who will follow it.  It is always the case that the higher the calling, the fewer the followers.  Thanksgiving asks of our humanity what our humanity struggles to give.  It asks that we shift away from an attitude of selfishness to an attitude of selflessness.  It asks that we recognize that life is not something that we amass, but it is something at which we should be amazed.  It is not the possession of objects, rather it is the privilege to be granted ample provisions.  It is not the holding of life, but being held ourselves in the act of beholding life. Thanksgiving is a titanic shift of mind and massive alteration of heart.  Yet, in the end it grants us the very kind of life that we've been seeking through endless acquisition.  It's the sure path to the kind of life that's deep, peaceful, content and rich, when the path we've chosen to get us there actually takes us anywhere but there.  In short, an attitude of thankfulness is transformational. Change your attitude and your life will be changed.  Change your life and we begin to change our world.  Maybe Thanksgiving is the very place to start.           Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts.  Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Rarely do we rise to the pinnacle of our capabilities.  However, all too often we readily descend to the dismal pit of our inabilities.  We're remarkably human, but we're terribly primal at the same time.  We have the ability to access an intellect that has no equal in all of creation, yet we defer to something more animalistic that's all too common in all of creation.  And that primal, animalistic side of us is more often than not the “primary” side of us.  And that's primarily a problem because “we are better than this.” It seems that we're relatively slow to think and dreadfully quick to react.  We're sluggish to methodically strategize our actions, while we're reflexively quick to strike out in some sort of impulsive reaction.  Rather than draw upon the expanse of our intellect and the depth of our wisdom, particularly in the difficult times, we too often grab the closest thing to us and start swinging. Too often we're not prudent and we're anything but judicious.  We've too easily abandoned our intellectual capabilities and we react in less than thoughtful ways.  And when we do that long enough, we tend to forget that we have the ability to be and to act in ways that are far above what we're being, and far more judicious than how we're acting.  We're slowly led to believe that we're a bit more primal than anything else, and that a keen discernment and a prudent approach is either “beyond us,” or that it “takes too much work” to get there when in reality “we are better than this.”   Is It Beyond Us? Too often we use the whole mentality that something's beyond us as an excuse to avoid using what's actually within us.  We don't want to be all that accountable, or we're not really all that interested in stepping up, or we don't want to extend ourselves, or a million other excuses for the inexcusable attitudes of mediocrity and apathy.  “We could never do that,” we incessantly tell ourselves as a means of lulling ourselves into some sort of stale complacency.  And in doing so, we penalize our spirits, forfeit our abilities, and levy a heavy fine on our capabilities.  “We are better than this.”           Is It Too Much Work? The fact that acting with wisdom, prudence and discretion takes some time and requires a bit of energy is quite often something less than appealing.  To act wisely and thoughtfully means that we purposefully rally our intellectual resources, apply those resources in order to carefully ascertain the situation, make judicious decisions based on our observations, and then engage the situation with wisdom, balance and discernment.  That all takes time and energy, and often it takes a lot of it.  Too often we're not really all that interested in expending that kind of time and energy because we'd much prefer to speedily dispense with whatever we're facing, or all we're really interested in is driving an agenda and nothing more, and in reality we probably want to get on to something that's much more fun and much less demanding.  So we do what we have to do to simply get it done in order to just get it done.  “We are better than this.”        It's Everywhere Sadly, these behaviors aren't exclusive to us.  In fact, they seem to be becoming a whole lot more prevalent in our culture these days.  We watch individuals at all levels in all kinds of roles and in an endless variety of occupations doing the very same thing.  Frequently we have an expectation that individuals in certain roles should obviously be acting wisely, thoughtfully and with an astute judiciousness.  To us, it's clear that people in certain positions of authority or in critical situations should be acting with a keen degree of prudence and reacting with an unbiased discretion.  Yet, often they don't.  And so we see this malaise and indifference populating the actions and behaviors of people everywhere.  In time, we devolve into the assumption that it's just the way it is.  And over time, we tragically lose the understanding that “we are better than this.”   Reclamation “We are better than this.”  We are better than how we behave.  We are better than the ways in which we act.  We are better than what our decisions would suggest and what our actions would portray.  We are better than the image that we have projected into the world around us, and the reflection of ourselves that we see within us.  “We are better than this!” I would rather pointedly suggest that it's time to reclaim the fact that “we are better than this.”  It's time to step up and refuse to be less than what we are.  And in reclaiming the fact that “we are better than this,” it's time that we not only believe it, but it's high time that we deliberately act upon it.  It's time that we get past the errant idea that it's “beyond us” and that it takes “too much work” to do it.  It's time that we step into the mind boggling expanse of who we were created to be, recognize the enormity of what that is, and live it out with a stubborn intensity and intentionality.  It's time to wake up and realize that we are “better than this.”   How's it Done? As with any great things in life, simple answers are simply insufficient.  But let me propose a place to begin. First, I think that we need to recognize that we are more than what we've come to believe ourselves to be.  We might not necessarily know exactly what that is or exactly what that means, but it's developing the recognition that we are “more.”  That recognition creates the awareness of a space that's largely uninhabited, but entirely available to us.  That reality fosters a compelling willingness to move up and move out from wherever it is that we are because we've recognized that there's place to do that. Second, it's about intentionally being better and deliberately doing better.  It's about recognizing the limitations that we've habitually embraced, confronting those limitations when they pop up, and asking ourselves how we can take one step beyond them this time around.  It's about identifying that this is how far we'd typically take something, and then purposefully taking it one step further.  It's about persistence and purposefulness in the pursuit of something better. Third, once we've taken a step further, it about recognizing that it actually worked because it typically does.  It's about reinforcing the fact that we actually felt pretty good about it because we typically do.  It's about pondering the fact that we went where we typically don't go and in going there it went really well, because it typically will.  And it's about feeling that we're better than what we've historically chosen to be because we are, and now we're actually experiencing it! Fourth, it's living it out right in front of the very people that we encounter every single day.  “We are better than this,” and we want that reality to become rampantly contagious to everyone that we meet.  We want to create this infectious influenza that causes people to step up, step out, and step into of the belief that “they are better than this” because they are. “We are better than this.”  It may be that we are living in a time in history where that message and that reality needs to be broadcast with all the intensity and every bit of emotion that we can muster.  We appear to live in times that beg each of us to passionately live out of the conviction that “we are better than this.”  And in doing so, we rally those around us to embrace and live out the very same conviction.  Indeed, if we respond to this reality we can change the world because the indisputable truth is that “we are better than this” which will make the world that we live in “better than what it is.”  How about being part of the effort?   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

We quite naturally and quite appropriately presume that to live in the world, we must understand the world.  We know quite well that to navigate this complicated and frequently fragile existence of ours, as well as have any hope of emerging on top in some form or another, we must understand what we're navigating.  If we don't understand the terrain around us, and if we're not acutely aware of the nuances both large and small that cut across it we risk not only being irreparably lost, but we also risk being destroyed in being lost.  Such a perspective is certainly sound. However, we feel that we must do far more than just understand the world that we live in.  Knowledge is information, but it is not necessarily transformation.  In reality, having knowledge alone is to live as nothing more than an alien with knowledge.  Yet, to keep up with the world, or to get to a place where the world has to keep up with us, we have to be far more than aliens.  We must throw off that which is alien and become more of that which is the world.  Subsequently, our lives are bent and spent on becoming what's around us, rather than becoming what's within us.    What Is Within Us? Whatever's within us, whatever it is that we are at our core, whatever that is often takes a backseat to what we feel we should become.  What we should become, or so we think, is a spitting image of the world.  We rigorously cultivate this image, assuming that such an image most effectively fits the world and therefore can most effectively navigate the world.  Therefore, we become what we see around us, rather than becoming what's within us.  Subsequently, what's within us eventually becomes lost to us. Nonetheless, there are those people who plumb the depths of their souls and press into the innermost caverns of their hearts.  There are those most robust adventurers who realize that the greatest adventures of all don't lie without, rather they lay within.  There are those who have come to the priceless realization that to effectively navigate the world is not to become the world, but to become the fullest self living in the world.  And these are the world-changers that we would be wise to admire, and to which we would be equally wise to aspire.   The Thoughtful Rebels I have been munificently impacted by many such thoughtful rebels.  I have seen the many who build inward-out, rather than outward-in.  There are those who daily stand in the gap and create the space for others to find out who they are so they're not told who they are.  There are many who have challenged the norms, rejected the trends, stood firm when others fled, and held the line on an intruding world so that those around them could be in the world, but not of the world.  There are those wisely rogue people who run against the world in order to change the world.   The Game Changers And these are the game-changers who were birthed by those who themselves first changed the game.  These are the movers and the shakers that walked in the footsteps of others who were constantly moving things and shaking what was left.  These are astutely discerning people who understood the world, but differentiated themselves sufficiently from the world so as to not be shackled by norms, swayed by trends, bullied by fads, baffled by the mediocrity, and capsized by the ever-changing currents of culture, societal expectations and politics. Many of these game-changers were game-changers because of others who refused to let them be anything else.  I applaud those bold people, the fearless people, the sacrificial people who refused to bend to culture or trends so that they're friends and children might grow into who they are, verses turning into what the world is.  I can count innumerable men and women who created the space and ran interference at great cost to themselves to guide others who knew who they were, verses being children who were trying to figure out who the world was telling them that they are. So who will we be?  How will we live out our lives?  Will we be what the world demands we be, or will we be what our soul invites us to be?  And in making those decisions, will we look beyond ourselves to create a space for others to do the same?       Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.  

We always have, and we always will have the intrinsic need to believe in something.  Life is a journey whose demands will always exceed whatever personal assets we might possess in an attempt to meet those demands.  Life always has and life always will require more of me than I have within myself to give it.  All of my accumulated resources meticulously gathered and shrewdly coordinated in the most strategic manner possible will always fall achingly short of meeting even the most primitive and pared down demands of living life.  And because that's the case, I've got no alternative but to extend myself outside of myself and believe in things that are bigger than me.  I not only need to believe, I want to believe.  I want to believe, especially in a world that seems to be falling apart in places that I never believed it would fall apart.  In the midst of all of the unnerving unraveling that I am helpless to stop, there are things I'd like to believe to calm my heart and steady my soul.  There's some sustaining and comforting beliefs that I doggedly want to hold onto that provide me a sense of desperately needed peace in the tumultuous storms that seem to be roaring across the landscape of our culture.  I want to believe.  Yet, peace is not enough.  To believe in something that can bring me peace, but whose power and reach ends at peace is simply not enough.  I need more than that.  I need something that can do more than just weather the storms of life and bring me out on the other side with as few bruises as possible.  I want to believe in things that have relentlessly stood the test of time, every time, throughout all of time.  I want to believe in things that won't fall to the abject recklessness of our times, this time or any time.  But far more than that, I want to believe in things that can handily wrestle any storm into full submission.  And I want to dare to believe in things that are so pristinely confident and courageously authentic that they could keep the next storm from ever daring to roll across the landscape of our culture again if we all simply chose to believe in those things.  I want to believe. I want to believe in things that have the breathtaking power and the unobstructed reach to reconstruct and reclaim whatever's left when the storm is over.  I want to believe that storms are part of life and that they come into the sinful and fallen world that we live in as a natural part of our fallen existence.  But far beyond that, I want to believe in things powerful enough and audacious enough to transform the wreckage of the storm right in the middle of the very storm itself.  I want to believe in things that can reconstruct and reclaim in a manner that handily resurrects implausible beauty out of what seems to be unredeemable carnage.  I want to believe that no storm ever conceived can come close to having the force or the power to dislodge or destroy the things that I believe in.  I want to believe in believing because if I can't believe in something, what do I have?   What I'd Like to Believe I Want to Believe That Mankind is Inherently Good In the storms, I'd like to believe that mankind is inherently good.  I want to believe that even though mankind can act in gruesome ways that push the edge of evil out to appalling places and reign destruction in ways previously unfathomable, that even then there is still some thread of something good weaving itself undaunted through the core of our core.  I want to believe that we're lost, that we're drowning in greed and selfishness, and that we've taken to treacherous paths that descend to gaping depths of great atrocity.  But I want to believe that those things don't define us.  Despite our frequently heinous behaviors, I want to believe that we're better than that because I want to believe that there is no point that we could ever reach from which we cannot be redeemed.  I want to believe that mankind is inherently good despite all the apparently inherent evil that would scream otherwise. I want to believe that there is enough good in all of us to be marvelously good if we're daring enough to ruthlessly rid ourselves of everything that keeps us from being marvelous.  I want to believe this.   I Want to Believe That a Single Voice for Good is Never Too Small I want to believe that a single voice for good has a vibrant tenor, a wholly unsullied tone, a dynamically firm volume, and a magnetic quality about it that it will always be heard above, and around, and beyond any chorus of evil despite how loud it might be.  I want to believe that voices for good always have an undeniable and unapproachable genuineness about them that renders all fraudulent voices completely exposed and entirely drown out.  Too often it seems that a single voice for good is quickly submerged under the surging tsunami other voices which are anything but good.  Evil and treachery seem to be boisterous and arrogant, bellowing with an unashamed narcissistic quality that aims to quash any voice with even the remotest hint of good in it.  I want to believe that a voice for good will incessantly rise above the most bellicose volume that evil can produce, and that it will always render evil frustrated in its inability to drown out a single voice for good.  I want to believe that single voice can do exactly that.  I want to believe this.   I Want to Believe That Good is Eternal and Evil is Temporal I want to believe that evil is not part of what this was originally all about.  I want to believe that evil was not an original component of creation as it was sketched out on the original drawing board innumerable eons ago.  I want to believe that evil is an infestation that wormed its way into our existence and as such can be eradicated because it is an infestation, and only an infestation.  I want to believe that it is a cancerous plague that has no claim of originality in the original design.  I want to believe that evil is a temporary foe that lives on a short leash of time, and that every battle finds that leash shortened one more constricting link.  I want to believe that good will ultimately exterminate evil in a manner so complete that every battle will be forever laid to rest, and that the memory of those battles will likewise be laid to rest, and that good itself will be able to securely rest for the rest of eternity.  I want to believe this.    I Want to Believe That God Uses Evil to Advance Good I want to believe that God will not be thwarted by the greatest exploits that evil can conjure up.  I want to believe that evil will always find itself obliterated by its own evil as God seizes it, shapes it into invincible good, and then sends it hurtling right back into the heart of the very evil from which it came.  I want to believe that the greater the treachery and the more profound the wickedness, the more substance God has to mold good from.  That in the hands of God, everything vile is the raw material from which He can forge something astonishingly marvelous.  And that everything foul provides the very flames within which these good and great things are forged.  I want to believe that in the firing, that which God has forged becomes something so hardened that the most intense fires of evil itself cannot even remotely singe it.  I want to believe that as evil escalates in intensity, it only creates a greater abundance of raw material from which good is forged, fired, and fired against evil.  I want to believe this.   I Want to Believe that Believing is Not Childish Believing is not childish nor is it naïve.  It's not some escapist refuge where the weak flee in the face of the daunting cultural upheavals that now beset our culture and hound those of us who believe.  Believing will make us a ready target for those who don't believe, and it will draw skeptics and naysayers to us as bees to honey.  Believing means that we invest in what we can't see, we hand ourselves over to that which we can't control, and we cast our lot with the eternal verses the less demanding demands of the temporal.  Belief is not for the frail or faint-hearted as belief will demand belief of us, which is a demand far beyond most anything else in our lives.  And because of those realities, I want to believe.  Believing is being courageous enough to relentlessly hold onto the truth even when the derogatory actions of everything around us would attempt to entirely discredit the truth, smear the truth, and completely supplant it with falsehoods dressed in the look-a-like garments of truth.  By making the uncompromising commitment to stand on our beliefs, we declare that the truth on which we have chosen to stand is nothing of unreliable myth or childish fantasy.  And that will certainly draw the ire of many.  Believing is standing on the truth even when everything else around us has fallen into cinders and ash, and the truth on which we're precariously standing continues to be pounded by everything that hates the very truth that we're standing on.  And for all of those reasons, I want to believe.    I Want to Believe in God Believing is costly.  Believing is sacrificial.  Believing is what the majority of the world doesn't have the guts to do, but it is the only thing to do.  I want to believe this.  And of all the things that I want to believe, I want to believe in God above and beyond all of them.  To believe in God in the face of everything that would tell us not to believe is the highest calling of mankind, and the greatest feat of our existence.  To believe in God is to extend ourselves beyond our finite existence and cast our belief out into the unfathomable reaches of the infinite.  To believe in God is to stake our lives on something that the world declares as a mistake.  But to believe in God is to wager everything on the person who created everything, and no mistake could ever arise out of that.  Without God, I don't have the capacity to believe in anything else anyway as everything emerges from Him.  And so, I want to believe in God, I want to believe in every one of His promises, and I want to believe in all of the things that He allows me to believe in.  I want to believe.  With all my heart I want to believe.  And I want you to believe as well.             Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

I am only one.  That's all I am.  I am only one and I will always be only one.  I was born as one, I will live as one, and on the day of my death I will die as one.  In this journey that we all call life, I am and will always be completely restricted and wholly limited to being one and only one.  And all of those daunting realities strike me as miserably pathetic and colossally discouraging.  Sadly, I am only one. I am only one in a mammoth sea of surging and foaming humanity within which my main and often single goal is simply to survive.  The winds will blow and the tides will roll in whatever way they spuriously and often callously choose to blow and roll.  And whatever choice they make will dictate the ways that I will go because I'm far too small to swim against them, and far too weak to even dare chart a different course from theirs.  I am only one, and being one doesn't appear to be enough. I am only one, and because I am, even the reality of my existence is of little note.  In the span of this minute, or this hour, or this day, or in the span of history itself my existence will not only be largely disregarded, it won't even register enough to acknowledge that I was here in the first place.  Even the briefest notation that I have made or will make on the pages of history will be entirely lost in the seemingly infinite volumes of tightly written copy that stretch from mankind's earliest moments to his eventual demise because I am only one. Living as Being Only One And so, because I am only one, I relegate myself to being only one.  And in relegating myself to being one and only one, I unwittingly embrace the limitations that I perceive are part and parcel of being one and only one.  I suit-up in the pathetic apparel of powerlessness, I chart a path of capitulation that's dictated by the insensitive winds and tides of life, and I bow to the lamentable goal of surrender because I figure that that's about as good as it gets.  And then in some sort of tense angst, I hunker down and wait for whatever's going to happen to me, letting my mind spin in wild gyrations as I frantically attempt to figure out how I'm going to deal with whatever's going to happen when it eventually happens. What Does Being One Really Mean? What will I do with the fact that I am only one?  I am only one in a world that's spiraling.  I am only one in a world that's rapidly redressing itself in garments that are far from the ethics, morals and values within which it was clothed at birth.  I am only one in a culture that's lost its moorings and is finding itself on a dangerously churning sea that the culture has cleverly labeled “progressive thinking” or “cutting-edge” or “liberal thinking” in order to avoid the implications of living on such perilous seas.  I am only one in a world driven by the insatiable gluttony of selfishness rather than the spirited nourishment that comes from selfless living and self-effacing choices.  I am only one in all of that. But I Am One But I am one, and that is infinitely better than being “none.”  I am one, which puts me on equal footing with everyone else.  Every single person in human history who impacted history in ways either large or small faced the same exact dilemma that I am faced with: they were “one” and no more than one.  I am only one, but I do not stand as empty or hollow or void.  Quite the opposite.  This “one” that I am comes tightly packaged with innumerable gifts, talents and abilities that stand at the ready.  I am only one, but that “one” that I am is entirely and irrevocably different from any other “one” that has ever lived in the entire expanse of human history.  I am only one, but I have inspiring dreams and vitally rich visions for life that are unlike those held by anyone else.  I am only one, but I have unbridled access to everyone other “one” around me.  Oh yes, I am only one, but I am “one.” The Opportunity in Being “One” I am unbelievably privileged to be one, particularly the “one” that I am.  I don't think I'd really want it any other way.  But I only get one shot at being “one.”  I get this one single, sole opportunity to take this “one” that I am and use it to make a difference in all the other “ones” around me.  I have the privilege of impacting the “ones” around me, who will in turn impact other “one's,” who will in turn impact yet other “ones” . . . and on it goes.  I can be one person who impacts the world “one” person at a time, and in doing so I can potentially impact all of the “ones” in all of the world.  That's not a bad deal.  So, I'd be wise to take advantage of this one and only one shot I get at this.  It might be wise to consider that I am only one, yet I live in a world of “ones.”  That means that I am uniquely suited to impact other “ones” like me.  I am what they are.  They are what I am.  We are all the same.  And because that's the case I have the unique advantage of speaking into their lives because I'm living out their lives, and they're living out mine.  Our existence is shared, our experiences are similar, our joys are pretty much the same and our pain is familiar to all of us.  We walk through the same life, with the same experiences and the same challenges.  As one and only one person, I am perfectly suited to speak directly into the lives of all the other “one's” around me.  So, why don't I? The Fears of Being “One” The Fear of Not Being Enough I think that we fear that being “one” is not being enough.  Being one is too often seen as being inadequate.  The world out there is not some massive mass of people.  It is a collection of individuals.  By and large, those individuals experience life pretty much the same way that we do.  The world is a collection of “ones.”  It's a collection of people that are each one individual just like we are one person.  While being “one” makes us perfectly suited to impact all the other “ones” around us, we fear that being one is not enough. The Fear that We Can't Be Loud Enough I also think that we fear that our single voice is not loud enough.  We don't have the volume to be heard over the raucous, roar and interminable noise in our world.  We can't possibly scream loud enough or long enough to be heard in the ruckus and racket that defines the world around us.  So our voices are drowned out.  Yet, we need to remember that we're not speaking to the world around us.  We're speaking to the “ones” around us.  And because that's the case, we're plenty loud enough. The Fear of Being Rejected I think that maybe our greatest fear is that we will be heard, and that in being heard we'll be rejected or discounted or blown-off.  It seems that our single biggest fear is rejection.  What if we're heard and in the hearing, we're labeled as stupid, naïve or ignorant?  What if we're heard and then we're slapped with accusations of being politically incorrect, culturally ill-informed, or being something of a faith-based moron?  What if we take a stand?  What if we refuse to compromise?  What if we speak against the toxicity that's seeping into the lives around us?  What if what we're saying isn't popular or trendy or politically correct?  The Opportunity of Being “One” I am only one in a mammoth sea of surging and foaming humanity within which my main and often single goal is simply to survive.  But I am one, and my oneness is sufficient to forgo surviving and embrace living.  The winds will blow and the tides will roll in whatever way they spuriously and often callously choose to blow and roll.  And whatever choice they make does not have to dictate the ways that I will go because I am one, and because I am I can swim against them, and dare to chart a different course from theirs.  I am only one, and being one is enough. I am only one, and because I am, the reality of my existence can change the reality of everyone around me.  In the span of this minute, or this hour, or this day, or in the span of history itself my existence can be noted, and because I am one it can register enough to acknowledge that I was here.  The briefest notations that I have made or will make on the pages of history will add moving lines of inspiration in the seemingly infinite volumes of tightly written copy that stretch from mankind's earliest moments to his eventual demise because I am “one.” You have one chance at being “one.”  You have been granted one life to touch the other “ones” around you.  Being one is being enough.  Life's about being intentional about being the best “one” that you can be, and intentionally touching all the other “ones” around you in a manner that transforms them “one” at a time.  In transforming the “ones” in our world we will eventually transform our world.  So, go be the “one” that you are.  Step up in a world that's spiraling, confront a culture that has redressed itself, and seize the tattered lines of a nation that has lost its moorings.  Be the “one” that you were designed to be and change the world by being that “one.”               Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

At times, the innumerable dialogues regarding the state of our nation appear to be less dialogues and more something akin to agenda mongering and rights crusading.  It seems that we have hijacked the solemn rights and sacred liberties afforded us and have forced them into servitude around our ego-centric agendas and myopic special interests.  The altar of self is where nations perish.  And on that altar we have too often found ourselves tediously picking apart the fabric of liberty and meticulously editing the founding principles of this nation so that we might justify those agendas and rationalize those interests in the name of the very freedom we are abusing. In response to these actions, leaders and heralds of debatable origins spout bold platitudes and chart even bolder courses that often have little substance and are void of the balance achieved through the merging of wisdom seasoned by time, the vision gifted through deep struggle, and the astuteness afforded by heritage.  It seems that we are adrift on the tides of whimsy instead of the currents of calling, and that the sails borne by this ship of state are too often driven by the fickle winds of politically-correct agendas and bane opportunists instead of buoyed firm by the hard-core values born of faith and legacy. And has the insanity of such realities been adopted as our norm?  Has our identity as a proud people become the mess that we've permitted it to become?  Is this who we are, and are we satisfied with those who of their limited vision and selfish notions run on anemic platforms that perpetuate this very mentality while at the very same time saying those platforms do not?  And in the mess of it all, have we chosen to follow those who talk about what has perished with themselves having little to no idea of what has actually perished?   A Longing Undefined There seems to be a longing born of a great absence.  And there is likewise a passionate searching arising from that absence that appears to be seizing this nation today.  In a malaise spawned of comfort we have increasingly distanced ourselves from the founding principles of our nation, yet we have not distanced ourselves so far that we fail to feel the bruising impact of this profound absence.  And it is within this perplexing state that the soul of an entire nation of people are finding themselves plagued by a sense that something has perished that should never have perished.  And in this, there is an ever-stirring sense that it is somehow our solemn duty to find this thing that has perished and restore it so that this cherished nation might rise to heights that excel those summited at even at its most glorious moments.   The Core Challenge While it may appear simplistic, I would suggest that we begin with something simply powerful.  I would suggest that this grand undertaking might begin by reclaiming two simple yet potently unifying principles upon which this nation was rigorously founded.  First, I would suggest that freedom that is not exercised for the common good is freedom absconded and assaulted.  Freedom exercised for self is nothing more than greed in disguise, for to hoard assets of any kind is to simultaneously move someone else somewhere else into a deeper state of impoverishment.  And to create scandalous agendas driven by self-interest is to sequester others with the shackles of our unrestrained ambitions.  Therefore, freedom rightly exercised on behalf of the person standing next to us is impoverishment decisively crushed under the heels of liberty, and spurious agendas wholly exposed under the piercing light of principle.  And when these things transpire, freedom is free to be free.  And nothing man can devise can stand in the way of that. Second, I would further suggest that morals abandoned as a means of granting ourselves permission that these morals would not have granted us is freedom traded for license.  Such a trade-off is nothing less than cultural suicide.  Freedom is never license, and we would be wise to understand that the distinction between the two is so utterly profound that they cannot exist in proximity to one another.  Rather, freedom is the manifestation of a deeply held confidence that if we are afforded choice, mankind is innately principled by morals and sufficiently sacrificial in nature due to an adherence to these morals that we will fight all lesser impulses and consistently choose with selfless integrity.  Without these timeless morals, decay and anarchy will be our lot.  With them, the impossible will be our servant.   A Noble Calling It is my belief that we are a far greater people than we have chosen to become.  I would stand by the conviction that we are not what we have fallen to, and inherently we know this.  And in the carnage of freedoms abused and morals abandoned there yet lies tremendous potential.  And that potential lies not in legislative bodies, or towering institutions, or stirring platitudes, or political platforms of any design.  Rather, this potential resides in each of us.  For great nations are built on individual people all of type and sort who seize the principles of freedom for all, who zealously hold to timeless morals despite the cost, and who join with other like-minded people in an indomitable march of mankind that nothing in all of mankind can stand against.  It is the common man and the common woman who intentionally lives out these principles in their sphere of influence, whether that be large or small, that changes lives, awakens nations, and alters history. May we all take such stands.  And as a result, may there emerge a ground swell of epic restoration unprecedented that sweeps our hearts, seizes our souls, and restores the greatness that has been the enduring hallmark of this great nation.   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it.  All of us run thick with untapped potential.  We are rich with possibility and formidably equipped to tease the cusp of the impossible and to overcome it in the teasing.  The essence of our being is immense beyond words and the breadth of it eclipses any syntax to frame it all.  Despite the incomprehensible complexity of it all, the entirety of this essence is precisely consolidated and ingeniously joined so that the full measure of it might be released without any of it wasted or missed in the releasing.  We are crafted to enhance all that exists around us and to make everything immeasurably more than what is.  We are marvelous in ways so grand that such marvel escapes us although it resides right within each of us.  Indeed, we are created in just this way. This potential is not something of muse, as we might presume it to be since we tend to see so little of it.  It's not some hollow ideal that is more the trappings of some imaginative author who spins such ideas because they don't have the courage to face the realities of who or what we really are.  This is not about some feeble attempt to bolster our belief in ourselves as we watch the worst of ourselves create a world that we're turning into the worst of itself.  This potential is real.  Very real.  It may visit us rarely as it is much easier to access the lesser side of ourselves.  But, it is real and it is always waiting.   Playground Feuds and Turf Wars We have misplaced the majesty of our humanity in the lesser battles that we readily (and rather ignorantly) join.  We cast ourselves as heroes selflessly battling for the soul of a community, a family or a nation when in fact we are engaged in playgrounds feuds of no greater importance than those played out on elementary playgrounds.  We lay claim to some turf, which is less about what the turf might actually be and more about the fact that it's turf (whatever it might be).  We see ourselves on some colossal pilgrimage born of calling or destiny or the rallying of the masses against some great evil, however we have justified it.  It must be pointed out that at times the pilgrimages are in fact colossal and of significant importance, but too many times what's colossal is the appetite of our egos verses the worthiness of the venture.  And so, too often we engage in these dirty little mongering turf wars that are more the stuff of mud-slinging than anything that might raise up humanity or change the course of history itself. We wallow in the bane of blustering banter and then we gorge it fat on reckless arguments whose goal is to win, with us long having forgotten what exactly it is that we're trying to win.  Everything becomes a tit-for-tat circus of push and shove that might be attributed to two toddlers fighting over a toy that neither of them really wants in the first place.  The focus becomes on finding some weakness, some point of hidden vulnerability, some crack in the proverbial armor that we can exploit in the pursuit of pursuing.  We want to posture ourselves as some sort of valiant and sturdy victor, and if perchance we fall to the throes of defeat we then position ourselves as the victimized victim whose defeat clearly illustrates the impenetrable validity of their cause.  And in the depravity and insanity of all of this we have misplaced the majesty of our humanity and we have wholly abandoned our calling.   To Reclaim Our Majesty Might it be time to be accountable to who we've become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be?  Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we've become?  And once we've done that, are we brave enough to look at the damage that we're incurred in the becoming?  Can we relinquish our claim to whatever bit of turf we've claimed and lay our playground feuds to rest in deference to a cause far greater than the tiny space that we occupy?  Can we shake ourselves out of ourselves sufficiently to wake up to the far greater things that lay ‘round about us?  Can we begin to see others as less enemies and more people whose differing views may inform our own?  At what point we will understand that partnership and camaraderie must be preserved even when differences of beliefs or opinions would do their level best to blast us into warring camps?  When will we forfeit what we've become in order to become something so vastly superior to what we've become? It's not that such a shift is impossible (despite the fact that the behaviors exhibited in our world might suggest otherwise).  But in the face of the reckless insanity all around us, will we dare to dare?  Will we raise ourselves up to embrace the fullness of our humanity?  Will we cast off the scourge of selfish agendas and the saber-rattling born of insatiable egos?  Will we be what we've chosen not to be at whatever cost we might pay to do so, recognizing that the cost of not doing so is far, far greater?  Will we shed all that we've become to become all that we can be?  In essence, will we reclaim the majesty of our humanity as it was created and tenderly fashioned to be?   I Believe I am utterly confident in our ability to do all of those things.  I have great hope in humanity.  I have even greater hope in the God that bestowed us with abilities that in fact mirrored His own.  And for that reason, I have a pervading and insatiable hope.  Though some might say so, I do not believe that kind of hope to be misplaced.  I believe in us; in you and me.  I believe that we have not done well, but I believe we can yet do very well.  I believe in something better.  I believe that we can join together in a mutual assault on the mounting challenges in our world instead of engaging in mounting assaults on each other.  I believe, and I hope that everyone of us might join me in that belief.  And in that joining might we rigorously inventory how we can be different.  And then let us go and begin the process of making things different.  Let us reclaim the majesty of our humanity in the care of humanity.   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Finally, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity “Whatever you see within yourself, let it be the whole of yourself.  For too often we have been brutalized by our own sense of inadequacy and we've been held hostage to the lesser choices born of such a debilitating sense of self.  Know this, that latent within you there lies more than ample resources begging to be called forth to smash the chains forged of such an incapacitating sense of self.  And it is my prayer that you would press against everything within you that would hold you back, and that you would raise whatever voice you have and extend that call.” You are more than you realize.  A lot more.  You've probably heard that before, and if you haven't, you're long overdue.  You are more than you realize.  But the thing is, we don't feel that we are ‘more.'  If anything, the things that happened to us would suggest the opposite…that we're less than what we hoped we were (and probably a whole lot less).  Whether that's failure (in any of the million different ways that we fail), or ridicule, or jobs lost, or relationships that blew up, or dreams that went up in smoke, or friends that walked away, or opportunities that drifted away, or family members who were critical to the point that we wished they went away…or whatever it might be.  The statement that “we are more than we realize” just doesn't seem to fit this stuff.   In my recent book, “The Self That I Long to Believe In,” I wrote this: “The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it.  That in and of itself may be why we don't recognize them and therefore don't believe that they exist.  All of us run deep with untapped potential that is rustling just under the surface of our lives waiting to be unleashed.” We are ‘more.'  Our circumstances don't have the power to refute that or change that.  For sure, our circumstances can lead us to believe that we're not ‘more,' and they can be very convincing in doing that.  Our circumstances can also lead us to believe that we're a whole lot less than we thought ourselves to be, and those circumstances can be incredibly convincing as well.  But our capacity exceeds the failures that we experience and the criticisms that are thrown in our faces.  Our abilities are not defined by what people have said, or the choices that we have made.  Our abilities exceed all of those.  They are greater than the limits of our imaginations, and they are not limited by people or choices that have proven to be less than imaginative.    That “more” will always be there whether you use it or not.  It sits at the ready whether we recognize it or not.  We are ‘more.'  That's not the issue.  The issue is will we understand that we are ‘more,' and will we allow that ‘more' begin to shape us into ‘more.'    Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Integrity - To Understand and Live It Integrity.  You've heard that “Integrity is doing the right when nobody's watching.”  It's not about being a crowd pleaser, or working to get some sort of edge.  It's not agenda driven, other than we do the right thing for no other reason than it's the right thing…and that's not an agenda.  That's a conviction.  It's not about the cost of doing the right thing, or the long-term effects, or the short-term effects, or whether it will be popular or not so popular.  It's not about the response of a person, or an organization, or a certain cultural group, or some philosophical leaning, or anything like that at all.  It's doing the right thing for no other reason than it's the right thing.  That's it. Now, a lot of people ask what the right thing is.  And in our culture, the right thing is too often based on the wrong criteria (or at least a terribly skewed one).  In the culture today, the right thing is typically based on its level of acceptance, whether that's in our social group, or among our co-workers, or in some organization that we've aligned ourselves with, or it fits the current cultural climate.  Is it politically-correct, or tolerant, or does it embrace diversity (whatever that might be at any given moment).  Often it's these criteria that define something as the right thing.  But the right thing is never defined by whether it adheres to an agenda or not, and it's not driven by whether it happens to be popular or vogue or trendy.  The right thing will always be bigger than any of that, and it will never succumb to any of our puny definitions and our fleeting agendas. So, what is the right thing anyway?  Well, here's an idea that's probably not all that popular or vogue or trendy.  But here's an idea.  Jesus put it this way.  He said, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.'” Now, maybe you're not a religious person, or maybe you're not really a people person, or maybe you're not either of these.  However, the principle is basically the same…am I acting out of love?  Love is not tolerance.  Love is not permissive.  Love is not about diversity.  It's not about embracing some cultural ethic because it liberates people to chase what (in the end) is going to destroy them.  It's not about liberty defined as permission to indulge in behaviors that will do nothing but indulge us to our own demise.  Love isn't about any of that. It's about understanding that there are an immovable set of ethics, morals and values that in the current culture have been labeled as constraining, antiquated, irrelevant, out-moded, or any other number of other definitions that have been assigned to them.  And love understands that we can incessantly label these ethics, morals and values in these ways, but those labels won't change the fact that what these ethics, morals and values are trying to protect us from remains unchanged.  Love will not give ourselves permission to destroy ourselves, even though we give ourselves permission to do that.  Love understands that in the scope of this existence there are principles that if ignored or defied will send us to our own destruction.  And while our culture would ignore such truths, love with not.  And it is this stubborn refusal to ignore these truths, and to commit to abide by them regardless of the cost that are the hallmarks of this thing that we call ‘integrity.' Integrity is the refusal not to love, despite whatever that might cost us.  Be advised, being a person of integrity comes a great price.  But the price of not being a person of integrity is infinitely greater.   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Thinking It's Over When It's Not It's over…we tell ourselves.  It's over.  Whatever it might be (or might have been) it's gone and there's no getting it back.  The loss is too big.  The obstacles are too daunting.  Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we're living in.  We're one person (just one person) trapped in a downward spiral that's far more powerful than all of us put together.  The glass isn't half empty.  The fact is, there is no glass.  We can't pick up where we left off because where we left off...left. It's over…so we think. In processing all of this for myself, I wrote this quote: “The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken.  Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again.  And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.” Sometimes things are ‘over' only because we believe them to be over.  We've been told that they're over.  Or everyone around us says that they're over.  Or the cultural climate seems to say that they're over.  Or those without vision have never realized that they lost anything because they never saw what they had in the first place, so they tell us that nothing's over because nothing was lost to begin with.  Or people have chosen to believe that they're over because that's easier than hoping that they're not.  We don't want to look the fool and try to save something that's no longer there to save, so we tell ourselves and those around us that it's over…so we think.  But we can sail again. Is something really over?  Have we actually lost something that we can't reclaim?  Is it gone forever?  Or, is that what we've chosen to believe.  It's my sense that most things aren't over (at all).  Rather, it's our belief that they are (which is a ‘belief,' but not necessarily a ‘reality').  It's more our attitude, or our fears, or our unwillingness to challenge popular thinking, or our unwillingness to risk grabbing hold of a vision, or a lack of belief in ourselves, or more importantly, a lack of belief in God.  In the Bible, Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”  Do you get that?  Do you understand what that opens up?  Do you understand that our perception that something is over does not take into account that with God, nothing is over?  That our families, our communities, our dreams, our relationships, our nation can sail again?  That there are always possibilities, even when all we see are massive impossibilities?  That what we feel we have to walk away from are things that have a ton of possibilities still living and breathing within them?  Is something really over?  Really?  You might want to think about that because you'd be amazed at all of the things that can sail again.   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

It's Not About Being Ordinary It's not about being ordinary, because we all are.  In talking about myself, I'm about as ‘ordinary' as they come.  But, it's not about being ordinary.  It's about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things.  That's the beauty of it.  We're all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.  God granted you and He granted me all of the elements, all of the ingredients (if you will) to do what we never thought we could do.  You come packaged with resources that (if used correctly) can accomplish things that are greater than the sum total of those resources.  And if there's some tragedy in all of that, it's that people don't use them correctly, and therefore they never accomplish the great things that were theirs to accomplish. The incredibly disappointing thing is that people look at who they are through the lens of who ‘they' are.  And through that lens (which is incredibly limiting) we don't see all that we are.  We have this vague understanding of ourselves, which leaves a whole lot of ourselves unknown, or ill-defined, or misunderstood, or mis-defined altogether.  And we walk through our lives with this less-than-accurate understanding of who we are.  And that understanding (whatever it happens to be) is typically a horribly marginalized and minimized view of who we really are.  So we might be ordinary, but we diminish the incredible abilities that are inherent in being ‘ordinary.'  Remember, “being ordinary” (as much as we diminish it) “does not limit us to ordinary things.” I think that God wants you to see who you are.  The whole of who you are.  Not just the good, but everything that's maybe not so good as well.  Not just the stuff that we're proud of (if we even have anything that we'd say we're proud of) but all of the stuff.  Not just the successes, but the failures as well.  Not just the bright and shiny things within us, but the dark places too. Because all of that is the stuff of the ordinary.  And God waits to take everything that's ordinary within you and do something extra-ordinary with it because “We're all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.”  That's what God does.  He takes whatever we are and He makes it into everything that we are not.  He's not looking for us to build all that up so that it eventually adds up to something that God can use.  He's looking for us to surrender all that's ordinary about us to Him (in whatever condition it's in) so that He can build it up to something He can use.  “It's about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things,” because we have an extra-ordinary God who wants to birth a bunch of extra-ordinary things in your life.      Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Being a Lamp That's Lit So let's begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit?  Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place? How many of us are lit and ablaze?  We're all lamps . . .  every one of us.  But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it's one thing to be a lamp, and it's quite another thing to be lit.  If you walk through life being a lamp that's not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you.  And that is tragic. The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you've known, any person from history, who would you be?”  Listen carefully to what he said.  George Bernard Shaw said this.  He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.”  Will that be your commentary on your life?  When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was? George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit. “Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.”  You . . . all of you . . .  all of us are lamps.  And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Dead-End Roads of Our Making We chart these paths.  We set these goals.  We ponder where we are, and from there we determine where we want to go.  There's some sort of road that we're walking, whether that's a road of our own making, or it's a road that everybody is walking, or it's the road that culturally vogue or socially trending.  Sometimes that road is well defined and clear.  Sometimes there's very little definition to it all, and we end up wondering if we're really on any sort of road at all.  And then some of us are just plain lost in the woods.  “There's some sort of road that we're all walking.” Whatever kind of road that we're on, it's both amazing and frustrating how many of those roads end up at dead-ends.  It's stunning that there are millions of people who are standing at the end of some road (or what they thought was a road) and it ends.  It just ends.  They had visualized it going somewhere great, or exciting, or meaningful.  It was the path to their dreams.  It was the road to a life-long relationship.  The highway to fiscal wealth or career advancement.  The byway that led them to everything that everyone else said that they could never do or never be…but it doesn't go to any of those kinds of places at all.  It dead-ends.  In the middle of nowhere. A dead-end is likely the product of being on the wrong road.  And if I created the road, it's probably going to dead-end because it's probably the wrong road.  Frequently, the dead-end will be up out of sight from where we started this journey (so that we won't have second-thoughts taking it).  Or, we can actually see the dead-end, but we live in denial of it because we want what we want.  Or, the people around us took it and were too embarrassed to tell us that we would run into a dead-end because they were embarrassed that they ran into a dead-end.  Or, the culture has deluded us into believing that it's not a dead-end at all (even though it looks strikingly similar to a dead-end). Dead-ends.  The only road that I know of that has no dead-ends is the one that God lays out for us.  Those are roads of no dead-ends.  Rather, those are roads of endless beginnings.  Forever beginnings.  Perpetual beginnings.  Where the world says that the road will stop, the roads God creates keep right on going.  When the mountains become too high, or the valleys become too low and the roads come to a screaming halt, God has already constructed a bridge or leveled the valley.  “There's some sort of road that we're walking.”  And if God didn't create it, your dead-end is just around the ‘corner.'  If He did create it, you don't need to worry about the ‘corners.'   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Being a Lamp That's Lit So let's begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit?  Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place? How many of us are lit and ablaze?  We're all lamps . . .  every one of us.  But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it's one thing to be a lamp, and it's quite another thing to be lit.  If you walk through life being a lamp that's not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you.  And that is tragic. The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you've known, any person from history, who would you be?”  Listen carefully to what he said.  George Bernard Shaw said this.  He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.”  Will that be your commentary on your life?  When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was? George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit. “Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.”  You . . . all of you . . .  all of us are lamps.  And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Welcome to LifeTalk's Thought for Life.  Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture.  It stands for something lofty, but costly.  It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  “So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature.  And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same.  And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.” I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Becoming Accountable Accountability…might it be time to be accountable to who we've become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be?  Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we've become?  And once we've done that, are we brave enough to look at the damage that we're incurred in the becoming?  Can we relinquish our claim to whatever bit of turf we've claimed and lay our playground feuds to rest in deference to a cause far greater than the tiny space that we occupy?  Can we shake ourselves out of ourselves sufficiently to wake up to the far greater things that lay ‘round about us?  Can we begin to see others as less enemies and more people whose differing views may inform our own?  At what point we will understand that partnership and camaraderie must be preserved even when differences of beliefs or opinions would do their level best to blast us into warring camps?  When will we forfeit what we've become in order to become something so vastly superior to what we've become? It's not that such a shift is impossible (despite the fact that the behaviors exhibited in our world might suggest otherwise).  But in the face of the reckless insanity all around us, will we dare to dare?  Will we raise ourselves up to embrace the fullness of our humanity?  Will we cast off the scourge of selfish agendas and the saber-rattling born of insatiable egos?  Will we be what we've chosen not to be at whatever cost we might pay to do so, recognizing that the cost of not doing so is far, far greater?  Will we shed all that we've become to become all that we can be?  In essence, will we reclaim the majesty of our humanity as it was created and tenderly fashioned to be? I believe that we have not done well, but I believe we can yet do very well.  I believe in something better.  I believe that we can join together in a mutual assault on the mounting challenges in our world instead of engaging in mounting assaults on each other.  I believe, and I hope that everyone of us might join me in that belief.  And in that joining might we rigorously inventory how we can be different.  And then let us go and begin the process of making things different.  Let us reclaim the majesty of our humanity in the care of humanity.   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Grief and Loss Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons There's an old Chinese proverb that states: "Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still." I'm going to talk about grief and loss in this podcast.  And if there's ever times in our lives when we end up "standing still," it's during times of grief and loss.  My intent in this podcast is to help us understand how grief and loss, even devastating grief and loss, rather than causing us to "stand still," can actually facilitate great growth.   Grief and Loss One of my books, “An Autumn's Journey – Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons” deals with the issue of grief and loss, so I'll be drawing from that book a bit this morning.  I ended up writing this particular book for a number of reasons.  Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into those reasons this morning.  Suffice it to say, I have had my own grief and loss, and for over forty years I've walked with thousands of people through their grief and loss.  Obviously, all of that created some of the motivation to write. In reality however, the thing that really created the impetus for me to take on the task of writing about grief and loss was the unexpected death of my own mother on October 14th of 2007.  In those final hours of her life, on her deathbed, I promised her that I would write.  I made that promise to her because for years she had encouraged me to write.  And so, the journey from her deathbed, to her funeral, to closing out her personal affects and affairs, to visiting her graveside on a cold Christmas Day some two years later is the journey outlined in this book.  Now, time this podcast only affords me the opportunity to say a few, very brief things of the many things I would like to say to you on the subject of grief and loss. The premise that undergirds everything that I am going to say in this podcast is simply this . . . "There is Great Purpose in Great Pain." So, in order to build a foundation to support this premise, I'm going to pull several different thoughts together.  First, I want to talk about pain as tremendous opportunity.  Then I want to briefly talk about how and why we miss those opportunities.  Once I have those two thoughts in place, I want to share with you two basic ideas, two principles that you can begin to incorporate into your own times of grief and loss to turn your pain into great gain.   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Welcome to LifeTalk's Thought for Life.  The notion of God does not set well with some people.  Sadly, that notion was often shaped by people or situations or less than admirable agendas that did not reflect the true nature of this God.  And if we're going to reject something, maybe we should reject it on its true merits, not those that have been imposed upon it.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”   “I can staunchly reject the notion that I was created to live in relationship with God.  But should I do that, I will be unable to reject all of the consequences for which I was not created.” I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

All Is Lost 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 ‘lost' today.  Everybody seems lost these days. Let's face it, we live in a world that's lost.  In one way or another (or to one degree or another), the world's always been lost.  There's a pattern to our humanity that should cause us to wise up a bit, and that pattern is that (as a species) we're pretty consistently lost.  It just seems that we're a bit more lost these days. And in our world today, the more that we work to become un-lost, the more ‘lost' that we seem to become.  As a culture, we walk around pretending that we have reliable maps and accurate compasses to get us un-lost.  But we have neither.  We attempt to create them, or make them, or say that we have them when we don't.  We claim that we have the policy, or the formula, or the philosophy, or some recent enlightenment, or some supposedly brilliant or revolutionary idea from which we can now draw the maps and fashion the compasses that we've been looking for, for so very long.  And we grab hold of these new maps and compasses, and we use them to recalibrate wherever we are (and wherever it is that we think we want to go), and we end up deeper in woods than we've ever been before.  The woods of our lives and our culture are littered with discarded maps and broken compasses.  Everybody seems lost these days. Of course we're lost.  We're lost because the woods that we're in are bigger than the resources that we have to get out them.  And those woods become increasingly bigger the more that we convince ourselves that we can get out of them by ourselves.  Where we are is too big for any map or any compass that we can create.  And while we tend to bristle at the idea, God holds the map and has the compass.  A sure map and a steady compass.  And while we're likely to continue to refute that reality, or work to ignore it in light of our incessant stubbornness, He's got the map and the compass.  And all we have to do (all we have to do) is ask Him for it.  And I wonder (I wonder) exactly how lost we're going to have to become before we finally ask Him.   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Grief and Loss Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons There's an old Chinese proverb that states: "Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still." I'm going to talk about grief and loss in this podcast.  And if there's ever times in our lives when we end up "standing still," it's during times of grief and loss.  My intent in this podcast is to help us understand how grief and loss, even devastating grief and loss, rather than causing us to "stand still," can actually facilitate great growth.   Grief and Loss One of my books, “An Autumn's Journey – Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons” deals with the issue of grief and loss, so I'll be drawing from that book a bit this morning.  I ended up writing this particular book for a number of reasons.  Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into those reasons this morning.  Suffice it to say, I have had my own grief and loss, and for over forty years I've walked with thousands of people through their grief and loss.  Obviously, all of that created some of the motivation to write. In reality however, the thing that really created the impetus for me to take on the task of writing about grief and loss was the unexpected death of my own mother on October 14th of 2007.  In those final hours of her life, on her deathbed, I promised her that I would write.  I made that promise to her because for years she had encouraged me to write.  And so, the journey from her deathbed, to her funeral, to closing out her personal affects and affairs, to visiting her graveside on a cold Christmas Day some two years later is the journey outlined in this book.  Now, time this podcast only affords me the opportunity to say a few, very brief things of the many things I would like to say to you on the subject of grief and loss. The premise that undergirds everything that I am going to say in this podcast is simply this . . . "There is Great Purpose in Great Pain." So, in order to build a foundation to support this premise, I'm going to pull several different thoughts together.  First, I want to talk about pain as tremendous opportunity.  Then I want to briefly talk about how and why we miss those opportunities.  Once I have those two thoughts in place, I want to share with you two basic ideas, two principles that you can begin to incorporate into your own times of grief and loss to turn your pain into great gain.

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" I Was Thinking - To Think Outside the Box(s) I was thinking.  And the more I thought, the more I realized that there is a whole lot to think about.  But in my thinking, I thought that most of our thinking (despite how much there is to think about) is really pretty standardized and chafingly rote.  We think in predetermined patterns and pre-existent templates that require no thinking, other than the commitment not to think.  We think in the way that others have chosen to think because they've already done the thinking, which relieves us of the need to do so.  We think we think, but the more I think about that, the less I think we think (if you know what I mean).  So, while there's a whole lot to think about in this big, wide world of ours …we don't.  It seems that our thinking is constrained in a manner that there's really not that much thinking going on at all.  Rather, more often than not our thinking is a tired process of monotonously gathering up a predictable handful of stale but safe thoughts.  And if we play with them long enough, we figure that maybe they'll freshen up and something innovatively fragrant might actually emerge out of the rot.  If something actually does, we're usually scared of whatever it is.  If it doesn't (which is typically what happens) we become increasingly convinced beyond hope that life is actually as stale as we thought it was.       Why? Most of this appears to happen because we think within boxes that we randomly (and sometimes not so randomly) borrow.  We think within predetermined boxes because anything outside of those requires some innovation wherein we let the leash out a bit, let our thoughts find their legs, and let them run.  But we've discovered that sometimes that simply takes too much thought, far too much energy, and far, far too much courage, for it is much easier and much, much safer to just sit.  Or worse yet, we fear that once our thoughts have caught even the slightest whiff of a life running at full stride, they will forever refuse the short leash.  What if our thinking were to open up fresh venues and pull back some hitherto hidden veil that suddenly revealed vast horizons that leaves ignorance no place to hide?  And what if the magnitude of such revelations is such that it handily crushes the complacency within which we've found so much comfort?  What if?  And out of the fear that such things might actually befall us, we peruse the stank back alleys of complacency, hastily borrowing boxes that we find deep in the darkened hovels of mediocrity.  And life becomes a journey lived within suffocating boxes rather than an adventure crafted of breathless horizons.   Our Box Collection: The Box of Societal Norms We think within the box of societal norms.  We grant these norms legitimacy because most of the people around us adhere to them in one form or another.  Because all these people adhere to them, we naturally grant these norms a morality, assuming that others would not dare embrace them if they weren't sufficiently ethical or moral.  Therefore, (despite the terribly narrow nature of both the boxes and our logic), they are deemed acceptable.  To our relief, we quickly discover that if we think within these boxes we are far less likely to be met with rejection, or ridicule, or disdainful judgement, or some other rather distasteful response.  We desperately want to be in the good graces of those around us as that's far more comfortable and far less dangerous than being in some other more adverse state of relationship with these people.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.   The Box of the Mundane We think within the well-worn boxes of the mundane as that path is quite well charted, rigorously predictable, and therefore void of anything dangerous because other people have figured out where all the dangerous stuff is and either removed it, or they've created paths around it.  We know that venturing off the path in life is ref with all sorts of calamity that's just waiting to happen, and so in the box of the mundane there's nothing to venture off on because there's one and only one path.  It might be mundane, it might go nowhere, but it's safe (if you happen to define ‘safe' as refusing to live in order to effectively avoid being hurt).  In an increasingly busy world that's careening in every conceivable direction, the box of the mundane allows us to perfectly function on autopilot since there's only one path that we can walk.  Better yet, if we so choose we can simply sit along the side of this singular path, as this box generously allows us to somehow think (because we're not) that sitting is a journey.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.   The Box of Our Fears We think within the box of our fears, as anything on the outside of those walls is filled with horrific danger (often of the most fabricated sort).  We've probably ventured out there a time or two, and when we did, we got hurt.  And so, when we were hurt, we put our pain on emotional steroids which exponentially magnified our fear.  We then took that fear and fashioned a monster that doesn't exist, and we hunkered down in our box horrified by the fiction of it all.  And while the space out there is a whole lot bigger than the infinitesimally tiny space in here, at least it's safe.  And safety (in our minds) is a decent trade-off, so much so that we amply decorate the box and make it homey with the scant furnishings of justification, rationalization, denial and other carefully appointed excuses.  We settle into the scantily upholstered armchair of mediocrity and wile away our days pretending that we're not pretending.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.   The Box of Our Families We think within the box created by our families as we engaged them growing up.  In many unhealthy families, their boxes were shaped by their own demons and assorted hobgoblins that they handed the reins of power over to.  Over time, they dutifully passed those onto us lock, stock and barrel.  Sometimes these families demand that family members stay within those boxes because, somehow, we will vanish into the dank darkness of another life, or be whisked off to parts unknown by friends, or fall headlong into a career if we dare step outside of them.  Other times, family members may prompt us to move outside of the box because they have come to recognize the life-sucking quality of the box.  Yet, while they prompt us to step out, they did not know how to do so themselves.  Therefore, we must do the most daring thing imaginable and think through exactly how in the world we're going to do that.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.   The Box of Self-Esteem We think within the box crafted by our low self-esteems.  These are often the smallest of all boxes because we dare not create any room whatsoever for anyone else to come in lest they see how pathetically awful we really are.  Sitting in our confining hovel, we know full well that there's great adventure and untapped possibilities outside of our boxes.  There's a good chance that we studied it, or read about it, or on those better days taken a slight peek outside before slamming the door shut again.  In fact, knowing all of that is often the most difficult thing of all.  We know outside this box of ours there's more life than we can wrap our solitary minds around.  We constantly hear the invitations to come out.  We can imagine adventure because we've imagined it so many times that we can almost touch it in our minds, which makes us think that somehow we're touching the adventure out there (which in fact, we are not).  But we doubt our ability to function in it, or find a place in it, or seize it in the cultivation of our dreams, or much less survive it.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.   I Was Thinking I was thinking that there are a whole lot of boxes.  Lots and lots of them.  But I was also thinking that they are just boxes and nothing more.  A box is not a fortified prison with towering walls and tangled barbwire, even though we have come to see it as such.  It's just a box and nothing more.  And as a box, it doesn't hold us.  Rather, we hold it.  I don't ‘think' that we have the power to move beyond our boxes.  Rather, I ‘know' that we do.  And when we realize that power and move beyond our boxes, the parameters of our lives will explode exponentially in a manner that we will be free to think about all the many things that this big, wide world of ours has to think about.  When we do, the role of thinking will finally destroy the rules of the box.  And when that happens, we will be genuinely free.  And when we're free we won't be imprisoned by the dark specter of endings.  Rather, we can embrace the majesty of our purpose, and we can run with the power of our calling. And so, I think I really, really want to think outside the boxes.  So, I think I'll start getting rid of them.  It might take some time.  I'm going to have to be honest about them and grieve what they've already stolen from me.  It might be scary (in fact, I know it will be).  I may wonder what in the world I'm doing at times.  People may wonder what I'm doing as they peer out from the cracks in their own boxes.  But to not get rid of the boxes is to rot away in a box.  And I know that that is not the life for me.  And might I say, I don't think that's the life for you either.  So, let's begin the process of letting the role of thinking destroy the rules of the box.  And let's be free.

Welcome to LifeTalk's Thought for Life.  We need to stop.  We need to put down our calendars, set our phones aside, strip ourselves of the voices incessantly clamoring for our attention and listen.  Just listen.  For life is not what we're chasing.  It's what we're leaving behind in the chasing.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”   “Rich is the person who stops long enough to listen to a bird sing in the celebration of spring, peer into the deep blue of a drowsy summer sky, draw in the pungent aroma of fall's leaves, and watch the listless kiss of a winter's snow.  For in doing these you have witnessed that which money cannot purchase and man cannot create.” I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

The Problem Is Not the Problem We all have…problems.  And there's a real good chance that we have a lot of…problems.  Life comes with problems.  It's part of the deal.  It's a natural part of this thing that we're all doing called life.  Life comes with problems.  But the real problem is not that life comes with problems.  The real problem is what we do with them. In the majority of cases, the problem is ‘not' the problem…despite the fact that we think it's the problem.  The problem is how we're choosing to deal with the problem.  That's the problem.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that in most cases the problem actually creates less problems than the way that we've chosen to deal with the problem.  The ‘real' problem is that we don't want to deal with the ‘real' problem.  And all we have to do is look around at our culture today to realize that we have cultivated, and refined, and ingeniously perfected a whole bunch of ways to do that. We want to immediately minimize the problem out of our frantic efforts to wave off the gravity of it at any cost in order to salvage our self-image.  Or we want to blame others for it so that we are magically free of any culpability from the problem that we (through our geed or stupidity or arrogance) created.  We want to devise clever narratives to excuse whatever we did that created the problem so as to hand ourselves a free pass and by-pass accountability for the carnage we caused.  We want to see the problem as arising from circumstances beyond our control, leaving us utterly innocent, squeaky clean, and nothing more than the wounded victim of the choices that we refuse to own.  Or, we have come to determine that the problem is marvelously self-serving, and that it grants us some sort of cherished leverage that we would lose should we actually solve the problem.  Therefore, we perpetuate the problem, turning a blind-eye toward those who are suffering because of the problem.  Or, most deviously of all, we spin the problem to be the brain-child of some ill-defined, but dark and foreboding force intent on our destruction.  And these people, or these organizations, or these clandestine groups clustered in some darkened room, or whatever they might be become enemy that they never were, and we become the victim that it is, in fact, the victimizer.  The real problem is rarely the real problem. But when we fall prey to our lesser selves and enslave ourselves to the fear of accountability, or risk tarnishing our cherished reputations by being exposed as the culprits, or have to expend cherished resources to clean up the mess we made when we would much prefer to hoard those resources for ourselves, or when we seize the opportunity to turn our failures on others in order to elevate ourselves above them in some sickening power grab, or when we choose whatever gain the problem might grant us over the destruction it will wield in the lives of others…when we do any of these, we are creating a problem far bigger than whatever the real problem was.  Far bigger.  And we would be utterly foolish to think that these choices will not come back to haunt us with an unparalleled vengeance that we cannot begin to imagine.  Yes…the real problem is rarely the real problem. It takes courage to step up and own what we have done.  It is the brave individual who will refuse to elevate themselves at the expense of others.  It is the person of integrity who will unflinchingly stare into the mirror of their decisions and own what they see staring back at them.  It is the man or woman of wisdom who will recognize that to embrace the consequences of our choices, and to own the outcome of our behaviors is the single path to freedom, and that any other path will always, always, lead to enslavement.  And it is the person of faith will understands that God can only forgive that which we repent of, and that there is nothing so large that He cannot, and will not, forgive.  God is in the business of wiping slates clean and handing out new starts.  Yes…the real problem is rarely the real problem.  And if we are to begin the process of wiping out the problems in our world, we must wipe out the way that we have chosen to deal with them.  We must… “Do not deceive yourselves.  If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise.  For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight.  As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness…”. 1 Corinthians 3:18-19

Might I Say - What I Don't Want to Hear 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 love with plug-and-play and pre-fab.  We like things pre-packaged, prepared, and predetermined.  We're looking for answers that were already ingested, digested and reflexively regurgitated for our reflexive consumption by whatever source we happen to have happened upon.  In essence, we don't think.  And in fact, there are few things as dangerous as that.     We're going to ingest a whole lot of something.  That's inevitable.  And if that ‘something' shapes us with that much force, we might be wise to ask what that ‘something' is.  We live in a world roiling with bias and flushed murky with politically-correct agendas.  We have splintering splinter groups proffering philosophies of every shape and sort.  We've got the thematic propagation of ‘diversity' that's more about a permission to be permissive.  Too often it's about the ‘spin to win'.  It's less about truth and it's more about triumph.  It's about the resolute and rather gritty proliferation of the agenda to the degree that truth becomes the agenda and the agenda becomes the truth.  Therefore, truth becomes negotiable and pliable in a forced and placating servitude to an onslaught of dubious agendas.  However, truth in the service of an agenda becomes opinion.  And too often opinion is bias off the leash and running wild. So, we need to listen for a change.  We need to question…aggressively and responsibly.  We need to ruthlessly investigate and corroborate.  We need to quit being complacent consumers and become invested investigators.  We need to use truth as a steeled template, not as a fluffy convenience.  We need to bring the sturdy compass of ethics to point out the true north in every decision whether that true north is to our liking or not.  We don't need to be worldly wise, for that's an oxymoron of the most deceptive kind.  Rather, we need to be wise in the ways of God and life.  We need to be sufficiently stubborn to reject the pabulum of the masses, yet pliable enough to hear the beating hearts underneath the pabulum.  We need to be bold and brazen in a manner stitched tight by wisdom and lent compelling by reason.  We need to be beacons of light knowing that the crowd is apt to label us as sorely antiquated and ridiculously ill-informed.  We need to listen in the bravest form imaginable.     It would behoove us to remember that to live passively is to live dangerously.  To live inquisitively is to live wisely.  To live boldly is to live robustly.  And to live our lives based on timeless principles is to honor God rather than worship everything else that pretends to be God.  May we choose to abandon the former and judiciously embrace all of the latter.   “Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.” Ephesians 5:15-16   Additional Resources Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" To Believe In Something Better - The Rise Against What Is Our humanity is ingeniously fashioned in a manner that it can handily break the realities that would seek to break it.  Our existence need never be held hostage nor pressed into servitude to the sordid realities of all that is happening around us.  Rather, we are able to stand in spirited opposition to those realities, and in the face of them we are capable of crafting brilliant and utterly resilient solutions that crush those realities by transforming them.  We are dreamers and the authors of visions.  We have the ability to conceptualize marvelous things and actually begin the act of crafting them even at those times when the presence of them or the hope for them is entirely non-existent.  We are a powerful bunch vested with immense potential that exceeds even that which we understand.  Yet, we bring these abilities to bear against a world that would wish to press us flat in its skepticism.  The world becomes embroiled in the selfish pursuits that it crafts as it chases things born of greed, gluttony and selfishness.  The world would bend us to its darker ways rather than be bent to a better way.  The world would prefer to kill both us and itself rather than give up what it has selfishly given itself over to.  Indeed, the world has sold its soul to something that it is convinced will liberate the soul that it sold.  Therefore, in the insanity of a world gone rogue, the world will viciously fight for the things that are certain to destroy it. The weight of living in a world such as this, as well as the incessant press of darkness that such living spawns can at times leave us wondering if our influence might be too insufficient to wrestle the world out of a darkness that has become so terribly dark.  We stand as single entities, bringing what light we can.  Most times, that light seems swallowed in the vast darkness that seems to advance without restraint.  We are left in the squalor of a battle that seems lost, only holding the line so that we can delay the full descent of evil and grant ourselves a few precious moments before life is over.   To Believe In Something Better But we forget.  We are extraordinarily quick to lose touch with a greater reality that infinitely surpasses the darkness which surrounds us.  Our perspective becomes one of gradual defeat and continual hopelessness.  Our understanding of who we are and Who we serve is lost in the grief of a battle seemingly hopeless and ground perpetually surrendered.  We fall prey to the lies of the darkness whose own darkness is completely dependent upon our fear of it.  Therefore, the darkness must appear dark beyond what it is in order to create the fear necessary to insure its own survival.  It is not an undefeatable foe.  It is, in fact, a foe that fears lest we discover the power that we possess and the vulnerability that it has. Therefore, to remind us of who we are in times such as these and to fan the flames of our passion, I have compiled a number of quotes that I have had the privilege of authoring.  It is my desire to call us back to lofty dreams and rigorous passion.  To remind us that the darkness is the absence of light and therefore is totally dependent on the light remaining absent.  As such, the darkness is terribly vulnerable as it possesses no means by which to stop the light other than creating fear in us.  These quotes are written to set us free and send us out in the marvel of our humanity to change a world that is too ill-equipped to change itself.  To say that we stand for something better, and that we will be that ‘something better' in the standing.  It is my hope that these quotes will move you to move your world, for I believe that you can, and I believe that you will:     The Rise Against ‘What Is' “If it didn't go all that well today, tomorrow is the opportunity that I have to do what I did today without doing it the way that I did it today.”   “Pull every dream that you've ever had from all of the places that you've abandoned them, brush them off, set them in front of yourself, run the fingers of your heart over each of them, fight the lie that you're not enough to achieve them, and realize that the dream was not too big.  Rather, the belief in yourself is too small.”   “Let us not fall prey to the leaching negativity and rank pessimism that runs unleashed all around us.  Rather, with the utmost determination we must bring ourselves to understand that these lies have been given legitimacy by people who thought themselves as powerless in the face of them, rather than recognizing that we have the power to rip the face off of them.”   “You, yes you are the impossible waiting to happen.  And the only reason that that sounds impossible to you is that you haven't been daring enough to push the possible out to the point where it becomes what you once mistook for the impossible.”   “I am begging you to let nothing shackle you that God has sent you to unshackle.”   “I've sat with tens of thousands of people and I've stared into as many empty eyes.  And I must say that the inexplicable contradiction for me is that despite the gaping emptiness engulfing every one of these eyes, there yet lies within each one a wonderfully formidable gifting, an irrepressible energy, a depth yet undiscovered, riches unfathomed, and the resources to amply transform this ever-darkening world.  And I've seen enough eyes to know that if yours are also empty, like everyone else's they are also full.”   “God doesn't ask if something can be done.  Nor does He ask if we have the resources to do it.  For God is bound by neither question.  And when we stand with God, neither are we.”   “You are fully and magnificently equipped to stand up and change the world around you.  And to simply sit down and tolerate the world around you is to squander who you are in the process of never being who you are.”   “Do not be ashamed of who you are, for in doing so you are not taking into account the majesty of all that you are.  And without any shred of doubt, I know that you are a person of majesty, for in my innumerable years of working with people I have yet to find even one person who is not.”   “Stand up and be the light that God created you to be.  Stand with me and the millions of others like both of us who have bowed before this inexplicably marvelous God of ours and in the bowing have begged that He not let us die until the darkness in the world around us has died first.”   “Look in the mirror.  Go ahead and look yet again.  And look not at the reflection, for while this body of yours is marvelously complex in ways that continue to elude the reach of modern science, it is but a simple shell that holds the image of God within you.  And if the shell is that grand, how much more what God has placed inside of it.”   “If I let that which I hold to be true fall victim to a world that says it is not, I have in that action surrendered to the voices of those who know nothing of the truth other than to destroy it because it terrifies them.  And if there's one thing I should be terrified of, it's not the surrender itself, but the fact that in the surrender I have given the world permission to avoid the very thing that it should fear.”   “It's not the gifts or the abilities or the talents that equip us to accomplish great things.  Rather, it's the persistent and adamantly stubborn conviction that we will in no way leave the world the way that we found it.  And I would rather join hands with a single person of this kind than sit with a million gifted people who are not of this kind.”   And finally… “I will spend my life believing in you so that you will someday commit to doing the same.”   To Believe We must press ourselves into a sort of reckoning.  We must realign our minds with the truth of who we are, who God created us to be, and the fantastic mission that He gifted us with.  In a battle this pervasive and insidious, we must ground ourselves in a truth so brilliant and pristinely clean that it will handily stand against the wiles of the devil and the depth of the darkness he has spun.  We must align ourselves with a reality so brilliant, robust and muscular that we find ourselves unintimidated by the darkness that now stands quaking in front of us. We have a God who has called us to great things.  Great things.  He has not called us to defeat or even some slightly marginal victory.  He has called us to complete and unquestioned victory.  And such a call would never have been extended had not this God of ours provided ample resources to achieve that victory. Before moving to the next chapter, I would encourage you to reread the quotes shared in this chapter.  I would likewise encourage you to pick one that speaks to you, to write it down, and recite it daily.  Let its truth seep deep into your soul and ignite your heart.  Let it breath confidence into your spirit and energy into your convictions.  Indeed, it is time to rise against ‘what is.'  So, let's rise.

Welcome to LifeTalk's Thought for Life.   “Talk is cheap,” as the old saying goes.  We say a lot of things, more due to the fact that we believe that we're supposed to say those things, or we say so them because, in the end, they'll get us what we want.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  “The degree of my commitment to a cause will not be in direct proportion to the degree that ‘I am willing' to sacrifice for it.  Rather, it will be in direct proportion to the degree that ‘I am sacrificing' for it.” I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Is Anyone Listening? Is anyone listening?  In the world within which you live, is anyone listening?  Does your voice matter?  The pain that you carry, the confusion that dogs your steps, the fear that drains your soul, the dreams that lay buried in a distant past, and a future that you sense is already being buried by the same things that buried your past…is anyone listening?  In those moments when loneliness is all that you know.  At those times when the loneliness has gone on for so long that you have little alternative than to believe that loneliness is the single story that life has penned for you, and that there is no other story…at those times is anyone listening? Is there anyone who cares that you cry?  Is there anyone who is willing to place themselves aside in order to make sufficient space for you to place yourself in their arms?  Is there anyone who is willing to pick you up, to wipe clean the wounds that you have, to light a candle in your darkness, and help you press out into the light?  Is there anyone who's willing to get their hands dirty so that you might begin the process of getting yours clean? Is there anyone listening…at all? And if perchance someone does listen, are they listening?  Really?  Or do we sense that they are listening out of obligation?  Are we their project, or their charity case, and that in some way they are simply using us in some misguided way to fulfill some guilt-induced obligation to give back to society?  Are we the box that they check in the ‘good deeds' column of their lives because they haven't checked a whole lot of boxes in that column?  Or are they listening because focusing on our pain grants them an escape from their own?  Or are they listening because to play the hero in our life is to make them feel that they have a life, or at least some sort of purpose in life so they don't stumble through life feeling purposeless?  Is anyone listening?  Anyone? In the Bible God says, "Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.”  God will listen.  Not out of obligation.  Not because you are a project.  Not because you are a charity case.  Not because God is checking a box.  Not because He's escaping from anything, or needs to play the hero, or to grant Himself some sort of purpose.  There is none of that. God is listening.  And He's listening because to hear you warms His heart.  To hear you thrills His soul.  To hear you is the culmination of everything that He created, including you.  He created the entirety of this world, and then He placed you in the middle of it so that you might know this God, and that He might love you.  Intimate relationship.  Unbroken relationship.  A forever relationship.  And when we broke that relationship through our sin, He refused to let that brokenness stand.  That brokenness stood against everything for which God created ‘everything.'  So deep was His desire to listen to us, to connect with us, to hold us, and heal us that He sent His Son to die to heal what we broke.  Yes, He listens.  He created us to be heard, and when we messed it up He did nothing less than sacrifice His Son to heal what we broke.  Yes, God listens.  He refuses to do anything less.  He listens.  And because He does, He's waiting for you to speak.  And so, do the thing that you were created to do…talk to God, for He's listening.  "Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." Jeremiah 29:12 and 13

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" Not Where We Were - Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we're going in this thing called life.  For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined.  For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered.  For many, where they're going is defined by the tasks of the day, rather than enlarged by a vision for tomorrow. In many cases where we're going is far more rigorously defined by all the places where we don't want to go, rather than the places where we do want to go.  At other times its definition is rather handily shaped by the opinions of others, or it's carved directly from the bedrock of the value systems that have been built into our lives throughout the whole of our lives.  For others, it's based on the need to avoid the pain of our past or somehow prove our worth in the face of a self-image that lays battered and bloodied.  Vague or refined, we all have some sense of where we're going.  And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else. Some of us are not necessarily in conscious pursuit of wherever this place is.  We have this instinctually primal sense that it's there and we intuitively assume that our path will take a natural course to wherever that place is.  Then, there are others of us who are myopically focused on where we're going to the degree that everything that we do is wholly defined by that singularly beguiling destination.  Some of the more adventurous souls among us nimbly pursue that destination, spiritedly pulling in as much of everything that we can along the way to accentuate both the journey as well as the destination.  In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we're going.  And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.    The Detours We Create Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going.  There are those times when where we were going was bafflingly mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination.  At other times the place where we're going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it.  At such times we craft some other less intimidating and thoroughly unfulfilling destination.  Sometimes our destination is to set a course away from our destination so that we can dispense with whatever responsibility or obligation our original destination might have demanded of us.  And then in the magic of life, there are those times where we have actually pursued some authentic destination with such rigorous tenacity that the trajectory of our efforts has catapulted us past our destination to places that are everything of our furthest and fondest imagination.  However, it might play out, we're all headed somewhere.   The Detours Life Creates But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm's length of it.  There's a sense that something intrinsically unjust, stealthy and evil is always about and on the prowl, and whatever it is, it's bound to show up if it hasn't already.  When it does, it undoes everything that we thought was secure and certain, wreaking havoc on whatever our journey had been to that point.  And to whatever degree it wrecks the road underneath our feet, we're left in a blurring trauma that renders our journey disjointed, our destination uncertain, and our lives dispirited.   The Explanation of Detours Missed How It Happens Yet, more often than not it's the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are the core problem.  Sure, life shows up and we get shoved down.  There's no question that the natural ebb and flow of life, whether it be titanic or miniscule, will happen to us.  Despite our frequently ego-centric inclinations to the contrary, we are not so shrewd or ingenious as to be able to traverse life in a manner that deftly side-steps everything that comes at us.  We don't dance as well as we think we do.  Our ingenuity falls prey to our arrogance, and the winds that we assumed to be reliable often shift and drive our genius toward some rocky shoal.  And so, life will fall upon us, or ram against us, or pull the ground out from under us, or wreck us.   Casual and Careless Yet, more often than not, the explanation doesn't rest in life having shown up.  The much more poignant issue is that too often we are passive, flabby and lax in rigorously living out our lives.  We're far too casual and careless.  Somehow, somewhere the exquisite sanctity of life and the priceless privilege of living it out was supplanted with some sense that it's too much work or that it's not going to work, so why try?  The gift is lost in the grind and we lose a sustaining sense of gratitude.  We get caught in the shallows, forgetting that the deepest waters hold the greatest treasures.  But we would rather forage for trinkets because treasures are too stubborn to just hand themselves to us and we will not succumb to such preposterous demands.  The shallows become our calling when they are nothing more than our coffin.  Therefore, we drift without knowing that we're drifting because we're no longer paying attention.  We come to believe that we are living a life of great things because it is too overwhelming to embrace the truth that we have forfeited great things.  The outcome of such passive living is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.   Preoccupied with Pabulum Too often we're too preoccupied with pabulum.  We're tediously engaged with tiny things and we're caught in the tedium of minutia because we can gather these things around us and control them when the bigger things are out of our control.  Too frequently we're goaded by the fear of big dreams and massive possibilities, so we dumb down our lives to anesthetize those fears.  There's plenty of pablum to go around.  Therefore, we assume that if we collect sufficient quantities of it, it will add up to something bigger than pablum.  Yet, dreams are never constructed of pablum and our fears are never put at bay by any collection of it, regardless of how massive.  It is an escape, but it is never an answer.  It's a detour, but it is never a destination.  It is an imitation of what we are attempting to avoid.  Subsequently, pablum gives us a sense that we can circumvent everything that we fear and still achieve everything that we dream.  We're caught in small things, and the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.   Along for the Ride Frequently we presume that we're some docile passenger along for a ride that's going wherever it's going, so we just let it go to wherever that place is.  We freely surrender to passivity which is an invitation to meaninglessness.  And meaninglessness is the death of the soul itself.  Life is a river, we say.  And the best course of action is to navigate it because entertaining the far-fetched notion of swimming against it is utterly preposterous.   Assuming that we are along for the ride releases us from any accountability for the ride and where it might end up.  We are innocent.  Or we're victims of circumstance.  Or our families put us here because they didn't know any other place to put us.  Or we're simply being obedient to whatever we've subjected ourselves to.    Assuming we're on a ride that we can't direct, the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.        The Walls of Denial At other times, we live in the constructed confines erected from the raw material of denial, causing us to live out a life that is in denial of life itself.  We become squatters living in a squatter's camp constructed by the flimsy materials of justification, rationalization, blame-placing and projecting.  We pull in the walls due to the reality that materials of this sort are always pulling inward because they will die if we dare to press them outward.  Hemmed in by walls of this sort, the world around us is shut out and moves on without our awareness of it.  We live in walls that we pretend are horizons, or vast doorways that open to massive expanses and marvelous places.  In time, we come to believe that they are not walls at all as we've visualized them as something that they will never be.  We then live out our lives in these confining hovels, convinced that we are forging great mountains and running in wild places.  The outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.          Ending Up Where We Wish to Be We will end up somewhere.  The fact that we have a destination is irrefutable as life is a journey that presents us with no option other than the journey.  We may decide that the nature and course of the journey is irrelevant, and we may take a backseat to passivity.  If we do, we have no right to complain when we end up in some place other than what we may have thought or preferred. Yet, we can recognize that we are not automatons subject to the flux of the world within which we have found ourselves.  It would seem advisable to recognize that we have an obligation to the course that our life is taking, and that along with that obligation we have been granted a profound degree of power to bring to the course.  If we imprudently succumb to carelessness, or become engrossed by pabulum, or if we just let the ride go wherever circumstances take it, or if we pull close the walls of denial this thing that we call life will wind itself to wherever it's going with no one at the helm.  And that kind of destination cannot be good. We would be wise to inventory our lives and determine if we are in some way large or small participating in any of these behaviors.  If so, we need to root them out and expunge them from our lives.  Reclaiming a sense of vision, and then seizing our lives with discipline and intentionality will set us on a path that will land us in places that we've dreamt to land.  If we don't, the place we land may not be on any land that we even remotely recognize. 

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.' We Don't Want a God 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.

Welcome to LifeTalk's Thought for Life.  Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture.  It stands for something lofty, but costly.  It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  “So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature.  And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same.  And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.” I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Good as the Enemy of the Best “That's good enough.”  How many times have those words come out of our mouths?  The idea of this lackluster commitment to the living out of our lives has become so prevalent that we've learned to articulate it in a whole bunch of different ways.  The rather robust vernacular that we've created to wave off responsibility and say “that's good enough” includes such catchy phrases as “that'll get us by until Monday,” or “that's good enough for government work,” or “that's doable,” or “that's in the ballpark,” or however we say “that's good enough.” The whole phenomena of “sliding by” or “skating by” has always been a byword of history.  Subsequently, any vague concept of a ‘work ethic' seems to have become much less an ethic and much more of a remotely fuzzy idea.  We're constantly working out ways of how not to work.  And in doing that, we forfeit doing all the incredible things that we could be doing. Many of us seem to have developed this fairy-dust type of magical thinking where things will just be there for us.  Because we can't see the efforts and the work of those who fill the shelves of our stores, or keep the wheels of commerce greased, or who relentlessly ply the seas of a forty-plus hour work week, they tend to become invisible.  And so, things are just there because they're there. Ultimately, our gifts, talents and abilities are sacrificed on the altar of laziness and entitlement.  We lose who we are, we lose what we could do, and in essence we lose our lives.  At best, whatever our best could have been is lost.  Tragically, in time we gradually lose a sense that we could actually do great things, and we forfeit the transformational reality that our best is both achievable and far beyond anything we could have imagined with the best of our imaginations.  We forget that to be our best is the best thing that we can be. Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to our own limits in any given situation?  It's asking, how do I intentionally leave every situation and every person with more than what they had when I first encountered them?  Being our best involves walking away from every situation with less than what we had when we encountered it because we left something behind in the exchange.  Being our best asks did we press it as far as was humanly possible, and did we walk away with nothing else we could have given? And so, commit to being your best.  Shun anything that is anything less than that.  Realize that you were created to ‘best' your own ideas of what your best is.  Be your best, and in doing so transform yourself and transform those around you in the best way possible. “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Galatians 6:9

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" What I Want - The Frightening Call of Great Things I want to be happy, but I don't think I want to be satisfied; for satisfaction lures me into believing that happiness is found in reaching some point rather than realizing happiness is born of striving for those points.  I want to experience a resilient and wonderfully endearing sense of contentment that neatly threads itself through every part of my soul, but I don't want that contentment to morph into the baser mentality of complacency.  I want to keep a weathered eye on every horizon, but I want to do more than just watch those horizons from some sorry distance.  Rather, I want to walk their ridges.  I don't want to contemplate the taking of a journey.  Rather, I want to be contemplating a journey as I'm taking it. I want to robustly celebrate the achievements and vigorously revel in the milestones in a manner completely worthy of them, but I never want to fall to the bane of mediocrity that would prompt me to see them as a terminus.  I want to develop a sturdy confidence born of the advances made, and I want to have that confidence perpetually reinforced by the successes achieved.  Yet, I pray that my failures will always serve to temper that confidence so that it never turns to rot in the form of arrogance.  And in further managing this tempered confidence, I never want it to be so strong that I errantly assume any challenge as too small to be worthy of my time.  I want to be happy, but I don't think I want to be satisfied.  For whatever reason I might do it and in whatever way I might do it, I never want to hand myself excuses to round the next summit instead of scaling it.  I never want to slothfully presume the ability to achieve a goal without holding myself accountable to actually getting on the track and running the race.  And I suppose worst of all, I never want to scan my assorted array of trophies, whether they be numerous or few, and in the scanning embrace some languid sense born of complacency that somehow it is done and that I can hang up my hat, when in reality life is never done and no hat is really ever hung.   Why Do I ‘Never Want' to Do These Things? Laziness is humanity domesticated to its own destruction.  Mediocrity is life pent up in the very iron-clad cages that we create out of the misguided notion that an ‘adventure' is a product of those misty-eyed idealists who expend their lives chasing dreams too elusive to catch.  Therefore, we create dreams that we can cage so that they simply can't elude us, and in their captivity we can manage them so that, God forbid, they never manage us.  And what we forget is that a dream caged is nothing more than an anemic, pasty-white wish that is always in the process of dying in whatever cage it happens to find itself.   We Are Made for More We are made for more than all of that.  Our humanity yearns for the next adventure.  We desire lofty summits and distant finish lines that tax the whole of our energies in order to get us to them.  There is inherent within us this incessant sense that where ‘we are' is not where ‘we're going,' and that to park it wherever we're at is to start dying in that very place.  There is some fixed notion in our psyche and some insistent voice in our souls that will not be silenced and cannot be appeased by lesser agendas.  These call out despite the many ways we work to silence them, and in the calling out they call us out. Sadly, in light of the calling, we too often surrender to fear and we sell-out to apathy.  We foolishly peddle our resources and pawn off our talents to lesser things so that we can hold up some small, pithy achievement to offset the gnawing guilt we experience over bypassing the greater achievements that were our calling before we were called away.  We can't show up empty-handed, for that would work against our efforts to squelch the already suppressed voice of passion.  Yet, unless we set our sights on higher things we will always be empty-hearted, for blind obedience to fear and the steady ingestion of apathy leaves everything it touches empty.  And I would propose that emptiness of this sort is the bedfellow of death itself. Therefore, we achieve something because we must.  And at times we dress up those ‘somethings' so that they don't look half bad.  But too often our achievements are an insidious effort to sedate our sense of passion and render it appeased.  They're the anemic manifestation of our fears, a groveling by-product of our lackluster vision, and a response to the snide voice of mediocrity that herald's ‘passion' as the fool's errand.  Passion is not fooled, even though we are fooled by the belief that we somehow fooled it.  To numb passion is not to diminish its power.  Rather, it is to diminish our sense of its power.  In doing so we stepped down instead of stepping up.  We swapped mountains for back alleys, and dramatic vistas for fading fences.  And these realities create a grinding angst within us that will not be soothed by anything but heeding the call from which we've run.   What to Do? Decide to Do Something As obvious as it may sound, the first thing to do is decide to do something.  Without the decision to do something, anything and everything is only an idea.  An idea, regardless of how ingenious or bold changes nothing until it is birthed as a reality.  The greatest ideas will only tickle our imagination, but they won't fire it until they're released.  They will nudge us, but they won't force us to jump.  They will call, but they won't beg. To do something is to decide to be disciplined.  It's a decision to take a step rather than toy with ideas.  It is a choice to move from the non-committal ease of playing out various scenarios in our head, to grabbing one of them by the throat and acting on it.  It is not based on cost in stepping out, for the greatest cost of all is in not stepping out.  And it is the sad reality that most of our ideas die without ever having been birthed as realities because we choose to do everything but step.   Decide If You're Going to be Brave An idea as only an ‘idea' and nothing more than an idea is safe.  As ideas and ideas only, they're manageable.  They're domesticated.  They're leashed.  We hold them within the safe confines of our minds and our imaginations, toying with them as time permits and returning them to those confines when it does not.  But cut the reigns and turn an idea loose and it may not be as manageable and domesticated as we might like it to be.  So, are we brave enough for the ride that is certain to ensue? An idea that is given legs is one of the most dangerous things imaginable, but it is also one of the most exciting things possible.  An idea running at full stride is wildly frightening in a manner that unleashes something that was never supposed to be leashed.  It is not about throwing caution to the wind as some might think.  Rather, it's about stepping into the wind and being swept up by it while wisely holding caution as we do.  It's about understanding that wisdom is not held hostage to safety.  Rather, wisdom is based on figuring out how we navigate dangerous things in a way that no longer renders them dangerous.  And as such, are we going to choose to be brave?   Decide How Important Comfort and Familiarity Are Unleash your ideas and things will never be the same; guaranteed.  Things will change when great ideas are unleashed because they can't help but change.  What ‘is' will become the stuff of a history that will lay beyond our ability to ever reclaim again.  Our ideas are the stuff of the future.  They are never home in the present for the present is only the thing that launches them, not the thing that cultivates them.  If our lives have been expended in the acquisition of comfort and the cultivation of familiarity, our future is our ‘now' and no idea can sufficiently grow in that. While the degree of success rests on the magnitude of the idea being released, the greater degree to which it will be successful is the degree to which we unleash it.  And if we prefer familiarity and the comfort that it engenders, we might never truly let an idea loose, or we may well attempt to cram it back into the confines we released it from after we've unleashed it.  At best, the ideas are hamstrung.  At worst, they perish.      Get the Resources If you've decided that you want to do something, if you're sufficiently brave to do it, and if you're willing to forgo familiarity and comfort in the pursuit of it, then get the resources that you need to make it happen.  Real resources.  This is not about thin and pasty resources, nor is it about material that's been worn thin.  It's not about sugary-sweet notions or trite sayings that are fun and fanciful but are shallow and porous.  Rather, this is about finding bold, honest, timely, daring, frank, deep and brisk material that will thrust you out beyond the confines you saw as the terminus of your dreams.  Find resources that are unforgiving in helping you grow, reliable in content, proven in substance, and thick with wisdom.  Learn from trusted people who have been there-and-back who have likewise taken other people there-and-back.  Grab these resources, let them grab you, and then rigorously apply them without delay or excuse.  When you do, you will start the process of placing yourself in a position to begin heeding the call of great things.