"Craig D. Lounsbrough"の名言

Some would say that paradise is the escapist ‘fiction’ of hapless minds caught up in the denial of a darkening world. But Christmas would say that the ‘paradise’ of escapist fiction has not a single shred of fiction in it at all.

It is not a matter of being broken, even though I am in fact quite shattered. It is understanding that my capacity to be fixed always exceeds the extent to which I’m broken.

Being thankful reminds us that if it’s broken it’s an opportunity.

The longer I’ve walked with God the more I’ve realized that being thankful is vigorously celebrating what’s right in the world while anticipating that what’s wrong with it will soon follow suit.

I’d much rather have all of this be the ‘pigment’ of my imagination rather than a ‘figment,’ for at least it would all have some color.

Hope is not some flimsy belief that things might somehow work out. Rather, hope is a belief in a God who’s already worked it out.

Despite how dark it might be, what is tonight but the precursor to tomorrow?

It comes down to 'fear' and 'faith'. 'Fear' of what stands in front of me. 'Faith' in believing that the resources I possess can handle what stands in front of me. If I stop at the former, I will change nothing. If I embrace the latter, I can change everything.

Having the eyes of a child does not mean that we are naïve. Rather, it means that we’ve become brave enough to believe in a great good while simultaneously embracing the reality of a great evil.

The utterly frightening thing about great things is that we don’t know where they’re taking us, we can’t control them, and we’ll never be able to return to what we left. And are those things not the things that make great things great?

Fear is the absence of faith, while the presence of faith leaves us with the absence of nothing.

That which is possible is only the seedbed for that which is impossible. And therefore, if we neglect to plant liberally we might live lives full of the possible, but we will never hold the harvest of the impossible.

If something didn’t happen, it’s probably not that it couldn’t. Rather, it’s more that we chose not to believe that it could.

I do not doubt the ability of mankind to aspire to lofty ideals and the most pristine of principles. But what I doubt is the willingness of mankind to incur the sacrifices involved in moving from aspiring these things to actually embracing them. And in such a conundrum as this, I would suggest that to stop at ‘aspiring’ and never move to ‘embracing’ is without a doubt the greatest sacrifice of all.

Do not tell me about your principles, for words are easy to craft and talk is cheap. Rather, let me see you live them out in the sentence and syntax of everyday life. And let me see that not so that I know that you understand the principles that you espouse, for that is easy. Rather, I want to know that you understand the sacrifice of living them out, and that the weight of the principle offsets the sacrifice of carrying it.

It’s not the world that enslaves me. Rather, it’s my attitude about the world as positioned against the rather faltering belief that I can change it. And when that belief is firmly rooted in a relentless thankfulness that I have both the privilege and the gifting to do exactly that, I can know that I will never be a slave to my attitude, which is one of the greatest acts of liberation that I will ever experience.

If we were to tally all of the potential that was never unleashed throughout the history of mankind, and if that tally was somehow held up in front of us, I would hope against all hope that it would horrify us to a point of such despair that we would be driven to insure that such a tragedy would never be given any shred of space anywhere in our own lives nor in the lives of any life that we might touch for the rest of our lives.

Jesus was born into an existence that I cannot fathom, and He died a death of the very same sort. And therefore, what insanity causes me to presume His inability to understand the difficulties of my existence when His wildly eclipsed mine, and why do I doubt His adequacy to engage the death within me when He died a death for me?

When we lose the belief in ‘something better’ we’ve embraced the belief in ‘all things worse.’ And such a perspective is based less on things being worse, and more on our inability to believe that we can make it better.

In this imperceptibly vast sea of humanity, we are scarcely a drop. But in the sweeping vastness of such a turbulent sea we forget that these waters are in fact made up of a collection of drops, for without these individual drops the sea would be nothing but parched rumor and dusty myth. And because that’s the case, the turbulence engulfing this enormous body of water can be brought to a stilled calm by this single drop that we are touching the drop that everyone else is with the love that God has touched us with.