Quotes by Craig D. Lounsbrough

Be absolutely assured that we will die long before our own deaths if we ever allow the fear of adulthood to kill the wonder of childhood.

Fear left unrestrained always leaves us running ‘from’ something. Fear harnessed compels us to run ‘to’ something. And fear denied leaves us running in circles.

Comfort is not a goal that I seek, rather it is a place that I hide.

The more we construct lives that prioritize safety, the bigger the prison we construct around ourselves.

What would behoove me to instantly declare God not to be God unless He followed my script in some tediously exacting manner? I must confess that I am less likely to believe that it’s a matter of some narcissistic demand that I freely pen my own script. Rather, I think it’s fear that I’m too inadequate to follow God’s.

If I am sufficiently brave to extract the cancer of fear, I have effectively gutted my conviction that what stands before me is impossible.

Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse.

We think that boxes take everything that’s bad and they lock all that nasty stuff out, when in reality they take everything that we are and they lock all of those great things in.

Self-preservation is to hunker down in the suffocating confines of this infinitesimally tiny existence that I define as ‘me,’ instead of letting ‘me’ run through the infinitely massive expanse of everything that is not me. And if the beast of self-preservation does not permit such freedoms, I will preserve myself to my own death.

I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one.

I might define a ‘journey’ as something that life itself calls me to. And I might then define a ‘trip’ as something I create to avoid a journey by mimicking a journey. And while fear is most certainly part and parcel of both, the latter is emboldened by fear while the former surrenders to it.

It’s not about the elimination of fear. Rather it’s about the elimination of the feeling that the elimination of fear is necessary before we take the next step.

The hand of God is wonderfully evident at those times when He pens stories whose lines we ourselves are far too fearful to pen or whose imaginations are far too limited to envision. And I would unashamedly suggest that the Christmas story is that very story.

Far too often, it is at the moment where we finally stand on the very precipice of some great thing that we turn and abandon it, for it is at these seminal moments that fear wins and greatness dies. The beauty of Christmas is that God steps over precipices.

What excites us the most or likewise scares us the most is when something is exactly what it says it is. And when it comes to Christmas, we’re going to end up finding ourselves on one side of that line or the other.

How often have I painted a splendid picture of a journey marked by courageous ascents and daring desert crossings when all along all I’ve really been doing is running?

Fear is often bred of an imagination that couldn’t let something be what it actually was.

Fear is a lethal killer of dreams, the greatest cancer that has beset passion, and a ruthless thief of lives stolen and buried in the decay of lives squandered. Yet the greatest tragedy of all is that the fear that destroys us is rarely the monster it pretends to be, nor does it possess anything close to the power that we grant it. Therefore, it is only a killer, a cancer and a thief because we empower it to be so.

What in the world would ever lead to me believe that life is a series of opportunities that are readily available to everyone else but me? What really leads me to believe such an atrocious lie is that I don’t believe in myself sufficiently to engage those opportunities in the first place.

By choosing comfort we are in the very same decision choosing to miss every great thing in life, and that thought should be anything but comforting.