Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

Being a mother is not about __irthing a child into the world._ Rather, it is about repeatedly __irthing into the child_ a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that the cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother.

My sin murdered Him. And out of this self-loathing shame borne of the understanding that I could perpetrate such a heinous act, I am barely able to raise my head sufficiently to ask what crazed insanity would prompt Jesus to walk out of an empty tomb for the single purpose of pursuing a decaying soul that murdered Him? And I would be wise to consider that the question itself is asked only because I have yet to touch the barest periphery of God__ love despite the fact that because of an empty tomb it stands right in front of me.

Being a mother is not about __irthing a child into the world._ Rather, it is about repeatedly __irthing into the child_ a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother.

What I allow into my head finds its way to my heart, which is a porthole to my soul. Therefore, I might be wise to consider the state of my soul, and then walk this process backwards.

Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain.

Humility is the greatest shaper of souls and crafter of character, for it wipes away all the grandiose things that we spend so much of our lives pretending to be, so that we can spend all of our lives being the exceptional person that we were actually created to be.

Directing praise to oneself is to cash in on the ego in order to bankrupt the soul.

Given the lethal enormity of sin and the inestimable value of a single soul, a baby in a manger and a man on a cross makes more sense that anything else I will ever be able to possibly imagine.

We must clean the lens of our hearts to see the state of our souls. However, too often the former is too dirty to even know that the latter exists.

The romantic within us is a harbinger of our deepest desires.

If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own __od_. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a __od_ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be __od_ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.

A nation aimlessly drifting away from God is a nation for which prayer is a rudder and praise is a sail. And it is the man or woman on their knees that builds the former and gives wind to the latter.

Without a beginning I am pouring the whole of my existence into the building of endings, while the cross and the resurrection declare that God is incessantly building beginnings from the collapse of endings.

I am always trying to figure God out so that I can figure Him in. But after a while I figure that I should just let God be God, and figure that He__l figure it all out anyway.

I huddle in the dark with a mass of burnt matches strewn at my feet. And yet, for all of those matches I__e not been able to light a single candle. And huddled in such deep darkness, I__e somehow yet to realize that Christmas made both matches and candles forever obsolete.

Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.

The drum to which we march reveals the conductor to whom we__e listening.