Craig D. Lounsbrough

What is life but God's daring invitation to a remarkable journey? And what is human nature but a staunchly inbred tendency toward self-preservation? And because of the rigidly paradoxical nature of these things, the road of life is seldom trod beyond a few scant steps.

Will I someday pass into history having passed by God and therefore forfeited the opportunity to change my world and reap the blessing of being able to do so because I saw myself as inadequate to achieve either? And how long will it take me to realize that if I doggedly refuse to pass by God, my inadequacy is instantly irrelevant and I have in actuality begun to achieve these very things.

We have forfeited our calling for the simple reason that we__e ignored the God who says that the __ossible_ is never bound by the __robable,_ and instead we__e dutifully heeded the god of fear that incessantly says the __ossible_ is anything but __robable.

To assume that I can even begin to chart a __traight_ path is probably the best way I can take myself __traight_ to the very place I don__ want to go.

If sacrifice is not the theme of my life, there__ no sense telling the story.

If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives.

The reason my life has wandered to nowhere is likely due to the fact that the focus of the moment has dictated the destination of my life, when the destination of my life should have been dictating the focus of the moment.

To my own demise, I rarely ask why I__ hungry because I__ focusing all of my energies on getting fed. And if I persist in such a diminishing cycle, in all probability I will eventually starve to death because I have chosen to gorge myself on the very things that will keep me empty.

To be an end in myself is to bring an end to myself.

I think myself so terribly __lever_ that the need for God is blatantly irrelevant. And all the while, in the rapidly growing mess that I__ __leverly_ creating, I rather quickly begin to realize that the only thing that is relevant is His relevance.

At some point I hope to have grown sufficiently in both stature and wisdom to understand that I cannot deliver myself from myself, and that God alone can save me from me.

To be __ne_ in one__ own hands is to be __ne._ To be __ne_ in the hands of God is to be __ne_ that is far too vast to be counted.

The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it__ translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves.

If I so much as dare to intimately probe the reflection I see in the mirror, I am filled with the tormenting fear that I might be repulsed. God invites us to boldly probe the reflection in the mirror so that we might be released.

If I don__ know who I am apart from everyone else, I probably need to spend some time apart from everyone else.

We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we__e too often doomed ourselves to be.

The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.

Self-serving biases and self-centered agendas are cotton jammed in the ears of our conscience. Even if truth shouts, we can__ hear it.