My vision of what God can do is nothing more than a fleeting glance of the backside of the ‘possible,’ while God is inviting me to the forefront of the ‘impossible.
~ Craig D. Lounsbrough
The hallmark of great dreams is not their possibility but their impossibility, and the fact that it is the very notion of the ‘impossible’ that inspires us to go and accomplish them anyway.
Calm for too long begs the question of whether we're in an all-out pursuit of life, or we're all-out of the pursuit of life.
Without unreservedly surrendering myself to God, whatever place I might raise myself to remains nothing more than a step or possibly two off the hard basement floor of life, for of myself I can be utterly assured that I will never step out of the basement.
To avoid the cost incurred in pursuing great things we opt for ease and blithely abandon great things. The sheer recklessness of such a pathetically apathetic trade-off will eventually cost us a life squandered, which in the end is the greatest cost of all.
How often do I stand in abject terror and raw trepidation before the impossible peaks that soar to impossible heights in front me, when God turns to me and calmly says “what mountains?
Every advancing step I take toward my goal of comfort is yet another retreating step I take away from God's goal of the impossible.
A conviction borne of God amply possesses the potency and power to brazenly reach beyond the possible in order to topple the impossible.
If I am always standing at the bottom of the mountain longingly looking up, in all probability it is because I have heeded the pillaging dogma of mediocrity which persistently tells me that the dream is not worth the climb.
I am what no one else is, and in the hands of God I can do what no one else does. And if I dare set such a truth in motion I will change my world.
To find one’s purpose is to discover one’s worth, discern one’s direction, wholly dedicate oneself to the journey, and forge an unbending determination that I will not leave the world the way I found it. This week's blog outlines the finding of our purpose.
I would surmise that we must cherish the resources that God has given us to achieve a goal more than we cherish the goal itself. For if we fall victim to the pursuit of the goal alone, then the goal has suddenly become our god.
Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.
The thing that I’m most likely to collapse under is not the weight of the stresses that stand around me, but the ego that sits within me.
I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.
If it’s about me, I can be assured that there will be a bunch of empty chairs in the auditorium of my life; save the one I’m sitting in.
If I can’t quite figure out what an ego is, all I have to do is look for the thing that’s killing itself in the very act of feeding itself.
If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice.
If I’m my biggest fan, the only person in the stadium is probably me.
Ego is borne of the need to ‘prove’ oneself instead of making the choice to ‘be’ oneself. And so maybe we need to begin curbing the birthrate.
Whatever the item is that I have chosen to give you, it is nothing more than the receptacle within which I have placed the whole of myself. If it is empty, it is not a gift.
The death of our self-worth begins at its appraisal, for such an action erroneously implies that our worth can be quantified.
Of course love is blind, it keeps me blind to myself.
I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can’t help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can’t help but marvel.
Self-serving biases and self-centered agendas are cotton jammed in the ears of our conscience. Even if truth shouts, we can’t hear it.
The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.
If I don’t 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’ve too often doomed ourselves to be.
To save myself I must face myself, which may be the hardest of all things to face.
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’s 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.
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 an end in myself is to bring an end to myself.
To be ‘one’ in one’s own hands is to be ‘one.’ To be ‘one’ in the hands of God is to be ‘one’ that is far too vast to be counted.
I think myself so terribly ‘clever’ that the need for God is blatantly irrelevant. And all the while, in the rapidly growing mess that I’m ‘cleverly’ creating, I rather quickly begin to realize that the only thing that is relevant is His relevance.
If sacrifice is not the theme of my life, there’s no sense telling the story.
To my own demise, I rarely ask why I’m hungry because I’m 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.
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.
To assume that I can even begin to chart a ‘straight’ path is probably the best way I can take myself ‘straight’ to the very place I don’t want to go.
We have forfeited our calling for the simple reason that we’ve ignored the God who says that the ‘possible’ is never bound by the ‘probable,’ and instead we’ve dutifully heeded the god of fear that incessantly says the ‘possible’ is anything but ‘probable.
