The father who has selflessly poured himself into the life of his children may leave no other monument than that of his children. But as for a life well lived, no other monument is necessary.
~ Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s not about inviting great things into our lives. Rather, it’s about accepting the invitation of great things to step out of our lives.
The world screams, ‘Stay down, it’s safer.’ My soul screams, ‘So is being dead.
Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious.
My definition of success is not based on achieving the impossible, but rather surviving the probable. And with a threshold that horribly low, simple survival cannot help but become my highest aspiration.
Far too often the ‘things’ that men define as success do little more than successfully destroy the lives of the very men who achieve those ‘things.’ And while I must admit that there is an authentic element of success in all of that, it’s the kind of success that I would much prefer to successfully avoid.
Authentic love is deciding to live on a one-way street where all the arrows point down the street and not a single one of them point back up to where I’m standing.
As I contemplate a relationship with God, I find that I’m afraid to ride on the coattails of the infinite. But what I fear more than that is spending my life in the coat closet.
It’s not about describing someone as that’s typically an attempt to make whatever they are comfortable for whoever we are. Instead, we may wish to skip the agenda of the description and embrace the wonder of the person.
Real relationships are the product of time spent, which is why so many of us have so few of them.
Vulnerability creates unimaginable space to build each other up, as much as it creates ample room to tear each other down.
Betrayal is advancing myself at the expense of the one who I committed myself to advance.
I cannot live without you. For to attempt to do so would be to rob both of us of each other, and that is thievery of the greatest sort.
What rubs off on me is hard to rub off. So, I’d better figure out what I rubbing up against.
Ignorance might be bliss, but it also has teeth.
A life that chooses not to grow is a life that died long before it ever lived.
To spin the tale with great flourish but never live the tale is the power of vision strangled to fiction by the fiction of fear.
Too often we make it more about what stands before us, and we miss all that stands within us.
Ignorance is my refusal to think outside the box of my fears.
We can be seized with panic of the fall, or inspired by the potential that lies within the fall.
Too often it’s about what stands before us, not what stands within us.
My life is too often driven by the fear of the next moment verses focusing on the privilege that I have the next moment.
What is fear but that ‘thing’ that we believed to be as powerful as it pretended to be.
I’m not the author of my fears, but I sure feed them really well.
Maybe my greater fear should not be fear itself, but what I will lose should I submit to fear.
The restless adventurer within me stands eye-to-eye with the fear that has stepped directly in my path. And the thing I absolutely must not do is to blink first.
Sadly, in too many cases surrender is having been ‘outrun’ by fear rather than having ‘run out’ of heart.
If we’re honest, what makes something impossible is not our fear. Rather, it is our indifference.
If your dream doesn't scare you, it's not big enough.
Sadly, it seems that I have the proclivity to create plenty of devils, but most of the time I don’t even go looking for angels.
Fear is my mind painstakingly creating the worse-case scenario and then putting it on steroids.
Running’ is driven by panic. ‘Destination’ is driven by thought. And while it’s terribly painful to admit, incessantly pretending that I do the latter doesn’t replace the fact that I’m constantly doing the former.
To ‘pretend’ is to say that I’m willing to waste the precious energy that it takes to pretend, and I’m unwilling to cultivate the bravery that it takes to be real. And I am at a complete loss to pretend that either of these aren’t true.
Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking ‘muck’ across the floor of fact.
We will understand the depth of our vision when at some point we are finally faced with the price we must pay to achieve it. And when the price comes calling, most visions end up falling.
Have we ever thought that being lost is our destination?
We can certainly run from a lot of things. But when we eventually pull up exhausted and entirely out of breath, we are rather shocked to discover that we haven’t been able to create any distance between ourselves and what we’ve been running from regardless of how fast we might have been running and how far we think we might have gotten.
I spend a tremendous amount of time carefully choosing the roles I wish to play so that I can run from the role I was born to play. And if I keep on doing that, I will eventually set foot in my grave never having set foot on the stage.
If there’s any redeeming quality that I can find in running away from something, it’s that I’m on my feet. Now all I’ve got to do is alter my direction.
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.
