Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes

Despite my incessant desperation, I simply cannot paint the perfect picture within which I would wish to live out my life. And because I cannot, God picked up the brush of love, positioned the canvas of history and painted a manger.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If my decisions constantly heed the voice of the world, I can be completely assured that I’m going to end up in a ‘world of hurt.’ If my decisions heed the word of God, I can be completely assured that this ‘world of hurt’ isn’t anywhere near my solar system.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The most formidable way to lead is to serve. And while the perplexing oxymoron of such a grinding statement absolutely cripples us, it birthed a Savior.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Why in the world have we never found what we’re really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won’t accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The worst defeat of all is to surrender without having been defeated. And it is Christmas that obliterates both.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To grasp love, I must grasp the fact that it is a creation of God and therefore it is forever beyond me. But the very fact that it is forever beyond me is the very thing that prompts me to forever pursue it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I often think myself to be so ingenious that I don’t even realize that my own plans may actually be my own undoing. Therefore, I might be wise to realize that God’s plans undo what I’ve done that’s undoing me.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To only see ‘death’ in death is to somehow assume that death itself is a barrier so abrupt that God Himself is halted by it. To see ‘life’ in death is to understand that death is a sprawling horizon to a new beginning that God created long before death ever thought to show up.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The promises of God hold up long after the promises of the world have blown up.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

God has given me both the right and privilege to outrun Him if I so choose. Yet, if I do so, I will have lost the race.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To understand the mysteries of God we must move past the logic of men.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Despite my best effort to make myself as large as absolutely possible, life will always be larger than me. That simple fact makes God not only a likelihood, but a necessity.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The length of the fall is dictated by how far we had climbed. The outcome of the fall is dictated by whether we’re holding on to that which we’re climbing, or we’re letting God hold onto us.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

When standing face to face with myself, I far too often refuse to look in the mirror. When standing face to face with God, there is no place where a mirror is not.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The yardstick that we frequently use to determine if something can be restored is based on the handful of inches that we bring to the process, when God shows up with an infinite amount of miles.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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’ll figure it all out anyway.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The worst of me is the raw material from which God molds the best of me.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

We are quick to surrender that which we deem as long dead, when God is quick to restore that which He deems as never really having lived.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Without a doubt, the most ingenious plan I could ever hope to devise would be to trade my plans for God’s.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The worst thing that I can do is humanize God. The second worst thing that I can do is deify myself. And the best thing that I can do is to avoid both.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Rarely do I truly understand the disease which ails me. Therefore, rarely do I truly understand the fix that would cure me. And so maybe I should truly contemplate how rarely I recognize that God understands both.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The extent of God’s grace always eclipses the extent of my grotesqueness. Therefore, I can never be bad enough for God to tell me that He’s had enough.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I cannot create greatness as I can only create weak facsimiles. And in sorting through the innumerable facsimiles around me, I will only happen upon true greatness when I happen upon the true God.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I must know something in order to believe in it, what I am able to believe in will be severely limited. If I choose to believe in something in order to know it, then what I believe in can be boundless.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough