Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough Craig Lounsbrough

Repentance
Reconfigured Standards
We all have standards, even if our standard is not to have one.  We all live by something, even if it’s the denial of that ‘something.’  There’s some sort of inherent code that creates a framework that provides direction to our actions.  There’s a paradigm that we all work within.  Call it genetics, call it cultural, call it greed, call it fear, call it upbringing, call it faith, call it whatever you want…but we all have standards shaped by something.  We each have them.
But the thing that shapes them the most is us.  We want standards because we’re supposed to have them, or they were inbred within us, or we just picked them up growing up, or whatever the case might be.  But we want standards of convenience.  We want standards that are fluidly permissive and that grant us ample free reign to do what we want when we want.  We want standards that won’t hold us back if we hold them up.  At times, we want standards that give us permission to do what, in fact, standards tell us not to do.  We want standards that are standards in name only.  We want standards so that we can say to others and to ourselves that we are people of standards…when, in fact, the standard is not to have one.
And to pull all of that off, we tediously and rather ingeniously reconfigure our standards to the point that they’re not quite empty, but pretty much empty.  They have a slight hint of ethics or morals or principles or values hidden away somewhere within them.   But that slight hint is left there solely as a means of granting those standards a soothing illusion of legitimacy.  But they are not left there as something to which the standard adheres.  And then we intricately weave these largely empty standards into our lives just enough to provide the illusion that we are indeed people of standards.  We make them sufficiently legitimate to look the part.  We make them tolerable.  We make them doable.  We take the ‘standard’ out of the standard, but we leave them with the name.  And in the end, we are utterly fooled into believing that we are people who live by standards.  That we are people of principle.  That we walk the hard road of integrity.  That we live right.  That we stand for all that is good and just.
But we are not.  We are people living a distortion of what we say we’re living.  And that is utterly heart-breaking.  If we honestly face that reality, it’s nothing short of catastrophic.  It’s a shock to our system.  It’s a blow to everything that we’ve built.  It’s a pill that’s far, far too big to swallow.  It’s a reality check that upends this incredibly fragile and permissive narrative that we’ve built the entirety of our lives on. 
And it is in the acceptance of this painful and often devastating truth that repentance is born.  This is where we stand before all of the good that we thought we were, and we recognize that this ‘good’ is a myth convincingly spun by this horribly comprised standard that we fashioned.  Repentance is a stark realization and a horribly jarring awakening that we’re living a life of reconfigured standards that are not standards at all.  Repentance is a hard and terribly frank look at the flimsy narrative that we created to grant us permission to live a fluidly permissive life of self-serving, dark, and personally destructive agendas.  Life is full of this stuff.  They’re everywhere in every place.  These permeate everything, including you and including me.
Repentance is acknowledging these behaviors, and then rejecting these behaviors as destructive for us and everything around us.  It’s confessing the destruction we’ve brought on ourselves and everyone around us, and it’s repenting of such an inexcusable and wholly squandered life in a manner so comprehensive that no moment, from this one forward, will ever be squandered again. 
And once we’ve cleared the house of all of that stuff, re

"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part One
We yearn for security.  There is an inherent need deep within the fiber of our being that desires to be able to lean on and lean into the things around us, knowing with steeled assuredness that they will hold us firm and steady.  We want life to be safe because we have a passion to engage life.  And to engage life out to its furthest edges, we must of necessity step out of ourselves and into that which is around us.  We have to step up, step off and step out.  Any real journey is of necessity a journey beyond ourselves.  A robust journey unapologetically takes us outside of all that we are able to keep safe, into that which we cannot.  To do that, we by nature need some degree of safety in the endeavor.
Not only do we naturally yearn to lean out into life, life at many junctures demands it, and a real journey is not possible without it.  Life frequently arrays itself before us in a manner that forces us to trust; to moderate or marginalize caution and to step out onto ground or relationships or circumstances that have not entirely convinced us of their certainty or safety.  Sometimes we have to step out into things that are not of themselves safe at all. 
Yet, if we are to journey, we must step out into these things.  Likewise, if we want to embrace everything there is to embrace, we must step out into and onto all of these things for most of them do not necessarily come to us.  We must of necessity go to them; extending not only the effort stepping out, but taking the entire initiative of seeking them out as they move either largely hidden or complete obscure.  Life most often calls us outward.  It beckons with grand and rich invitations that hold out the promise of growth and great adventure.  But it does not always come to us with those invitations.  We most often must go to it.  The hard evidence of our passion for the journey is illustrated in our willingness to chase it however elusive it might be.
 
The Risk in it All
Life however is terribly imperfect.  It seems that there was some grand design that granted us tremendous ability and then graced life with tremendous opportunity.  There seems to be shadows of some great correlation where we were equipped to do great things and then life laid out great resources and ample space within which to do those things.  The chemistry of it all made life something potentially grand. 
Somewhere the whole marvelous arrangement seemed to have gotten marred.  Somehow it was apparently damaged.  “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), which is the ultimate loss of the ultimate gift.  The original intention of grand opportunities remains, but it now has to overcome obstacles, barriers, and various difficulties.  Life demands that we battle disappointments, cruel turns, unexpected twists and surreal pain.  Life remains for the taking, but it now comes with risk; sometimes great risk.
 
Betrayal as Part of the Risk
Into all of this comes betrayal.  Betrayal is a cruel reversal.  It takes the trust entrusted and uses it for purposes contrary to trust’s intent.  Trust is a powerful thing.  It willingly bequeaths both power and vulnerability when it extends itself to another or to life.  Without trust, the greatest things in life are simply not achievable.  Trust pushes out the boundaries. It allows us to extend ourselves out into places we would not otherwise venture.  Whether that trust is vested in the destination itself, who we’re journeying with, who we’re journeying for, or whether that trust is vested in ourselves, it must be present.  Trust is the prerequisite to risk and without risk little can be accomplished.
Betrayal takes trust and cruelly uses it to the advantage or purpose of the one initiating the betrayal.  The agenda is most often self-centered.  It’s about using trust to achieve an agenda that trust was not extended to achiev

We all throw around the idea of having a purpose, or not having one, or wondering if we’re supposed to have one, or whatever we’re wondering.  We wonder if we really need a purpose, and if so do we create it or does it already exist and we just haven’t happened to happen upon it just yet.  For some of us, we think that the whole idea of having a purpose suggests that life is much more intentional than maybe we thought it was, and that maybe we’re all part of a grand design of some sort. 
For others of us who tend to see life as more happenstance, it’s more about figuring out how we can figure ourselves in to whatever’s being figured out around us.  In that sense, we create a purpose if what’s around us appears to make it worthwhile or possibly necessary to do so.  However, or in whatever way we go about it, we all ponder this whole idea of having a purpose.  For having a purpose gives us a desperate sense of purpose when our self-esteem would tell us that we serve none.
There’s something about life that doesn’t quite make sense without a purpose.  There’s too much rhythm to life.  There’s too much that seamlessly meshes, even when scrutiny of the most exacting kind would not be able to ascertain how it possibly could.  There’s a beautiful and even mysterious connectivity that creates a dynamic unifying function, drawing everything together in some jointly corporate effort as a means of keeping everything moving and growing and flourishing.  Even the darker side of life, perpetually roiling with its chaos and anarchy has an underlying cadence that maintains the darkness and feeds the destruction.  Things have a place and a purpose in that place.    
 
We Need a Purpose
Whatever the nature of our orientation might be, it seems that we need a purpose.  There’s a lot of things that we talk about and discuss and debate and ponder and pontificate about in life.  We analyze and scrutinize a whole bunch of stuff.  And most of those discussions are really all about sizing all of that stuff up in order to determine if we want to engage in them or not.  Do we want to invest in those things, or learn more about them, or build some part of them into our lives?  Or do we categorize them as wholly irrelevant, blithely toss them aside, and move on from them to whatever the next thing’s going to be?  Most of our discussions are a part of this bit of shopping that we’re doing in order to determine to if we want to purchase the product or pass on it.
But when it comes to purpose, it’s not about shopping.  Shopping implies that we have a choice.  It suggests that we’re leisurely strolling the endless aisles of life working out those endless decisions of whether we want to purchase something or not purchase something.  There’s a sense that we can live with or without whatever it is that’s crammed onto the shelves that flank us on our left and on our right.  The majority of these things are bright and shiny accessories that simply compliment what we already have or lend a bit of accent to what we already believe in.  In the complimenting and the accenting, they don’t necessarily add to what we have nor do they detract from it.  Most of them are appealing options designed to supplement something, not sturdy truths constructed to support something.  We can take them or leave them without any major repercussions in the taking or the leaving.  That’s most of life.
But purpose doesn’t appear to be a bright and shiny accessory.  It’s not designed to ‘supplement’ anything because everything else is designed to supplement it.  In fact, it’s not an item that we choose to select or not select.  Purpose doesn’t leave us with the luxury of deciding whether we’ll choose it or whether we won’t.  It’s inborn.  It’s how we make sense of our existence as it’s played out within the rest of existence.  We have meaning because there’s a role that makes sense of our

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:
“I am left with no alternative than to look beyond the efforts of men, for efforts of those sort leave cities flattened, nations teetering, and lives crushed.  Instead, I must shift the whole of my gaze to the God who tenderly kneels in the midst of this unimaginable carnage and effortlessly makes the healing imaginable.”
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Fear – How We Create It
Fear.  We all have it.  Sometimes it’s just this slight apprehension, or this bit of inner angst, or this uncomfortable twinge that we experience.  At other times it’s utterly overwhelming, leaving us helplessly paralyzed and violently shaken right down to the core of everything that we are.  At certain times and in certain situations, fear seems to stalk us.  It seems to relentlessly circle us, waiting for some opportunity to pounce on what little bit of sanity and what tiny shred of hope we have left.  Fear.  It can be brutal.  And we all have it.
In grappling with fear, we might ask ourselves how many times have our choices set the stage for the fear that we’re experiencing?  How many times have our choices, in fact, resulted in the very actions that created the very things that we fear?  How many times have our choices presented opportunities for fear to find some space in our lives, or increased our susceptibility to what we already fear, or made what we fear bigger than what it already is?  How many times has our fear been a product of our choices? 
And in contemplating these thoughts, we might ask two very profound, yet very fundamental questions.  First, where am I walking?  And second, who am I walking with?  Where am I walking in life, and who am I walking with?
First, where do we walk?  What kind of places are we walking in anyway?  In good places?  In the wisest of places?  Are we walking in the places that everyone else is walking in simple because everyone else in walking in them?  Are we walking in the kinds of places that are trendy now, but will likely fall out of favor as quickly as they fell into favor?  Are we walking in places where we can fly under the radar, because in today’s cultural climate we’re frequently too afraid to be on anyone’s radar?  Are we walking in places that have thrown ethics to the wind, so that we find our life’s a journey where we’re always walking into the wind?  Have we chosen the places where we’re walking based on some politically-correct notion, or some vogue philosophy, or some fleeting agenda that’s not grounded in much of anything other than not being grounded?  
We can walk in all kinds of places.  Some are places that are good to be in.  Others are not.  Some will strengthen us in preparation for the next place, and others will keep us from getting to the next place at all.  Some are wise and others are foolish, even though those walking in foolish places claim those places to be wise indeed.  However, the question remains, where do we walk…because our fear often arises from the very places where we’ve chosen to walk.  Therefore, have we chosen wisely?
Second, who are we walking with?  What kind of companions have we chosen?  What kind of people are walking along with us?  Are they for us?  Are they against us?  Or are they altogether apathetic about us?  Do they care are about us, or are we largely irrelevant to them?  Is the journey viewed as a joint venture, or have they declared (either silently or not so silently) that it’s “every man is for himself?”  Is it about the destination, or is it about a partnership in the journey to the destination?  Can we count on them, or can we count on not counting on them?  Who are we walking with, because our fear often arises from the people we’ve chosen to walk with.
Where am I walking, and who am I walking with?  Have we chosen the right places and the right people?  Or do we look around us and realize that we’re in all the wrong places with all the wrong people.  Or maybe we’re in all the wrong places without any people at all.  Or maybe we’re not even certain as to exactly what place we’re in or who’s in whatever place this happens to be.  In other words, we’re lost.  Really lost.  And there’s a good chance that we’ve been lost for a long, long time.  A really long time.  So long in fact that we wonder if

"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Four
Did you ever have one of those surreal moments when it seems like something snaps in your head and suddenly you see everything like you never saw it before?  Have you experienced those times when things unexplainably shift and they don’t look at all the same as they did only a moment ago?  When what was entirely familiar is no longer familiar in quite the way that it was before?
A lot of things can trigger these moments . . . an argument, a child leaving the home, a death, a job loss, a divorce, a birthday, unexpected contact from a long-lost friend or any number of similar events.  In the middle of whatever this is, you’re suddenly able to see the reality of your life with a stunning, nearly razor-sharp clarity that you’ve never had before.  It’s kind of like you were blind and you didn’t know it and in the briefest nanosecond, for the briefest nanosecond you were granted stunningly perfect vision.  And with that perfect vision, everything looks perfectly different. 
Suddenly, what we now see is familiar but strangely unfamiliar at the same time.  We intimately know everything that we see around us but it’s entirely alien just the same.  It looks different or not quite right.  It’s my life but it’s not my life, or at least what I wanted my life to be.  It’s what I’ve been living all along, but at the same time it’s not what I’ve been living, or what I thought I was living.
And we stand there rubbing our eyes because what we see is not stuff we saw before, or at least what we saw with the clarity that we see it now.  In the emotional turmoil these rare moments create we’re often left asking “who am I and where am I?”  And in the briefest nanosecond, in exactly the same way it came, this vision is gone.  However, the memory of what those few incredible moments revealed is anything but gone.
What times like this most often reveal is the paralyzing reality that we are not where we intended to be.  This was not the destination that we had mapped out as pimply-faced teens or adventurous young adults or giddy newlyweds.  The line that we had drawn from those younger years forward in time didn’t go where we’re at now, or weren’t supposed to go here; to this place that we now realize we are.  We never really considered the heading on our compass.  And now we pick it up, shake it to make certain it’s actually working and we’re left realizing that it’s working perfectly but we didn’t follow it.  And now we stand at some point far removed from, and possibly decades away from where we were supposed to be, or thought we were supposed to be.
What hits us really hard is that we didn’t fully realize the deviation from the path that our dreams had laid out so long ago.  We got here and we didn’t even realize that we got here.  But now we know it.  And we’re standing deflated, attempting to figure out where we got so terribly off course, all the while madly calculating how many years we have left, and how many responsibilities we have on our plate in order to determine if we have the time and the freedom to ever get back on course.
Worse yet, some of us don’t even remember what the course was in order to retrace it.  Others of us never set a course for ourselves in the first place; having allowed the winds of life and the currents of circumstance to bring us here.  Whatever the case, there is this chilling, haunting sense that we are not where we wanted to be, and that the path intended to take us there may now be forever forfeited.  We fear a life squandered.  And the question wildly reverberates in a near panic, “how did I get here?”
 
I Am Where I Am
At these times we can certainly pull out our tattered life map, grab whatever compass we’ve used over the years, or review the saved settings on our personal or relational or spiritual GPS.  We can then hunker down ove