Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough Craig Lounsbrough

The front porch was the door to the world “out there.”  As a kid, it was the stepping off point to the world that never forced us to step off.  It was the place through which the outside world would come into mine; monitored and managed in a way that didn’t make the world safe, but that pared and neutered it sufficiently to make it safe whenever it was granted entrance.  As a kid, other than it being huge, I didn’t know everything that was out beyond the oak planks and cement steps.  What I knew however was that the front porch would unflinchingly manage its entrance into my life.
It was a rarely used place because I found the solace of home much better than the turmoil of a world I didn’t understand.  The front porch was that first step out into that world; the threshold to whatever was out there.  I suppose it was something akin to witnessing terribly frightening realities from a vantage point of absolute safety; vulnerability rendered neutral either by safety or the sturdy knowledge that safety breeched would not be unsafe at all on the porch.
That’s what made it the safest place of all.  It was the stepping off point to a big world that I knew little of.  It seemed like the portal from the safety and embracing warmth of my world to whatever lay out there; fixed and firm but never naïve.  In the child of my mind, the front porch edged right up to the world, but it held me perfectly safe and completely secure all the while.  It provided me a front row seat as the happiness and horror of life paraded by, holding me, it seemed, entirely in perfect peace.  I loved the front porch.
George Moore astutely pointed out that "a man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."  Somehow I knew that I would someday step off the front porch and go out there into whatever the world was, and that the journey would eventually return me to this place.  But for now, it was a magical and certain haven on the sidelines of life.
Fall always graced the front porch with vibrantly colored leaves from the massive maples that lined the street as mammoth sentries.  Hardwood behemoths, they would rain color; drops of searing reds falling in torrents when the wind blew firm.  Blown onto the front porch the spun in royal red eddies; dancing with abandon as the wind courted them with a mix of tease and intention.
The turn of the season always invited me to the front porch to watch fall hand itself off to winter.  You could watch it all safely from the front porch, as you could watch anything.  It was, it seemed, somehow the best of all worlds.
With three or four bulbous pumpkins, several stalks of dried corn cinched tight with flax cords, a ragged bale of hay and a handful of incandescent leaves as trimming, we would dress the front porch for fall.  It became a stage of sorts from which we would celebrate the departure of fall; pulling onto the front porch all the assorted things that symbolized the season.  It was all staged right there on the oak tongue and groove flooring.  We said goodbye from the safety of that place, acknowledging a passing from the kind distance that the front porch afforded us.           
 
Adulthood and Distance Gone
They were other dying eyes the weekend my Mom died; one pair so much younger and entirely unexpected.  I met them on the front porch.  It’s not a long front porch, other than being long with the kind of miles that memories pave; lined generously with so much of my childhood.  If memories were to define its breadth, it would stretch beyond any home to contain it.  The tongue and groove flooring is yet firm, having welcomed and ushered feet both wandering and intentional to a sturdy oak door for nearly one hundred years.  Friends, visitors and strangers have all crossed its planking in order to engage the family within; that defining portal to the world out there.
How do you grasp a place framed by towering pines and muscular mapl

We seem small.  We look around at the mounting difficulties and challenges in our world today and we simply seem too small to make any sort of meaningful impact.  We witness the flood of irrational agendas, the rampant greed, the destruction of morality, the corruption in leadership, and the insanity of organizations that propagate questionable platforms, and we feel far too small to speak into any of those things.
Yet, small is big when understood correctly.  After all, everything big started as something small.  Everything big is a compilation of small things.  Everything big requires the work of small things to sustain them.  In essence, small is big.
Craig's recent message outlines the fact that size does not suggest power.  That we are capable of making a significant impact despite how small we might feel.  Take a moment and enjoy this thought-provoking and timely message.

It's Not About Being Ordinary
It’s not about being ordinary, because we all are.  In talking about myself, I’m about as ‘ordinary’ as they come.  But, it’s not about being ordinary.  It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things.  That’s the beauty of it.  We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.  God granted you and He granted me all of the elements, all of the ingredients (if you will) to do what we never thought we could do.  You come packaged with resources that (if used correctly) can accomplish things that are greater than the sum total of those resources.  And if there’s some tragedy in all of that, it’s that people don’t use them correctly, and therefore they never accomplish the great things that were theirs to accomplish.
The incredibly disappointing thing is that people look at who they are through the lens of who ‘they’ are.  And through that lens (which is incredibly limiting) we don’t see all that we are.  We have this vague understanding of ourselves, which leaves a whole lot of ourselves unknown, or ill-defined, or misunderstood, or mis-defined altogether.  And we walk through our lives with this less-than-accurate understanding of who we are.  And that understanding (whatever it happens to be) is typically a horribly marginalized and minimized view of who we really are.  So we might be ordinary, but we diminish the incredible abilities that are inherent in being ‘ordinary.’  Remember, “being ordinary” (as much as we diminish it) “does not limit us to ordinary things.”
I think that God wants you to see who you are.  The whole of who you are.  Not just the good, but everything that’s maybe not so good as well.  Not just the stuff that we’re proud of (if we even have anything that we’d say we’re proud of) but all of the stuff.  Not just the successes, but the failures as well.  Not just the bright and shiny things within us, but the dark places too.
Because all of that is the stuff of the ordinary.  And God waits to take everything that’s ordinary within you and do something extra-ordinary with it because “We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.”  That’s what God does.  He takes whatever we are and He makes it into everything that we are not.  He’s not looking for us to build all that up so that it eventually adds up to something that God can use.  He’s looking for us to surrender all that’s ordinary about us to Him (in whatever condition it’s in) so that He can build it up to something He can use.  “It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things,” because we have an extra-ordinary God who wants to birth a bunch of extra-ordinary things in your life.   
 
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

He was four years old . . . barely.  Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living.  He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life.  I love Corey.  I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not.   He is innocence untainted and unsoiled, a young boy that catches the essence of living through windows of the soul yet unsullied by life.  Splendidly exuberant, he draws in all the energy of life and expels it freely out to anyone who will embrace its gift.  He is both a repository of living and the embodiment simplicity.  One without the other would dramatically diminish him, as it would any of us.
“I have seventy cents,” he said.  Sitting at a red light, I had no idea as to the nature, purpose or rationale of his comments, arising it seemed from the incessant babbling and spontaneity that frequently marks him.  “Dad, I have seventy cents.”  Attending to the blur and bustle of the marauding traffic that rushed around me, I attempted to placate him, hoping that he would drift on to something else.  “That’s nice,” I replied.  He was irritably insistent.  My verbal pabulum was blatantly insufficient for him.  “Dad, I have seventy cents!”  His voice was emphatic.  I glanced in my rearview mirror and watched him squirming in his car seat, obviously possessing some agenda of great importance to him that was swallowed up in the supposedly greater agendas that dictated my day.  Catching my eyes in the mirror, he held out a clenched fist clutching seventy cents and with sordid determination said, “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
 
What We Miss
I am occupied, attending to the congestion and myriad events around me.  The traffic of my life is made up of frustrating red lights, a rare green one, and irritating yellows that flash across a myriad of my intersections.  All of the congestion of commerce and career, the snarls of success and the raucous rhythm of rush hour that I embrace as essential and necessary to achievement.
I am caught in the blindness of believing that living life means winning, being horrified that an opportunity missed is an unredeemable loss that creates a permanent setback and lifetime diminishment.  I must master life by gouging and gorging myself on its complexities at every opportunity, without having time to savor the tender exquisiteness of its intricacies.  Mine is a hoarding of life, rather than a delicate sampling.  In and through it all I miss the minute details in the mayhem, the subtleties that are the very essence of the larger things that I gorge and feed upon.  In essence, I miss simplicity.  “I have seventy cents Dad!”  It was a statement of simplicity, and so I missed it.
Crystal blue eyes and romping blonde hair, his small hands cradled two quarters and two precarious dimes.  They were clenched so firmly that his tiny fingers turned shades of red and white; holding them valiantly in front of him with arms outstretched.  His face was chiseled with a squared hint of boyish determination, the manifestation of four year old eyes apprehending the core of life and living when I could not see it.  His perceived with a crystal clear soul what really mattered when all I saw was an annoying red light and thick traffic.  “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
And then I saw it.  Quite accidently it caught the barest edge of my mind.  Out of the corner of my eye, from the farthest fringes of my life it stirred.  The simple intruded upon my chosen world of complexities.  A solitary figure sat on the margins of my wild world, passing by me except for a four year old attuned to the wonder of simplicity, hoping that the din surrounding me might ebb just enough to catch a glimpse.  I finally saw it.
Scrawled by an unsteady hand across a tattered piece of discarded cardboard, stained and bent were a handful of words.  The edges of cardboard w

Being a Lamp That's Lit
So let’s begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit?  Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place?
How many of us are lit and ablaze?  We’re all lamps . . .  every one of us.  But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it’s one thing to be a lamp, and it’s quite another thing to be lit.  If you walk through life being a lamp that’s not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you.  And that is tragic.
The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you’ve known, any person from history, who would you be?”  Listen carefully to what he said.  George Bernard Shaw said this.  He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.”  Will that be your commentary on your life?  When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was?
George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit.
“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.”  You . . . all of you . . .  all of us are lamps.  And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?
 
Additional Resources
Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

They leave sporadically.  Some of them go at the first hint of fall’s advance.  Others hang around until the first snows herd them southward as a rancher with heavy-footed cattle lumbering across pasturelands; gorged on the last of summer’s grasses.  The air is sullen and stilled by their absence; the void of song leaving a hole wide and gray.  Trees stand as tenements emptied, their residents having taken wing for warmer skies.
But it was the geese really.  Their movement was monumental; indescribably massive in scope as if a whole nation of waterfowl moved in unison.  Other birds would cluster in sordid bands and bounce southward; a grouping here and a grouping there.  But geese . . . they would advance as an innumerable army seizing the very skies themselves.
As a kid, they would surge down the Atlantic flyway as if it were a conduit that compressed untold millions of geese into an invisible highway in the sky.  The main body would come in droves of thousands; an endless string of black pearl strands being pulled southward; waving like the tail of a grand kite in the wind.  It was too vast to embrace; being one of those things in life that defies the parameters of our imaginations and spills far outside the reach of our senses.  Because it does, we’re never quite done with it because we never quite absorb it all.  It slips by experienced as something grand, but we inherently know that the grandeur that we were able to embrace was but a minuscule part of the whole.  As I kid, I knew that.
The Atlantic flyway cuts a mystical swath through the heart of the southern Lake Erie region.  All but an hour's drive or so away from home, we would tumble into the car and head out to sit on the sidelines of the miraculous.  From miles away, you could see thin layers of black string formations low-slung across the sky; birds ascending and descending in numbers too vast to count.  The water, the adjacent fields, the roads themselves were thick with them, each seeming to be an exact replica of the other; each energized with a corporate sense that something grand was afoot that was as individual as it was collective.
Even as a kid I knew that what I was observing was but a moment in time.  Some things are too grand to last for long because you can only absorb so much wonder and majesty before you’ll explode.  But therein lays the rub.  You want it to last, even if the sheer pleasure of it all kills you.  At least death would be happy.  You’d die with a smile.
To appreciate most things you have to let them go.  Some things become even more precious by their absence.  When you lose something you grieve the loss and the exercise of grief can be brutally hard.  At the same time, appreciation for that thing is dramatically enhanced in kind of a give and take exchange.  It’s the push and pull of life that as a kid watching a million geese I didn’t get.  All I wanted to do was to stand in the middle of this ocean of airborne life and somehow try to be a part of it; to find my place in it and believe that I could join it if only in the celebration of a season turning and a migration transpiring.
In feathered constellations of hundreds and sometimes thousands they would launch themselves from all around me in a deafening burst of pounding wings and haunting voices; assailing the sky and rising to warmer horizons.  And in it I was left behind, simultaneously feeling a sense of abandonment, an equally thick sense of loss, but a deeper instinctual sense that this was right and proper and good.  I had to let go.  I had to let it be.  I had to close out this moment, let it pass into my history, go home and resume my life.  As a kid, that was tough.
Yet there was something temporal is the grandness of it all.  Jacques Deval said, "God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages."  Some things cannot be bound over or held, despite our desire to do so.  It's in the context of un