Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
56 quotes
"Decisions are the privilege we’ve been granted to have a hand in penning the script of our lives. And in the writing, the question is not the availability of the paper or the pen. The question is the wisdom to use them rightly."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"I can be absolutely assured that any endeavor of which God is not a part is most certainly a step backward. And any step backward is at least two steps behind where I’d be if I’d have gone forward in the first place."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"The world brazenly touts freedom as both the inalienable right and morally liberating justification to mindlessly play in the filth that lies all around me. And the slight bit of sanity that yet remains within me asks, ‘what raging madness would prompt me to incessantly wallow in the very things that will eventually swallow me?"
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"Is it possible that my walls are specifically erected and intentionally reinforced out of the fear that God calls me to an existence without walls? And if this is so, do I realize that I am the warden of prison that I created in which I myself am the prisoner?"
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"I am thankful that I can be thankful, for if thankfulness did not exist my heart would be irretrievably imprisoned by the crazed twins of acquisition and possession, and my soul would exist as a forever slave to greed."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"My soul is utterly frantic for that single place of perfect refuge from which I can clearly see the winds rip and hear the tempest tear, yet despite the ferocity of the tumult I rest in such a sublime peace it is as if neither existed at all. And if I have not yet found such a place, it is because I have not yet found God."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"An ending is only happening because at some point it was a beginning. And if an ending is dependent upon a beginning, I would be well advised to focus on the miracle of beginnings verses the pain of endings."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"No, I am not powerful nor do I wish to be, for it is God using my weakness that makes me potent and I would never wish to surrender that."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"It is not within my power to refuse the journey of life regardless of the nature of my fears or the depth of my selfishness, for the definitions of ‘journey’ and ‘life’ are indistinguishably synonymous. I can however sufficiently inhibit them and amply fight them to the point that I have accepted the journey, but the journey is now solely defined as my effort to forsake the journey."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"Will I live yearning for a world that I need not yearn for because the message of Christmas is entirely undaunted in its ability to handily penetrate and completely subjugate the very world that I doubt its ability to survive in?"
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"Maybe I need to immerse the fabric of my soul in torrential nature of Christmas, and in doing so to finally understand that it is the very thing that can make the world what I so wish it were."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"Maybe we don’t ever feel that sweetly untainted and wholly majestic kind of love that takes every longing captive because we are hopelessly entangled in the illogical fear that despite all of love’s grand goodness, it might not be good enough to keep us safe."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"I pray that I am sufficiently stirred by the rumor of great things to seek the God who created this single thread that I am, and to marvel at a vision magnificent enough to cause this God to weave from this single thread a tapestry most resplendent."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"The art of living is to rise above lesser things so that we can truly enjoy great things. And the message of Christmas is the greatest of all things."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"Doing life without God is not doing life."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"If I were to be brutally honest with myself, how often is my journey actually a path designed to circumvent my journey?"
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"Whatever I ‘align’’ myself with are the very things that will create a ‘line’ into my future."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"The present is too often squandered grieving the past or fearing the future, which makes the present nothing more than a cheap facsimile of what was or what will be instead of what it could be."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"To assist us in climbing the mountains is marvelous. To level the mountains and altogether eliminate the climb is miraculous. And at times I think that God prefers the latter because it emboldens us to face the former."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"My fear of standing alone often pressures me to stand with a rather unsavory group that embraces a rather unsettling belief system which leaves me wondering why I left the promises of God for the company of people."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"Why does not the stunning evidence of the last miracle grant me confidence in the next crisis? Because my immaturity does not permit such a faith, my desperate prayer is that God would grant me a robust faith sufficient to trust Him not for one crisis, but for an eternity of miracles."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"It‘s utterly astounding that every time I get knocked down God’s mercy compassionately raises me to my feet; His grace thoroughly brushes off every trace of assorted filth I accumulated in the fall, His word precisely recalibrates my direction to insure the success of a journey resumed, and once all of that is completed He gently leans over and whispers, “How about another run?"
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"The cross unerringly exposes this stunningly marvelous and abruptly exquisite declaration that God will not let this single life of mine, with all of its grotesque maladies and pathetic filth pass into oblivion without unflinchingly declaring that my life carries a value worth the expenditure of His. And if I dare look upon the cross, I am utterly perplexed but wholly enraptured by the immensity of such a love as this."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"For once in my life maybe I ought to actually think about taking God at His word, and in doing so to suddenly find myself riotously welcoming the rather shocking reality that Christmas is truly everything that He says it is."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
"We must leave Christmas to be what it is, for to reduce it to the stuff of myth and whimsy is take the single and sole hope of a dying humanity and obliterate it. And I would contend that such an action is insanity of the greatest sort."
Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus