Being Thankful - Greed or Gratitude We all have personal agendas, and typically we have quite a boatload of them. Many times when it comes to personal agendas, we can become so entranced and subsequently driven by them that the actual cost of achieving them often becomes a secondary consideration, or maybe not even a consideration at all. When we’r…

“An attitude of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to give way to a brooding sense of entitlement, the scourge of greed, or any other lesser attitudes that keep company with such things.” - Craig D. LounsbroughCraig Lounsbrough による

Thanksgiving. To the destruction and detriment of those who live there, it will perish in an environment within which a sense of entitlement and greed rules the day. Conversely, on the opposite end of that spectrum, a sense of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to giv…

Flying with the geese. Following the seasons instead of being left behind in whatever season that we are in. Taking wing and launching ourselves off to new horizons, fresh goals, untainted opportunities, and unexplored places. To live life as an ever-unfolding adventure that is always anticipating the next adventure. We want to live life like this.…

Rich living has nothing to do with wealth...depending upon the kind of wealth we're referring to. Rich living is found far more frequently in impoverished lives. It is in these lives that the clutter of material wealth is absent so that these lives are free to see what is truly precious. Life is not about the pursuit of 'stuff.' Rather, it's about …

Rarely do we rise to the pinnacle of our capabilities. However, all too often we readily descend to the dismal pit of our inabilities. We’re remarkably human, but we’re terribly primal at the same time. We have the ability to access an intellect that has no equal in all of creation, yet we defer to something more animalistic that’s all too common i…

We quite naturally and quite appropriately presume that to live in the world, we must understand the world. We know quite well that to navigate this complicated and frequently fragile existence of ours, as well as have any hope of emerging on top in some form or another, we must understand what we’re navigating. If we don’t understand the terrain a…

We always have, and we always will have the intrinsic need to believe in something. Life is a journey whose demands will always exceed whatever personal assets we might possess in an attempt to meet those demands. Life always has and life always will require more of me than I have within myself to give it. All of my accumulated resources meticulous…

I am only one. That’s all I am. I am only one and I will always be only one. I was born as one, I will live as one, and on the day of my death I will die as one. In this journey that we all call life, I am and will always be completely restricted and wholly limited to being one and only one. And all of those daunting realities strike me as miserabl…

Integrity - To Understand and Live It Integrity. You’ve heard that “Integrity is doing the right when nobody’s watching.” It’s not about being a crowd pleaser, or working to get some sort of edge. It’s not agenda driven, other than we do the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing…and that’s not an agenda. That’s a conviction. It’…

At times, the innumerable dialogues regarding the state of our nation appear to be less dialogues and more something akin to agenda mongering and rights crusading. It seems that we have hijacked the solemn rights and sacred liberties afforded us and have forced them into servitude around our ego-centric agendas and myopic special interests. The alt…

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…

We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity “Whatever you see within yourself, let it be the whole of yourself. For too often we have been brutalized by our own sense of inadequacy and we’ve been held hostage to the lesser choices born of such a debilitating sense of self. Know this, that latent within you there lies more than ample resources begging …

The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it. All of us run thick with untapped potential. We are rich with possibility and formidably equipped to tease the cusp of the impossible and to overcome it in the teasing. The essence of our being is immens…

Thinking It's Over When It's Not It’s over…we tell ourselves. It’s over. Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back. The loss is too big. The obstacles are too daunting. Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in. We’re one person (just …

Becoming Accountable Accountability…might it be time to be accountable to who we’ve become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be? Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we’ve become? And once we’ve done that,…

Dead-End Roads of Our Making We chart these paths. We set these goals. We ponder where we are, and from there we determine where we want to go. There’s some sort of road that we’re walking, whether that’s a road of our own making, or it’s a road that everybody is walking, or it’s the road that culturally vogue or socially trending. Sometimes that r…

How Do We Look at Time? “Time is the great intimidator, steadily stealing away precious seconds with no pause in the stealing. And such thievery leads us to believe that in time, the pilfering of these seconds will eventually exhaust all such seconds, leaving us at the ‘end’ of everything. Yet, God states that the seconds are actually the countdown…

Do We Search for the Truth? Do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth? Do we even take the time to consider a question like that out of the long-held assumption that we are, in fact, looking for the truth because (we assume) that that’s the obvious thing to do? What insanity would behoove us to do anything less? But do w…

We Are a Mess We are a mess. We are a mess because we are a people on a mad rant. Sadly, we have become blinded to the fact that we are blinded by a host of pathetically self-serving agendas. And the pathetic nature of these agendas are evidenced by the fact that they are unable to stand up to the slightest scrutiny despite how rigorous our justifi…

We Like Things to Be New New. We like new things, or things to be new, or to do away with the old to make a place and a space for something new. The idea of ‘new’ is appealing. And because it is, we chase it. But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better,’ and I think that quite often we associate the two way too much. We tend to automatically think that if some…

“Right now, it’s Saturday for me. I’m between what was and what is yet to be, living squarely between a death of sorts and the unknown of the ‘what next?’ It is my Saturday. If the ‘yet to be’ is nothing more than what is transpiring right now, my future will be shrouded in the thick cold of bitter hopelessness. A shift in a slightly different dire…

What Is Right and What Is Not? What is ‘right?’ What provides our guiding function? What is our “north star?” Our constant? Our set of rules that keep us civil? Our code? Or… is our code the commitment to the absence of a code? What is ‘right?’ The question, “What is right,” must be asked without our efforts to choose what is ‘right,’ or to think t…

Why Is the World Like This Anyway? Why is the world like this anyway? Why is the world so much of what we don’t want it to be like, and a whole lot less of what we do want it to be like? Why is it so incredibly difficult to create the kind of world that we all would love to live in? How is it that we’re able to visualize what we would actually like…

What Is Our Narrative? What is our narrative? What is the story-line that we’ve authored to explain our world, or allay our fears, or justify our agendas, or excuse our behaviors? What is the narrative that we’ve created to give ourselves permission to do whatever we want permission to do? What are the story-lines, the spins, the bits of fiction th…

Change - It Begins With Us Change. It’s needed for sure…just look around. But if our posture is to wait for someone else to create the change that we’re waiting for, we’re probably going to just keep right on waiting. As a part of my own processing in trying to understand what change is, and how ‘real’ change is caused, I wrote this: “Change. It's …

What Are We Focusing On? We can be very focused people. We can decide that there is something that we want to do, or not do, or get, or not get, or complete, or not complete, or argue, or not argue, or whatever it is that we want to focus on. Indeed, we can be very focused people. In fact, we can be focused to the point of being quite stubborn abou…

We Reap What We Sow We reap what we sow. In other words, what we do is never free of an outcome that will be shaped by what we do. The ‘cause-and-effect’ of life is such that what we do will always cause an outcome that is fashioned directly by what we do. Despite the fact that we often think (or would prefer to think) that what we do is somehow is…

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, c…

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 situ…

It's Time to Listen We hear a lot of things. A whole lot of things. We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information. It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that. Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some s…

Better or Worse? Will the choice that you’re about to make, make you better or worse? Will it improve your life, or diminish your life? The fact of the matter is, it’s going to do one or the other. And because it is, it’s worth asking the question, will it make me better or worse? But that question itself can be clouded by a whole lot of things. Fi…

Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To? Who are you giving yourself away to? To what propaganda have you come to subscribe? To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb? Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached? What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you int…

Where Did All The Time Go? “Rush often results in waste and moments forever lost. Attention to time is inattention to the life that fills that time. So much can be lost.” “Where did all the time go?” We ask that all the time. However, it’s not where the time went. It’s what we were doing with the time while it was going. Think about this. When it c…

What I Would Say to the World I often think about what I would say to the world. In the pain, confusion, fear, and rampant disorientation…what would I say? With the deceit, the manipulation, the less than admirable agendas being floated on all fronts…what would I say? With marriages fracturing under the weight of a culture gone rogue, with teenager…

“When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?” We dig holes. Lots of them. With all kinds of shovels. But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re diggi…

What Is Success and What Is It Not? “Success”. People chase after this thing that we call “success.” But in the pursuit of this elusive thing that we call “success”, maybe the better question is, “What is success”? How do we define it? How does the culture define it? How do the people that we spend our time with, or live with, or work with, or play…

We hear a lot of things. A whole lot of things. We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information. It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that. Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy mosaic…

There Is No God - Evidence There is no God. It’s not an unfamiliar statement. In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’ I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God. Therefore, out of conve…

“In full uniform, the color guard marched by as part of the parade. And as they did, he forced his horribly slumped and deeply aged body out of his worn wheelchair and stood to ram-rod attention. He held a salute until the guard had passed, and then he feebly collapsed back into his wheelchair. As I stared in ever-warming admiration, emblazoned acr…

“The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.” Too often we don’t care, or that’s what we tell ourselves. We work really hard not to care because we’ve figured out that caring is just too risky, in whatever way it happens to be too risky for us. We get the idea in our head that ‘not’ caring is just easi…

"Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control." Proverbs 25:28 Life is filled with pain. Or maybe more accurately, our lives are engulfed in pain. We’ve all run into it, or have had it run into us, or have had it run over us. That pain can be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. It can be a product of the peop…

“I can do all things through him who gives me strength.” Philippians 4:13 We are bound by all kinds of limits. And we wonder why certain limits have to be limits. Why are our dreams stunted by limits that put them just outside of our reach? Why do we have relationships that become suffocated by limits, leaving them only a shadow of what they could …

“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. I Corinthians 6:19-20 Life is precious. Therefore, the loss of it goes deep. There are losses that are a natural part of our existence. They hurt, but a…

“…for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’” Romans 3:23 Failure. It’s having set out to do something, or not do something, and having failed to achieve the goal either way. It’s falling short. It’s having missed the mark, or having pulled out of the race long before we came anywhere close to the mark. It’s the dream that we couldn…

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.’” Psalm 139:14 One of the worst things is not knowing who you are. And probably a close second to that is to hate what you do know. And right behind that there’s the effort to create something that you think you’ll like in order to solve both…

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’” Psalm 27:10 There are many things that are meant to be forever. There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never questioned because they are designed to be permanent. Their role in our lives had nothing of a temporary nature built into them. Therefore, we have no …

“After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit, and testified, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’” John 13:21 Betrayal is intentional…ruthlessly so. It is the deliberate choice of someone to hold their interests as so superior to our well-being that the cost of crushing us in order to advance their agendas is dee…

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 w…

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 s…