Sometimes life is simply about fighting the battle. We succumb not to the battle, but to the sense that life is nothing but a battle. Too often we choose to contemplate the battle, analyze the battle, and become engrossed in all the many and varied aspects of the battle. And we become lost in this incessant process of contemplation when maybe we … [Read more...]
Discouragement – Courage, Determination and Persistence
We need not define discouragement. We’ve all experienced it sufficiently to understand it in all of its many variant and rather dark forms. Discouragement has come our way, and it will come our way again. Sometimes it’s rather diminutive, passive and rather soft. At other times it’s monstrous and entirely debilitating. In whatever way it comes, it … [Read more...]
Fight or Flee – Our Contradictory Nature in Crisis
We fight or we flee. Sometimes it’s one, and sometimes it’s the other. At times we can explain the choice that we made, and at other times we have no idea at all why we made whatever choice we made. We can stand tall and fight and be entirely uncertain why we’re doing that at all. Or we can be running away in a blind panic and not be certain why … [Read more...]
Fill’er Up – It’s Never Lasting
Has it ever dawned on us that the resources that we are constantly about the business of obtaining always need to be replenished? Always. We are always in pursuit of whatever resources we need to meet even our most fundamental needs. Yet it seems that none of that ever lasts. There’s really nothing of permanence to anything. Everything is always … [Read more...]
Forgiveness – The Necessity and the Application
Good as the Enemy of the Best
Grief and Loss – A Different Perspective
When we experience grief and loss, all we see is grief and loss. Our hearts are smeared thick with searing grief and our eyes are rendered blind by a loss that we’re struggling to embrace as real. Our worlds teeter and our lives wrestle with the massive holes of things torn away. We wrestle with an existence now altered beyond hope of restoration … [Read more...]
Happiness – Three Do’s and Three Don’ts
Happiness seems to be that infuriatingly elusive yet intensely desired thing that we're all chasing in some form or fashion. The apparent reason that we're in this rampant pursuit of happiness is that we don't have it very often, and when we do, we don't have it for all that long. This thing called happiness is elusive indeed. Maybe when it … [Read more...]
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC