Battles are both the bane and the glory of our existence. We adamantly abhor them when they’re forced on us by vengeful adversaries who mean us all the harm they can muster up, or when they randomly befall us through indiscriminately cruel circumstances over which we have no control. On the other hand, we rather bask in them when there’s … [Read more...]
Not Where We Were – Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else
It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we’re going in this thing called life. For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined. For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered. In many cases where we’re going is far more rigorously defined by all the places where we don’t want … [Read more...]
Love – A World Without It
Complacency is a potently tragic hallmark of our lives. We’ve certainly got bunches of it. In fact, as the old saying goes, we’ve got it “in spades.” Complacency is conceived in the bosom of familiarity, where something becomes so commonplace that we errantly render it as ‘common.’ We’ve yet to beat this terribly corrosive tendency we have to … [Read more...]
The New Year – Clean Slate or Simply Stale
With the New Year we long for a fresh start. We want to wipe the slate clean, removing the smudges and the smears. We want to get rid of the errors, the poor choices, the misguided decisions and the bruising flops that populated the previous year. We want to wipe away old habits, clean up destructive behaviors, sponge up toxic relationships, run … [Read more...]
Christmas – The Nature of God
We humanize God. It’s in our nature to create and craft a god who is more of us and less of anything divine. We have this terribly odd proclivity to need a god, but to concurrently need that god to be something that we can control. We want a deity that has enough supernatural qualities to rush into our lives in times of crisis, or handily answer … [Read more...]
Christmas – A Sorely Needed Reclamation
Some thirty years ago, I was given the opportunity to be a part of the reclamation of a gorgeous seventy-three room colonial-style mansion, as well as the property and numerous out-buildings that were part of this massive, rolling estate. It had set empty, hauntingly still and seemingly comatose for several decades, with suffocating layers of … [Read more...]
Christmas – Countering Death by Death
Christmas was an intentionally intentional decision of the most magnificent design. It was a decision wrought from an angst borne of incomprehensible love, wholly tempered by an inconceivable and unsullied forgiveness, and it was relentlessly energized by a relentlessly infinite compassion. It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and … [Read more...]
Being Thankful – Greed or Gratitude
We all have personal agendas, and typically we have quite a boatload of them. When we’re in a feverish pursuit of our agendas, we can, and we frequently will rob, pillage and/or discard many things along the way in order to achieve our agendas. Oddly enough, we can even destroy the very things that allowed us to pursue those agendas in the first … [Read more...]
Beginnings – An End is Only a Beginning in Disguise
Endings can be incapacitating and painful for a variety of reasons, most of which we never identify because we’re too caught up in the loss to see anything but the loss. We don’t really identify what we’re actually doing with whatever the ending is, or what the ending is actually doing to us because we’re too lost in the loss to even begin to … [Read more...]
Abundance – Defining How We Define It
It seems there’s been an evolutionary warping of the most rancid sort where we’ve come to define “abundance” as having whatever it is that we feel we need. Sadly, abundance today appears to imply the possession of a liberal quantity of whatever it is that we deem important, or desirous, or bright and shiny, or voguish, or trendy, or whatever might … [Read more...]
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC