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...]
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep – Mom and Dad’s Bedtime Prayer
It goes something like this, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless Mommy, Daddy, Mark, Brett and Granny. Amen.” Simple. I recited that prayer thousands of times as kid. It comes to my memory today as clearly as it did those many thousands of … [Read more...]
Shep – To Run With a Limp
We all have a limp that relentlessly dogs our steps, causing us at times to be dog-tired as we work against our limp in order to keep our lives sufficiently erect. For some of us, our limp is so slight and relatively minor that it’s really quite difficult to detect. For others of us it’s blatantly obvious, causing us to lurch through life with … [Read more...]
Dad’s Workbench – There’s a Tool for That
“There’s a tool for that.” I can’t tell you how many times I heard my Dad say that. And in the oddity of life, no matter what task we had to do there was a tool for it; not just some tool but a specific tool. Someone, somewhere, at some time had faced whatever challenge we were facing and had designed a tool to get it done with a fair amount of … [Read more...]
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC