Our humanity is ingeniously fashioned in a manner that it can handily break the realities that would seek to break it. Our existence need never be held hostage nor pressed into servitude to the sordid realities of all that is happening around us. Rather, we are able to stand in spirited opposition to those realities, and in the face of them we are capable of crafting brilliant and utterly resilient solutions that crush those realities by transforming them. We are dreamers and the authors of visions. We have the ability to conceptualize marvelous things and actually begin the act of crafting them even at those times when the presence of them or the hope for them is entirely non-existent. We are a powerful bunch vested with immense potential that exceeds even that which we understand.
Yet, we bring these abilities to bear against a world that would wish to press us flat in it’s skepticism. The world becomes embroiled in the selfish pursuits that it crafts as it chases things born of greed, gluttony and selfishness. The world would bend us to its darker ways rather than be bent to a better way. And the weight of living in a world such as this, as well as the press of darkness that such living spawns can at times leave us wondering if our influence might be too insufficient to wrestle the world out of a darkness that has become so terribly dark.
Therefore, to remind us of who we are in times such as these and to fan the flames of our passion, I have compiled a number of quotes that I have had the privilege of authoring. It is my desire to call us back to lofty dreams and rigorous passion. To set us free and send us out in the marvel of our humanity to change a world that is too ill-equipped to change itself. To say that we stand for something better, and that we will be that ‘something better’ in the standing. It is my hope that these quotes will move you to move your world, for I believe that you can and I believe that you will:
“If it didn’t go all that well today, tomorrow is the opportunity that I have to do what I did today without doing it the way that I did it today.”
“Pull every dream that you’ve ever had from all of the places that you’ve abandoned them, brush them off, set them in front of yourself, run the fingers of your heart over each of them, fight the lie that you’re not enough to achieve them, and realize that the dream was not too big. Rather, the belief in yourself is too small.”
“Let us not fall prey to the leaching negativity and rank pessimism that runs unleashed all around us. Rather, with the utmost determination we must bring ourselves to understand that these lies have been given legitimacy by people who thought themselves as powerless in the face of them, rather than recognizing that we have the power to rip the face off of them.”
“You, yes you are the impossible waiting to happen. And the only reason that that sounds impossible to you is that you haven’t been daring enough to push the possible out to the point where it becomes what you once mistook for the impossible.”
“I am begging you to let nothing shackle you that God has sent you to unshackle.”
“I’ve sat with tens of thousands of people and I’ve stared into as many empty eyes. And I must say that the inexplicable contradiction for me is that despite the gaping emptiness engulfing every one of these eyes, there yet lies within each one a wonderfully formidable gifting, an irrepressible energy, a depth yet undiscovered, riches unfathomed, and the resources to amply transform this ever-darkening world. And I’ve seen enough eyes to know that if yours are also empty, like everyone else’s they are also full.”
“God doesn’t ask if something can be done. Nor does He ask if we have the resources to do it. For God is bound by neither question. And when we stand with God, neither are we.”
“You are fully and magnificently equipped to stand up and change the world around you. And to simply sit down and tolerate the world around you is to squander who you are in the process of never being who you are.”
“Do not be ashamed of who you are, for in doing so you are not taking into account the majesty of all that you are. And without any shred of doubt I know that you are a person of majesty, for in my innumerable years of working with people I have yet to find even one person who is not.”
“Stand up and be the light that God created you to be. Stand with me and the millions of others like both of us who have bowed before this inexplicably marvelous God of ours and in the bowing have begged that He not let us die until the darkness in the world around us has died first.”
“Look in the mirror. Go ahead and look yet again. And look not at the reflection, for while this body of yours is marvelously complex in ways that continue to elude the reach of modern science, it is but a simple shell that holds the image of God within you. And if the shell is that grand, how much more what God has placed inside of it.”
“If I let that which I hold to be true fall victim to a world that says it is not, I have in that action surrendered to the voices of those who know nothing of the truth other than to destroy it because it terrifies them. And if there’s one thing I should be terrified of it’s not the surrender itself, but the fact that in the surrender I have given the world permission to avoid the very thing that it should fear.”
“It’s not the gifts or the abilities or the talents that equip us to accomplish great things. Rather, it’s the persistent and adamantly stubborn conviction that we will in no way leave the world the way that we found it. And I would rather join hands with a single person of this kind than sit with a million gifted people who are not of this kind.”
And finally…
“I will spend my life believing in you so that you will someday commit to doing the same.”
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC