Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

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 we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth?  Maybe we should consider the fact that there are a whole lot of reasons why we actually might stoop to something less.

Truth be told, the truth may not be what we want it to be.  It may not support our agendas, or our desires.  In fact, it might actually render those things as erroneous and all-together ill-fated.  The truth may not support all of the things that we passionately wish to believe, or have talked ourselves into believing.  Or truth may dare to go so far as to actually call the entirety of those beliefs into question, and call us out for believing in them in the first place.  Do we search for the truth even when it takes the foundations that we’ve laboriously built with the sweat of our brow and the best of our years, and does truth handily expose those foundations as weak, entirely misappropriated, and as nothing more than sand piled in every place except the right place?  Will we search for truth even when it looks us square in the face and tells us this kind of stuff?  Will we search for it knowing that there is a very distinct possibility that it will tell us everything that we don’t want to hear in every way that we don’t want to hear it?  Will we search for truth even then?

I don’t know that we do.  In fact, what we seem to search for the most are ways to circumvent the truth.  Our search does not seem to be ‘for’ the truth, but rather it seems to be far more vested in ways to get ‘around’ the truth.  We would not even begin to label our actions as such because such actions would immediately call the whole of our character into question.  But what we label something does not make it what we’ve labeled it.  Our search seems to be one of committed avoidance.  It is one of intentional evasion, of manufactured detours, of clever deviations that are so slick that we don’t even realize that we deviated.  It’s not that we run from the truth as much as we diligently work to create pathways around it, that in the end, never get us around anything.  I wonder if that’s really more of what we do.

And as such, these evasive endeavors are quite naturally filled with such familiar things as slippery denials, evasive rationalizations, ambiguous justifications, relentless blame-placing, rogue fear-mongering, the incessant spinning of events, the bogus editing of facts, and the mind-boggling contortions where we take reality and make it something other than reality.

But likely the most dangerous of these is the self-endowed liberty that we have granted ourselves to make truth whatever we wish to make it.  Therefore, it’s not about avoidance, because conveniently, that’s no longer necessary.  Rather, it’s about creating, which is avoidance of the most calculated, but ill-fated sort.  It’s about making truth whatever we want it to be.  It’s about making it fit whatever agenda, or belief system, or value system, or platform, or whatever it is that we want it to fit.  If truth will not grant us that which we wish, we will simply edit it until it does.  But in the end, it is no longer truth, and truth be told, we will eventually find that out, and we’ll probably find it out the hard way.

Truth.  Do we search for it, or do we do something else with it?  You might ask yourself, in a truthful kind of way, what you’re doing with it.

“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

• Jesus Christ

Welcome to Day Eight of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “The Painful Struggle of Infertility.”

The quote for today reads this way:

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten— the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm— my great army that I sent among you..”

What many people are desperate to have are the very things that others recklessly throw away.  What is cherished, intimately longed for, and desperately sought after by so many is discarded by others without so much as a fleeting thought.

Such is the agonizing dilemma of those facing the pain of infertility.  Having squarely set decades of dreams on the immense privilege of having a child, couples find their dreams brought to a jarring and often unexpected halt.  Facing the brutal possibility of being childless, these couples expend massive amounts of time, emotional energy, and personal resources to salvage a dream that seems to slip further away with every attempt to save it.

Wildly gyrating emotions spin off sporadic thoughts of physical or personal inadequacy.  We wonder if this is punishment for some perceived offense that is only now being executed on our passion to hold a child.  Thoughts of injustice as held against the reality that life is unjust.  An uninvited jealousy of other couples who were able to bear children that runs head-long against the very real joy that we have for them.  And then, the brutal thought of those who recklessly abort the very thing that we would give the entirety our lives to hold.  The turmoil is unspeakable.  The pain unfathomable.

Life robs us in many ways.  But God enriches us in every way.  What the world takes, God will restore.  We will never lose anything that God cannot and will not give back to us many times over.  The shape and form of what He gives may not resemble what we lost, but it will provide the healing that we need.  The truth of these statements will never and can never be offset by the depth, intensity, size, or pain of any loss…ever.

Prayer

Dear God:

I know that life is full of loss.  It’s all around me and it’s everywhere within me.  In this world, we can’t get away from it.  I know that because I’ve done my level best to do exactly that.  And despite those efforts, it seems like some sort of loss is always lying in wait just around the corner of every dream that I’ve ever had.

But Lord, sometimes the losses are so big, so deep, so life-altering, so unjust, so seemingly impossible to live with…so everything that they should not be that I have a hard time accepting them.  The inability to conceive a child is one of those.  I’m way too human and way too fragile to take the really brutal losses and somehow find a safe or reasonable place for them despite how much I want to do that.

You know life can be brutal.  You’re no stranger to any of that.  You lived it.  You endured it.  You knew it was coming for You from the beginning of creation.  You stepped into this world knowing that it was staring You in the face. 

But knowing that kind of brutality, You said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”   Dear God, fill the hole left by the hope of a child.  I don’t want to play the victim; I want to be the victor. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life pouting; I want to live my days prevailing.  I want to rest on the fact that nothing can be taken from me that You cannot replace many times over in whatever way You decide to do that.  I desperately want to live with that reality, with that hope, and with that peace.

I pray all of this in Jesus’s Name.  Amen.

A Thought to Carry With Me Today

“If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.”

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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Have a great day!

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 one person) trapped in a downward spiral that’s far more powerful than all of us put together.  The glass isn’t half empty.  The fact is, there is no glass.  We can’t pick up where we left off because where we left off...left. It’s over…so we think.

In processing all of this for myself, I wrote this quote:

“The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken.  Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again.  And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.”

Sometimes things are ‘over’ only because we believe them to be over.  We’ve been told that they’re over.  Or everyone around us says that they’re over.  Or the cultural climate seems to say that they’re over.  Or those without vision have never realized that they lost anything because they never saw what they had in the first place, so they tell us that nothing’s over because nothing was lost to begin with.  Or people have chosen to believe that they’re over because that’s easier than hoping that they’re not.  We don’t want to look the fool and try to save something that’s no longer there to save, so we tell ourselves and those around us that it’s over…so we think.  But we can sail again.

Is something really over?  Have we actually lost something that we can’t reclaim?  Is it gone forever?  Or, is that what we’ve chosen to believe.  It’s my sense that most things aren’t over (at all).  Rather, it’s our belief that they are (which is a ‘belief,’ but not necessarily a ‘reality’).  It’s more our attitude, or our fears, or our unwillingness to challenge popular thinking, or our unwillingness to risk grabbing hold of a vision, or a lack of belief in ourselves, or more importantly, a lack of belief in God.  In the Bible, Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”  Do you get that?  Do you understand what that opens up?  Do you understand that our perception that something is over does not take into account that with God, nothing is over?  That our families, our communities, our dreams, our relationships, our nation can sail again?  That there are always possibilities, even when all we see are massive impossibilities?  That what we feel we have to walk away from are things that have a ton of possibilities still living and breathing within them?  Is something really over?  Really?  You might want to think about that because you’d be amazed at all of the things that can sail again.

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

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 needed, but maybe not in the way that we think it's needed.  It seems that we need to be thoughtful about the values that we've embraced because of the ethics that we've discarded.  We need to challenge the apathy that we've fallen into because of the convictions that we've fallen out of.  Make no mistake about it, the collapse of the world around us began with the darkening of the souls within us.  Therefore, it's not about changing a nation that's in turmoil out there.  It's about changing a soul that's gone dark in here.”

Change begins with us.  With you and with me.  It begins here…right here.  The kind of change that we need…that we want, isn’t going to come from ‘out there.’  It’s going to come from everyday people like you and like me who decide to be different, to act different, to think different, and to live different.  It’s the impact of the single human being touching the lives of other single human beings in the process of living out our lives as human beings.  It’s how we celebrate with others when all is good, and how we lift them up when it’s not.  It’s determining that if we’re going to live out this life, we’re going to live it out so that when our days come to end, whatever’s left after we’re gone is better than whatever it was when we first showed up.  It’s about deciding to ‘be’ the person to other people that we want them to ‘be’ to us, and not waiting for them to ‘be’ that to us first.

It’s about asking if we’ve let our values slip.  If we’ve abandoned some ethics that we shouldn’t have abandoned.  If the principles by which we should be living have been lost because we got caught up in the flood of people, who themselves are lost.  It’s about asking if we’ve let our character be less than what it should be (or less than what we really want it to be).  If we’ve compromised standards, or become apathetic, or given the circumstances around us the power to make us jaded and negative and ultimately toxic to ourselves and to everyone around us.  It’s asking if we’ve let the deterioration of the culture define us, instead of us working to define the culture and turn back the deterioration.  Have we become what we hate and therefore we hate what we’ve become, so we’re stuck in what we’ve become (but not what we are).

And in all of that, it’s recognizing that we don’t need to be any of that, or do any of that.  We can be different.  We can set ourselves apart from a culture that’s tearing itself apart.  We can be an agent of change.  It is within us to do that.  And in choosing to be different in order to bring change, we cause those around us to be different as well, which can change everything.

Change.  It’s needed for sure.  But let’s quit waiting on someone else to do it.

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 about whatever it is that we’re focusing on.

The issue is not about being focused, as that’s simply part of our nature.  The issue is what we’re focusing on.  What has captured our attention?  What has challenged us, or captivated us, or made us angry, or riled us up and incited us to some kind of action, whatever that action might be?  What is it that we have latched onto, or what is it that has latched on to us?  What is it that’s seized the whole of our imagination and inspired us to throw off all caution, step up and run after dreams of the most magnificent sort?  Or, at the other end of that spectrum, what’s frightened us to the point that we’ve turned away from our dreams, fled in utter panic, and rushed off to hide ourselves in whatever place we feel has afforded us a safe place to hide?  What are we focusing on?

Whatever it is that we’ve given ourselves over to and focused all of our energies on, it’s typically something that we don’t have.  Whatever it is, it’s something that we’re ‘not’ in possession of.  It’s something that’s eluded us, possibly over and over and over.  Or something that’s teasing us because we can’t quite get our hands on it.  It might be something that we’ve got pieces and parts of, but we can’t quite get enough of it to have the whole of whatever it is.  It could be that critical and absolutely essential next step in a career, or something that’s just enough of whatever it is to nudge our position in our social group to that next cherished and sought after level.  It could be that one thing that will give us the financial prowess that we yearn for, or that bit of power that will allow us to leverage ourselves to some ascended position, or that one last resource that will, once and for all, liberate us from the grind of the daily grind.

But whatever it is that we’re focusing on, it’s something that we don’t have.  It’s something that we don’t possess.  It’s something that’s not in our grasp, or our control, or our bank account, or in our collection of successes and accomplishments that finally defines us in a way that we feel we are worth being defined as.  Whatever it is, it’s something that we don’t have.  And that’s something to think about.

That means that, quite frankly, we’re not focusing on what we ‘do’ have.  What we do have falls into irrelevance because it’s not what we don’t have.  It appears that part of the value of what we have (possibly the greater part) is more about achieving it and less about possessing it.  Somehow its value seems to get diminished by the sheer acquisition of it.  And so we press it aside in the famished pursuit of the next thing, when what we possess is the very thing that’s allowed us to pursue the next thing.  We lose the appreciation of all of the resources that we have as we immerse ourselves in the race for what we don’t have.  We sit amidst all of the resources that nurture us, protect us, feed us, grant us rest when we need it, give us needed refuge when the day has battered us, and solace when the world around us is too loud and overly demanding.  And we end up focusing on everything but that.  We focus on what we don’t have, and in doing so, we abuse and neglect what we do have.

And so, maybe you should take moment and ask what am I focusing on?  What has my attention?  Where are my energies being directed?  But more importantly than all of that, maybe you should think about what you’re ‘not’ focusing on?  For that is going to be far more telling. 

“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do.  I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain.’  And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years.  Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’  But God said to him, ‘You fool!  This very night your life will be demanded from you.  Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’  This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

• Luke 12:18-21

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.  First, there can be people telling us that the choice that we are about to make will, in fact, make us better.  They will look at us square in the face and say that without a doubt, this decision will improve our lives.  And these people can put forth all kinds of reasons as to why it’s absolutely certain to do that.  But do we see that kind of growth in their lives, or do we just hear that in their words?  Are we hearing real life principles and sound values and a truly refined wisdom, or are we listening to flimsy agendas and self-proclaimed platforms and substance-less statements dressed in the finery of something that they are not?  Will these choices make us better or worse?

Second, the question of whether a choice is going to make things better or worse can also be clouded by whatever is vogue or trending.  We want to be in step with the culture around us so as to not look the fool, or the ill-informed, or worse yet, the rebel.  And it is assumed that if we are in step with the culture, and if we align these choices with whatever is currently trending, these choices are certain to make us better.  They will improve our lives.  And while the likelihood is that any improvement will be superficial and fleeting at best, they will only serve us until that which is vogue is no longer vogue, and that which is trendy is now outdated and a burden to whatever has now been proclaimed as new and cutting-edge.  The question then remains…will these choices make us better or worse?

Thirdly, the question of whether a choice will make us better or worse is also clouded by our own greed and short-sightedness.  We ask ourselves questions of what a decision will get us, and not so much if the decision is right regardless of what it gets us.  We ask if our choices will position us nicely in whatever way that we want to be positioned, rather than asking how the decision positions us relative to sound principles and a set of morals to which we too often turn a blind eye.  We ask how it will make us look to those around us whom we wish to impress, rather than ask how it will make us look once time has peeled away everything that is false and less than admirable, all of which will eventually reveal the true nature of our choices.  And the question remains…will these choices make us better or worse?

Will the choices in front of us make us better or worse?  Will they improve our lives, or diminish our lives?  That depends on who and what is informing those decisions.  Is it people with questionable agendas, or is it a culture trending on a rogue wave of self-gratification, or is it our own lack of thoughtfulness and integrity?  Whatever it might be, we might ask who and/or what is informing our decisions?  And how much are they clouding that decision to the point that we will be set up to pay a potentially unimaginable price in making it…for we have all paid such prices before and we would be the fool to pay them again.  For the wrong information, and the wrong motives, and the wrong value system will leave you on the wrong side of every choice, and choices that leave you on the wrong side never make your life better.

Will the choices in front of us make us better or worse?  And if Godly principles and Biblical values are not providing the guiding function for those choices, we are doomed to live out a life of ‘worse.’

“Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise.  Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”

• Proverbs 19:20-21

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, call it greed, call it fear, call it upbringing, call it faith, call it whatever you want…but we all have standards shaped by something.  We each have them.

But the thing that shapes them the most is us.  We want standards because we’re supposed to have them, or they were inbred within us, or we just picked them up growing up, or whatever the case might be.  But we want standards of convenience.  We want standards that are fluidly permissive and that grant us ample free reign to do what we want when we want.  We want standards that won’t hold us back if we hold them up.  At times, we want standards that give us permission to do what, in fact, standards tell us not to do.  We want standards that are standards in name only.  We want standards so that we can say to others and to ourselves that we are people of standards…when, in fact, the standard is not to have one.

And to pull all of that off, we tediously and rather ingeniously reconfigure our standards to the point that they’re not quite empty, but pretty much empty.  They have a slight hint of ethics or morals or principles or values hidden away somewhere within them.   But that slight hint is left there solely as a means of granting those standards a soothing illusion of legitimacy.  But they are not left there as something to which the standard adheres.  And then we intricately weave these largely empty standards into our lives just enough to provide the illusion that we are indeed people of standards.  We make them sufficiently legitimate to look the part.  We make them tolerable.  We make them doable.  We take the ‘standard’ out of the standard, but we leave them with the name.  And in the end, we are utterly fooled into believing that we are people who live by standards.  That we are people of principle.  That we walk the hard road of integrity.  That we live right.  That we stand for all that is good and just.

But we are not.  We are people living a distortion of what we say we’re living.  And that is utterly heart-breaking.  If we honestly face that reality, it’s nothing short of catastrophic.  It’s a shock to our system.  It’s a blow to everything that we’ve built.  It’s a pill that’s far, far too big to swallow.  It’s a reality check that upends this incredibly fragile and permissive narrative that we’ve built the entirety of our lives on. 

And it is in the acceptance of this painful and often devastating truth that repentance is born.  This is where we stand before all of the good that we thought we were, and we recognize that this ‘good’ is a myth convincingly spun by this horribly comprised standard that we fashioned.  Repentance is a stark realization and a horribly jarring awakening that we’re living a life of reconfigured standards that are not standards at all.  Repentance is a hard and terribly frank look at the flimsy narrative that we created to grant us permission to live a fluidly permissive life of self-serving, dark, and personally destructive agendas.  Life is full of this stuff.  They’re everywhere in every place.  These permeate everything, including you and including me.

Repentance is acknowledging these behaviors, and then rejecting these behaviors as destructive for us and everything around us.  It’s confessing the destruction we’ve brought on ourselves and everyone around us, and it’s repenting of such an inexcusable and wholly squandered life in a manner so comprehensive that no moment, from this one forward, will ever be squandered again. 

And once we’ve cleared the house of all of that stuff, repentance is being sufficiently bold to ask what the great standard is.  The final standard.  The ultimate standard.  The real standard.  That standard that will stand no matter what.  The standard that will stand upon, against, and over every other standard.  What is it, where is it, how do I draw it into every shred of my being, and how do I live by it in a manner entirely uncompromised?  Repentance is uncompromisingly abandoning every reconfigured standard that we ever created and embracing the only standard that will outlive every other standard.  Ever.  And that is repentance. 

And so where are those kinds of standards.  Those are the standards that God, and only God, can create.  Therefore, it is God to whom we should repent, for He holds the only standards worth dying for and living out.  He holds the only standards that will still be standards when all other standards have long fallen away.  He holds the great standards, the final standards, the ultimate standards, the real standards.  That’s where they are.  In fact, that’s the only place that they are.  Repentance.  Abandon your reconfigured standards and seize God’s eternal standards.  That’s what will save you.  That’s what will bless you.  That’s what will transform you.

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

2 Corinthians 7:14

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 isolated to the action or the choice itself, by doing something we have, in fact, set the stage for a future outcome that will reflect whatever the action or choice was that we made.  We reap what we sow.  And that is an immovable reality.

And if we look around us, what we see today will tell us, quite clearly, the stuff that we sowed yesterday.  The events of today grew out of the choices of yesterday.  We can complain about the world today.  We can bemoan our lot in life, or we can find ourselves becoming deeply hopeless and darkly dismayed about the state of our culture.  We can grieve deeply over tragedies that seem to befall us at every turn and that leave us drowning in an agony so consuming that we don’t have time to heal before the next one befalls us.  We can be utterly stunned at the nature of events and the course of the culture, having believed that such things were leagues beyond the scope of reality…but here they are.  The headlines are strewn with news so dark that it sometimes seems nearly apocalyptic and we sit teetering on some abyss that our choices delivered us to.  But does not our surprise reveal our ignorance, because the fact of the matter is, we reap what we sow.

Have we been so oblivious as to somehow think that this would not be the case?  And are we so adamant about wanting to preserve our so-called ‘rights’ to engage in whatever destructive behavior that we choose to engage in that we altogether deny the cause-and-effect of those choices?  Will we pretend that we are somehow above such an immovable reality.  Will we delude ourselves with the belief that we have license do whatever we want, and that we somehow have obtained the power to grant ourselves a free pass from the consequences of doing what we want?  Are we foolish enough to believe that we can indulge in the most rogue and base passions imaginable, and do so in some sort of perfect isolation? 

Or do we actually accept the fact that we will reap what we sow, but that in time what we reap will somehow magically become better, despite the fact that it was, and will continue to be sown from the same exact stuff from which we’ve reaped the bad stuff?  Or have we been sufficiently fooled by those who would declare that what we’ve reaped was actually that of others who have liberally sown our cherished and rather admirable efforts with toxic seeds designed to undermine our efforts, and it is their seeds which we have reaped?  Let’s not be fooled, for we’ve been fooled for far too long already.  We reap what we sow. 

And so maybe we should look at what we’re sowing.  Honestly.  Frankly.  With great pause and even greater thought.  And maybe we should think about what the things that we’re sowing are going to result in.  And maybe we need to refuse to live in denial of that painful and frequently disappointing reality.  Maybe we should understand that while we might like to believe that we will reap something good from compromised seeds, that that is not the case, nor will it ever be despite how much sowing we might do.  And maybe, just maybe we should start sowing something different.  Something very different.  Something radically different.  Maybe it’s time for a change of seeds, a real change, an honest change.  Maybe it’s time to sow something better because we cannot afford to continue to reap things that are this bad.

“A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

• Galatians 6:7-9

Abandonment

When People Make Destructive Choices

There are times when the best of our logic fails to understand the worst of other’s behaviors. It’s part of the oddity or maybe complexity of the human psyche that we sometimes make choices that defy any shred of reason or seem void of even the slightest hint of sensibility. More times than we can count we stand in awe of the choices that some people make, standing at some distance shaking our heads in disoriented disbelief and wondering what in the world they were thinking. Sometimes our own choices are perplexingly confusing, defying our own logic and leaving us patently bewildered and entirely befuddled at who we are and what we just did.  Clearly, we can be our greatest mystery.

Yet, the most confounding situations are those when these rather irrational decisions are made at the expense of others. Sure, we can make wildly poor choices that effect ourselves in ways slight or significant. I suppose it’s within our rights to chart spurious courses that descend to dark places as long as the only person that ends up in those dark places with us is ‘us.’ It would seem that we can “shoot ourselves in the foot” as long as it’s our foot and no one else’s.  Yet, far too frequently we shoot a lot of other’s feet other than our own.

And so the pressing question becomes, why would we take someone else down with us?  What in the world behooves us to make choices that reach out with arms either long or short, grab someone else in whatever way we do that and drag them down? Why is it that we just can’t leave others alone? What compels us to make choices that are certain to seize the course of the life of another and set their path on some dizzying descent?

Self-Preservation

When life presses us with an unnerving intensity we’re reflexively prone to revert to defensive position of self-preservation. Sure, it’s quite easy to be gracious and selfless when the cost of doing so isn’t all that significant. We can look quite the part when we don’t have a lot of skin in the game, or when we know that we’re not likely to be skinned while we’re in the game. We live within limits that are long on self and short on others.

Therefore, as the cost/benefit analysis swings away from us we’re more likely to gradually or not so gradually swing the cost over onto others. We’re noble, but noble to a point.  We’re generous, but only to the degree that what we’re getting sufficiently offsets what we’re giving. We will extend ourselves in ways that appear magnanimous and philanthropic as long as we don’t have to extend ourselves beyond arm’s reach of ourselves. There comes a point where the responsibility of accountability is just a bit too revealing, where the selflessness of putting ourselves aside is pinching our egos a bit too hard, and where the concept of sacrifice and the ‘good of our fellowman’ hasn’t given us all that much in return, if it’s given us anything at all.    

Our Expectations

When the world around us doesn’t reciprocate our simple acts of simply being a ‘good person’ in the manner in which we feel it should, we begin to become jaded and we take a darker turn into ourselves. When the world is perceived by us as greedy, when it seems that every action is driven by a covert agenda, and when the rampant selfishness appears wholly unrepentant and entirely irreparable, we pull inward and we put up impenetrable walls. And in putting up the walls we would be quite wise to ask if the things that we find so aberrant and awful are indeed the very things we ourselves engage in.  It may well be that our own greed is worse than those that we condemn because we too often demand that we dictate what we give to those around us.

If we are not aware of such distortions, we will make it about us. And in making it about us we’re foolishly led to believe that all of our many cherished expenditures are never expended because they never move outside of us. It’s all about us investing all of ‘us’ back into all of ‘us.’ This self-sabotaging, self-absorbing cycle creates an ever-hardening pattern where the deepening pain that we’re inflicting on others and the manner in which we are diminishing their lives begins to go entirely unnoticed.  Often we are on the receiving end of such behaviors, and sometimes we’re often the ones dishing them out.

We Are Too Expensive

When we make it about us, someone, somewhere is going to go down simply because the cost of being about ‘us’ is a cost that will always extend itself beyond ‘us.’ We don’t have the life currency to make it about us, so we borrow or steal that ‘currency’ from other places and other people. Despite our frequent arguments to the contrary, we simply do not have the inherent capacity to generate everything that we need. However astounding we might perceive it to be, our capacity to independently generate resources will perpetually fall short of the resources that we actually need. Therefore, as our accumulated needs swiftly exhaust our scant resources we are forced by our limitations to reach outside of ourselves to obtain those resources. And in either borrowing or stealing those resources from someone else, that ‘someone’ is going down as we attempt to push ourselves up. 

Need We Dare Remember

We’ve regularly failed to realize that being a good person pays exceedingly generous dividends far beyond anything we can borrow or steal. Riches born of sacrifice fill the coffers of heaven. Yet we miss those dividends because they’re not exactly the ones that we’re looking for, or they’ve come at some cost when we’d much prefer to receive them free of charge. And so, cynicism wins the day, pessimism reigns and we’re going to take others down with us without even recognizing that we’re doing so.

It’s quite sad enough that we do things to take ourselves down and shoot ourselves in the foot. Yet, it’s infinitely more tragic that we do that to others. We cannot control the actions of others as they perpetrate such behaviors upon us. Yet, we can control ourselves. So to avoid taking others down we’d be wise to look at the state of our heart, take the temperature of our attitude, and see if our soul is still breathing because we may find that they are all in some state that we’d much prefer them not to be. And once we’ve inventories them alive again, maybe we’ll realize that to sacrifice is to fill the coffers of heaven which will spill over into the vault of our soul.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites as well as our array of books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks being here today. See you next time.

In the Footsteps of the Few

Our Calling

“This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

I Timothy 2: 3-4 (NIV)

“The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ came to do three things. He came to have my past forgiven, you get a purpose for living and a home in Heaven.”

Rick Warren

It’s inevitable.  Sooner or later our lives will be over.  The day will come when we will reach the last minute of the last day on the last page of the calendar of our lives.  Sooner or later we will all have that single day when ‘tomorrow’ won’t be standing at the ready to become the next ‘today.’

 At that point, the daily obligations and challenges that both defined and drove our lives will come to an abrupt end.  All of the assorted tasks, the innumerable problems, the incessant obstacles, the various celebrations, the breaking and making of relationships, the paying down of mortgages, the paying out of compliments, and all of the things that consumed both our thoughts and our time will be forevermore concluded.

The Tally of What We Got Done

If all that’s left is an endless litany of tasks accomplished and problems overcome, then the tally of our lives is the tally of what we got done.  We suddenly find that we had lived out the sum total of our days bowing to the stale tedium of checklists. We completed a bunch of stuff, most of which didn’t really matter at the end.  Yes, it was impressive.  But impressive toward what end?

And all of this we had mistakenly taken as living.  Life has now fallen into the dramatically expanding backlog of history that tediously records achievements accomplished and dutifully stores them in the catacombs of history as life now completed.  We checked the boxes, but did we live?

We live to live life, but not change it.  We live to figure out its cadence, not transform it.  We live to create a comfortable place, rather than dare to discover our place.  We live to be good, but not to be great.  We live to win, which means that we’ve forsaken what it is to succeed.  We live without a calling because we didn’t deem it of enough importance to ask God what it was and how we fulfill it.  We checked a bunch of boxes, but we didn’t live.

A Calling

Do we live solely to check off the relentless list of incessant obligations that life pens on the pages of our lives?  Have we drearily defined life as something more of a strictly linear course where we begin at one point and methodically plod in a single direction in single steps until we reach a single point?  And if this cycle is the sum total of our existence, is it simply existence that we errantly took for living?  Have we chosen to be that ignorant and therefore squander our lives out of that ignorance?  And if it is simply existence, have we completely confused authentically robust living with something more akin to a robotic subsistence? And in it all an exhilarating sense of calling is lost.

The Core of a Calling

A calling calls us to charge the world rather than solely walk in blind lockstep with it. A calling declares that a strictly linear course can be majestically swept upward by wonder, breathlessly elevated by vision, and potently energized by faith.

A calling is a brilliant and entirely undimmed vision that breathlessly engages this existence of ours.  In the engagement, it loudly declares that there is infinitely more to all of this and that we have been specifically ordained to boldly usher that ‘more’ into our own existence. It is a surrender to the great God of great callings, who has not created a single life without gifting it with a calling in the creating. And in altering our own existence as well as transforming that of others by clothing ourselves in such a calling, we do nothing less than change the whole of our world.  That is a calling.  That is our calling.

Do I Have a Calling?               

We may at times state that we don’t have a calling, or that life has somehow bypassed us in the area of a calling.  However, such a view is often birthed of fear and fed by trepidation as we know that a calling will demand sacrifice.  Simply put, ignore your calling and you forfeit your life.

The issue is not having a calling.  The issue is in boldly setting out to discover it, embracing the whole of if without the fear that its size would impart, and living it out despite the inherent costs that are certain to be ours to endure in accepting it.  It is about living above our line of sight.  It’s about living beyond the reach of our vision.  It’s about living outside of that which provides us comfort. 

 Identifying Our Calling

One very effective way to identify your calling is to ask yourself what do you spend your time running from?  What have you repeatedly avoided?  What have you perpetually ignored?  What have you persistently pushed off to another day that never becomes ‘the’ day?  What is it that have you attempted to replace with a dizzying array of things that never replace it?

It’s not that we don’t understand our calling.  In fact, it is our running that evidences the fact that at some level we do understand it.  A calling is consuming, demanding, relentless and uncompromising.  It will hand you everything you could hope for, but it will demand everything that you hope in.  In a world drowning in trinkets marketed as treasure, next to God our calling is the single greatest thing that we could ever hope to engage.  And when something so frighteningly magnificent calls, the frailness of our humanity kicks in and we run.  Your calling is calling.  Are you listening or are you fleeing?  Because if you’re fleeing, your will live within the box of fear.  If you listen, you’ll never know what a box is.

You will find all of these outlined in my book, “In the Footsteps of the Few – The Power of a Principled Life.” You will find “In the Footsteps of the Few” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.