Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

"Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control."

• Proverbs 25:28

Life is filled with pain.  Or maybe more accurately, our lives are engulfed in pain.  We’ve all run into it, or have had it run into us, or have had it run over us.  That pain can be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual.  It can be a product of the people around us, or the person within us.  It can come to us in the form of circumstances beyond our control, or circumstances that we should have controlled.  We might have had nothing to do with it, or everything to do with it.  In whatever way it comes, pain comes to all of us.

The perpetually debilitating nature of our pain gradually weakens our resolve to fight it.  Our belief that we can somehow beat it dissolves into some sort of mythical fantasy that becomes dimmer with each passing day.  Desperate to have even a moment of relief from the pain that dogs our steps, we turn to self-medication.  Self-medication can take on any number of forms, but the desire to seek relief is what drives them all.  If these methods of self-medication deliver the desired relief, our decision to use them is reinforced.  In time, we can begin to develop a gradually increasing dependency upon them that is far beyond their intended use or actual benefit. 

These means of self-medication soothe our emotional state, grant us a sense of control over our pain, and become so thoroughly integrated into our daily lifestyle that to remove them would cause a disruption in our lives that we perceive as far greater than the disruption of the dependency that we have now created.  We soon discover that the means of self-medication has created its own pain.  And in time that pain replaces the pain that we were originally self-medicating against, leaving us in the perpetually debilitating state that is certain to be our fate if we decide to swap one kind of pain for another in order to somehow remedy our pain.

The longer the dependency, the tighter its grip.  We fear the seemingly insurmountable challenge of breaking the addiction.  This fear is compounded by our concern that what we medicated ourselves against will return in force if we forsake our addiction.  In essence, we are held hostage to a something that numbs but never cures.

You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark

We all create expectations.  But how often are our expectations a wholesale surrendering of ‘what could be’ to ‘what is?’  How often are they borne of a discouraged soul and a frightened heart that cannot see beyond the realities of the moment so as to envision a brighter reality standing at-the-ready in the next moment?  How many times have we taken the darkness of today and handily projected it onto the landscape of a tomorrow that is in fact full of light?  How many times have we expected that failure will be our lot, disappointment our bedfellow, and that this curse is somehow our due?  We create expectations because that’s what we do, so we’d better be very careful as to how we create them.

What Shapes Our Expectations

There are an innumerable array of elements that mold and craft our expectations.  However, there are several that seem to directly impact most, if not all of the rest.  In and of themselves, these three are certain to kill our vision and utterly convince us that tomorrow will surely embody the darkness of today.  Left unchecked to bleed into the other areas of our lives, they can leave us destitute. 

First, we have a tendency to focus on the negative experiences that we have had for fear that the positive ones weren’t authentic, or if perchance they were, they’re unlikely to come our way again.  Second, we build a faith that’s safe, which means that it’s ‘faith’ in name only and therefore it holds no power.  Third, our vision is limited by the walls that we’ve meticulously constructed all around ourselves in order to protect us against imaginary enemies, or at least enemies that are not nearly as gigantic as we’ve given them permission to become.  And while it’s obvious that far more goes into the creation of our expectations than these three ingredients alone, these would appear to be inordinately impacting.

Making ‘What Is,’ ‘What Will Be’

Because these appear to be an inherent part of us, we gather up the sum total of our negative experiences, we fall victim to them because the lackluster nature of our purported faith can do no other, and we hold them hostage to these incessantly compressing walls of ours.  And in this ever-weary concoction of negativity, faithless faith and massive walls, everything coalesces to shape a distorted observation of ‘what is,’ which then goes on to shape these rather dark expectations of ‘what will be.’

Therefore, our expectations are constricted to what will ‘not’ happen verses being exuberantly expanded to embrace what actually might.  We project the misery of the present onto the landscape of the future and render it such before we even get there to better ascertain what it might actually be.  We live with this morbid expectation that nothing will get better, that the future is eternally doomed to be nothing more than the past in redress, and that any hope of something better would be yet another expectation disappointed when we feel far too fragile to bear yet another disappointment of any sort at all.

Hope Deferred

The morning was yet dark as if the darkness was purposefully lingering in spite of a morning that should have long been well on its way.  The cold of a winter in retreat somehow remained fiercely undiminished, casting a biting edge across what was supposed to be a warming spring.  The snow had secretly begun falling under the cover of a night now lifting, leaving a world elated by spring’s flowers laying helplessly encased in winter’s white.  It was as if the coming of spring was a promise disappointed; a hope fallen prey to a winter that spring was supposed to be advancing against.  That days tenderly warmed at the edges with hints of green breathing new life into winter’s impossible cold were a hope ripped away.

Sometimes we let circumstances of the moment create our expectations of the future.  We altogether lose the vision of being able to see beyond what besets us at the moment.  What we see is the ‘what is’ that our minds have interpreted as ‘what will be.’  And we throw the ‘what could be’ of a future yet unwritten into the straitjacket of a ‘what is’ that has all but consumed us.  The ‘now’ is projected forward and the future is subsequently cast in its unforgiving mold.   We create the shackles that bind us to the present and we fashion the blindfold that keeps us from seeing the future as anything but the present.  Our expectations of ‘what will be’ are crafted entirely by ‘what is,’ and yet it is highly likely that neither are correct.

I Heard a Robin

Suddenly and without warning, out of snow and darkness I heard a robin.  I heard the harbinger of spring call out into the dead of winter.  I heard a single song that raised itself up against the dark and the cold and the anger of a winter being forced into retreat.  It sat entirely at odds with everything that made that morning that morning, this bold song of this single bird off in the distant distance.  As held against the power of the frigid morning, it seemed to be voice mocked by the morning itself.  It seemed a lone prophet of spring that was ridiculed for bringing a such a song into such a morning.  But it sang anyway.  It sang until the sun rose.  It sang the promise of something better that I could not see because I had errantly projected the ‘what is’ of a dark moment onto the ‘what could be’ of a spring already surging in my direction.  This single robin was not deterred by the darkness and foreboding cold of my expectations.  It sang.  And that evening, it bid the cold day farewell by singing into the night of spring well on the way.

Expectations

It took a robin, this single harbinger of spring to remind me that the moment is just that…the moment.  On the heels of any day or any event there is a robin singing in the distance.  There is the hope of something coming, of the end of the darkness and the cold, of all things always moving on to new things.  I cannot allow my expectations of ‘what is’ to create some sort of construed view of a future that in and of itself will not bow to my ‘what is’. 

It might be dark.  It might be cold.  I might not see the horizon.  But out on the horizon’s edge there stands a robin.  There is something that is raising its song into the darkness and the cold, heralding the truth that something new has long been running in our direction.  Such is the story of spring, and better yet, such is the promise of God’s redemptive plan.  Something new is coming and the darkness of our expectations cannot stop it.  It’s existence is undeniable and its arrival is inevitable.  So you might take a moment, step into a darkness that is cowering before the light of a new day, pull your coat tight against a cold that is bowing in sure retreat, raise an ear and listen for a robin.

“I can do all things through him who gives me strength.”

• Philippians 4:13

We are bound by all kinds of limits. And we wonder why certain limits have to be limits. Why are our dreams stunted by limits that put them just outside of our reach? Why do we have relationships that become suffocated by limits, leaving them only a shadow of what they could be? Why do our job aspirations, our hopes for our children, our desires for a better world…why do all of these fall victim to limits that should not be limits?

We are a people of hope and vision. We can imagine great things. Incredible things. We have the ability to visualize a greater good and a richer existence. We can craft fantastic dreams that are enriching beyond imagination. Yet, many of these fall prey to limitations that we did not create and cannot overcome. The best of ourselves and our dreams are often left languishing in the face of limits that thwart the best of us.

There seems to be cruelty about it all. Something that borders on savagery. If our limits are going to cut the feet out from under our greatest dreams, why are we allowed to dream these things in the first place? Why a vision if limits render it impotent?

Limitations are not the issue. There’s a vulnerability to every one of our limitations. A limit to them. They are suspectable. They are not as ironclad and invincible as they would appear. And that’s the reason that they exist. They exist to be broken. Not by us, but by the God Who breaks them daily. In the midst of the impossibilities that he faced, Paul said, “I can do all things through him who gives me strength.” That is the promise of limits broken. The promise of dreams safe to dream and visions worth having.

You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Backwards - The Grand Reversal of Easter

By Craig D. Lounsbrough

I am backwards.  I don’t think I’m backwards, I wouldn’t necessarily see myself as backwards, nor would I tell you that I’m backwards; but I’m backwards.  And the oddity of it all is that I actually see backwards as forwards.  From where I’m sitting it doesn’t look backwards at all.  However, in terms of how I conceptualize the realities of life as held against the limitations that I perceive myself as having, I’m backwards. 

I’m backwards because I have tediously assessed the realities of the existence within which I am forced to operate, and I have concurrently determined the permanently fixed limitations that define my humanity as I live within that existence.  And based on the conclusions I have drawn in these two areas, I have done a rather splendid job of setting the parameters for my existence by configuring (to the best of my ability) what’s possible and what’s not.

In the end, this determination that I have made regarding that which is ‘possible’ verses that which is ’impossible’ is markedly canted toward the ‘impossible’, leaving me facing a life bereft of everything except a handful of the most limited ‘possibilities’.  Worse yet, this determination has come to comprehensively define all of life as I know it, leaving me nothing bigger than myself.  I have categorized the whole of life as falling within the limits that limit me, assuming these are limits for everything that exists, or ever will exist, or ever could exist.  And in that sense, I have dramatically drawn down life into some minute rubric that is but the slightest fraction of what life really is.  Indeed, I am backwards.

God’s Reversal

We reject God because He is not backwards.  He comes to us asking us to move forward, which we, by virtue of our shallow determinations about how life works, see as backwards.  And we stand there wondering why we would be asked to do something so utterly preposterous as moving backwards.  In fact, what God calls forward we call impossible, or improbable, or ridiculous, or naïve, or fanciful, or ignorant, or any number of other explanations that really do more to explain how backwards we really are.

Reversals

History is littered with God’s reversals.  Leprosy was healed when the person should have been consumed by it and died.  Bodies of water were split in two when they should have been completely impassible.  Food to feed literal thousands was secured from nothing more than a few small fish and a handful of leftover loaves of bread.  Massive armies were evaporated without so much as a shot being fired.  Dead teenagers were raised to life instead of being dropped in a hole.  Paralytic limbs were straightened and people walked away when they should have crawled away.  That stuff is all backwards.

The Grand Reversal of Easter

Then there is the grand reversal of Easter.  It began with an execution reversed, whereby He who was innocent was brutally executed by those who were guilty.  It was an inhumane execution turned into ingenious sacrifice, whereby an end for one man turned into a beginning for all men.  It was a devout religious leader who should have cast his vote against this man, who instead carried this man’s body into his own tomb.  Three days later it was an empty tomb when it should have not have been, leaving a dead man walking which is a reversal of the most astounding sort.  It was a group of terrified disciples keeping their heads down while crawling back to their old lives, now standing directly in front of the man they watched lose His.  It was all backwards. 

These were all uncategorically opposite of what should have been.  If we apply the realities of the existence within which each of us are forced to live, these things and so many more were and are completely backwards.  They were completely opposite of how it all should work.  They simply did not and do not fit into how we have conceptualized the realities of the existence within which we are forced to operate, and how we have concurrently determined the permanently fixed limitations that define our humanity.  They are backwards.

Going Forward

To fix this conundrum, might we say that to go forward we must indeed be willing to go backwards.  And I suppose the best way to do that is to switch the two of these in our minds by reversing our perception of how this existence actually operates.  And we cannot do that unless we include God, for God is the single and sole thing that reverses the limits of our humanity by quite literally obliterating those limits with His limitlessness.  Therefore, we must comprehensively trade who we are for what He is, and in the trading trade off everything of us in the exchange. 

We must understand that it is not our limits that define our existence at all, although we have foolishly surrendered to that terribly myopic idea.  Rather, it is God’s power and nature that define it.  We must understand or at least accept the immense, radical and in many cases incomprehensible difference between who we are and who God is.  And out of that understanding we must willingly trade our limitations for God’s limitlessness.  Indeed, that alone will abruptly turn things around. 

When we do that, backward becomes forward.  And when that happens we will have cut the chains that we’ve slapped on life, we will have blown out the boundaries that we thought defined us, the ‘possible’ verses that which is ’impossible’ now becomes wholly canted toward the ‘possible’, and the horizons that we had tightly fixed on our lives suddenly blow out to horizons that are horizon-less. 

Standing in the gaping space now created, we suddenly start to understand that dreams are more than hopeful fantasies that our minds toy with, rather they become realities that life is changed with.  That a vision for something better can move from ‘nice idea’ to ‘transforming ideal’.  That hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate, but it is crafted hard by the hands of God.  That the end of ourselves is where God begins.  That the fear of failure is slain cold by success already hot on the way.  That a looming mountain is nothing more than a road in disguise, and that the impossible is not an obstacle but an invitation. 

Message Delivered

All of this and more happens when we refuse to continue to go backwards.  All of this and more is the true forward.  This is the incessant and unrelenting message of God throughout history.  And it is a message hand delivered by God’s Son Jesus with potent impact at Easter.  It is a message for anyone who will hear it.  It is the single and sole message that can turn us from backward to forward.  Therefore, be assured that the direction of our lives and the outcome of our existence will hinge on what we do with this single message.  Oh yes, I am backwards, but no longer.  How about you?

Find additional Easter resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.

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“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own; you were bought at a price.  Therefore honor God with your body.

• I Corinthians 6:19-20

Life is precious.  Therefore, the loss of it goes deep.  There are losses that are a natural part of our existence.  They hurt, but at least they make sense.  But then there are the losses that don’t make sense.  The losses that didn’t need to happen.  The losses that were premature, unnecessary, avoidable, and entirely out of step with life as we know it (or would like to know it).

Suicide is one of these.  This loss was a choice.  In all likelihood it involved the convergence of many things dark and weighty; hopelessness, despair, life gone wrong, self-hatred, incessant failures, the inability to find a niche, dreams smashed, relationships lost, faith gone.  And the pressing compilation of such things tips the scales and renders death preferable to life.  At some point of darkest desperation, a decision is made and an action is taken.  And suddenly we are left with a loss that doesn’t make sense.  A loss that didn’t need to happen.  A loss that was premature and unnecessary.  A loss that doesn’t fit because it shouldn’t.  And despite our best effort to understand it all, resolution eludes us and people continue to die.

And all of those who live out their lives in those places are eventually left asking the question of “why?”  But maybe we need to replace the question of “why” with the question of “how” because that question holds the answers to what we need to change in our lives, our families, our communities, and our nation to save the next life.

You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

“…for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’”

• Romans 3:23

Failure.  It’s having set out to do something, or not do something, and having failed to achieve the goal either way.  It’s falling short.  It’s having missed the mark, or having pulled out of the race long before we came anywhere close to the mark.  It’s the dream that we couldn’t breathe life into, or the fear that we couldn’t breathe the life out of.  It’s the relationship that we couldn’t hold because we were not worth being held.  It’s the thing that puts us in our place because we foolishly thought that we might be better than that place.  It’s falling down and finding no reason to get back up.

Failure is a stark message regarding our ability or lack thereof.  It is the undeniable evidence of what we feared might be true, that we are in fact inadequate or incompetent or whatever we feared that we might be.  It reminds us of our misdirected efforts to elevate our place in life, and it assigns us the very station that we worked so hard to avoid.  It tells us that our dreams are bigger than our ability to achieve them.  That mediocrity is our lot in life, so we’d be wise to settle there and at least do that well.

But we forget that failure is the refusal to try.  Trying and not succeeding is the very place where God has placed the richest cache of learning opportunities available to us.  It’s a chance to try again, but to try differently.  It’s an opportunity to become everything that failure says we cannot become because it is failure itself that has taught us how to outflank it.  Falling short, missing the mark, or pulling out of the race are nothing more than events packed rich with learning opportunities that set the stage for greater things…possibly great things.  It is not the fact that these things happened.  It is what we do with the fact that they happened.  And if we seize the opportunities for growth that God has graciously planted within each of these, failure will fall to a life rich with success.

You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.’”

• Psalm 139:14

One of the worst things is not knowing who you are.  And probably a close second to that is to hate what you do know.  And right behind that there’s the effort to create something that you think you’ll like in order to solve both of those problems.

But all of this misses the only battle that’s worth fighting, and the only effort that will insure success.  Life is not about creating ourselves.  Rather, it’s about discovering ourselves.  It’s not about assuming some presumed right to make ourselves what we’re not.  Rather, it’s about the privilege of discovering who we already are.  And that journey is one of the most profound journeys that we are each privileged to take.

Yet we live in a world bent on creating what cannot be created.  Certainly, we can mimic many things, but the mimicking will never make us those things.  We stand by and watch those committed to becoming what they are not, realizing that the greatest pain experienced by these persons is not the struggle of loving themselves.  Rather, it’s the heartbreaking failure that they will experience in the persistent effort to make themselves what they are not.  And the self-hatred that is certain to follow that failure will handily surpass that which drove them to this decision in the first place.

The rampant declaration to pursue such agendas and to force them on larger society illustrates the failed nature of the endeavor.  It would be wise to remember that if something is based in truth it will not need us to sell it simply because the priceless nature of truth always places it beyond the reach of any such market.  And one of the greatest truths that we are in desperate need of embracing is the truth of who we are, along with the equally great truth of who we are not.   

You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Four

Did you ever have one of those surreal moments when it seems like something snaps in your head and suddenly you see everything like you never saw it before?  Have you experienced those times when things unexplainably shift and they don’t look at all the same as they did only a moment ago?  When what was entirely familiar is no longer familiar in quite the way that it was before?

A lot of things can trigger these moments . . . an argument, a child leaving the home, a death, a job loss, a divorce, a birthday, unexpected contact from a long-lost friend or any number of similar events.  In the middle of whatever this is, you’re suddenly able to see the reality of your life with a stunning, nearly razor-sharp clarity that you’ve never had before.  It’s kind of like you were blind and you didn’t know it and in the briefest nanosecond, for the briefest nanosecond you were granted stunningly perfect vision.  And with that perfect vision, everything looks perfectly different. 

Suddenly, what we now see is familiar but strangely unfamiliar at the same time.  We intimately know everything that we see around us but it’s entirely alien just the same.  It looks different or not quite right.  It’s my life but it’s not my life, or at least what I wanted my life to be.  It’s what I’ve been living all along, but at the same time it’s not what I’ve been living, or what I thought I was living.

And we stand there rubbing our eyes because what we see is not stuff we saw before, or at least what we saw with the clarity that we see it now.  In the emotional turmoil these rare moments create we’re often left asking “who am I and where am I?”  And in the briefest nanosecond, in exactly the same way it came, this vision is gone.  However, the memory of what those few incredible moments revealed is anything but gone.

What times like this most often reveal is the paralyzing reality that we are not where we intended to be.  This was not the destination that we had mapped out as pimply-faced teens or adventurous young adults or giddy newlyweds.  The line that we had drawn from those younger years forward in time didn’t go where we’re at now, or weren’t supposed to go here; to this place that we now realize we are.  We never really considered the heading on our compass.  And now we pick it up, shake it to make certain it’s actually working and we’re left realizing that it’s working perfectly but we didn’t follow it.  And now we stand at some point far removed from, and possibly decades away from where we were supposed to be, or thought we were supposed to be.

What hits us really hard is that we didn’t fully realize the deviation from the path that our dreams had laid out so long ago.  We got here and we didn’t even realize that we got here.  But now we know it.  And we’re standing deflated, attempting to figure out where we got so terribly off course, all the while madly calculating how many years we have left, and how many responsibilities we have on our plate in order to determine if we have the time and the freedom to ever get back on course.

Worse yet, some of us don’t even remember what the course was in order to retrace it.  Others of us never set a course for ourselves in the first place; having allowed the winds of life and the currents of circumstance to bring us here.  Whatever the case, there is this chilling, haunting sense that we are not where we wanted to be, and that the path intended to take us there may now be forever forfeited.  We fear a life squandered.  And the question wildly reverberates in a near panic, “how did I get here?”

I Am Where I Am

At these times we can certainly pull out our tattered life map, grab whatever compass we’ve used over the years, or review the saved settings on our personal or relational or spiritual GPS.  We can then hunker down over the topography of our past trying to scrawl out the line that brought us here.  We can do all of that.  And in doing that there may be value.

However, we are where we are.  Like it or not, we’re “here,” wherever “here” is.  First, the task is really about determining exactly where we’re at in order to get some sort of bearing on our life.  After that, we need to determine where we want to go.  Then we need to determine do we have the time and the resources to get there.  It’s not about bemoaning where we are.  Certainly we can make room to do that for a bit if that gets it off our chests.  It’s really more about grabbing hold of our lives and planning a strategy to take us where we want to go.

Where Am I?

So where am I anyway?  Not where I think I am or necessarily perceive myself to be or have deluded myself into believing I am.  But where am I . . .  really?  It may be a tough or even painful thing to think about.  It may be harder to accept and embrace.  It’s likely that not thinking about it was a major contributor to getting you here in the first place.  So look around and be chillingly honest.

Embracing where we’re actually at will likely involve grieving time and opportunities lost, anger that it happened, disappointment in that we let it happen, frustration that we weren’t attentive enough to keep it from happening, confusion over how it happened, and a host of other weighty and powerful emotions.  Our desire to avoid these may result in a less than honest assessment of our location.  However, such a less than honest assessment of where we’re at will entirely undermine any ability to reclaim lost dreams and dashed hopes.

Where Do I Want to Go?

Where I want to go is not about running from where I am.  Sometimes our destination in life is determined by our desire to get away from where we are.  If fleeing our present place in life is what drives us, we’re likely to make poor choices about where we want to go simply because the motivation is not entirely adequate.

Second, where we want to go does not necessarily have to be a radical resurrection or reconstitution of our old hopes or dreams.  We’re in a different place under different circumstances with different realities and different responsibilities than we had way back when.  It’s more about re-evaluating life and asking fresh and new questions about where we want to go.

Third, we may find that we really shouldn’t go anywhere at all.  It may be that we should commit to build upon and expand where we are.  Investment and renovation in the very place we’re at may result in the exact life we’re looking for.  Where we want to go may very well be utilizing the resources that we have right here and shaping them into something that we didn’t ever consider they could be.

Do I Have the Resources?

Some resources we have less of, like time.  Other resources we have more of, like maturity and knowledge and experience.  It’s about assessing our resources and realizing that we likely have more resources at our disposal than we did in the earlier years; we just don’t realize it.  Then it’s about pooling and maximizing those resources into whatever endeavor we feel directed toward.

Have You Considered . . . ?

In reality, most of us end up someplace other than what we intended.  Life is not so smooth or manageable as to chart direct courses on tidy timelines.  It’s more about recalibrating and making course corrections along the way, believing that life is a journey that takes us off course at times, but provides us resources to likewise alter those courses.  Not where you want to be?  Think about it.

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’”

• Psalm 27:10

There are many things that are meant to be forever.  There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never questioned because they are designed to be permanent.  Their role in our lives had nothing of a temporary nature built into them.  Therefore, we have no reason to doubt their permanence.  As such, we never stop to consider what life would be like without them because such a thought is entirely at odds with their permanence.  Yet, we live in a world where permanence can be traded for lesser agendas and what should never have left us does.

When a parent abandons us, the immense internal conflict of their supposed permanence as held in juxtaposition against their absence rocks our world to dark places.  In our desperate efforts to correlate the irreconcilable discrepancies of permanence as held against abandonment, we rationalize the loss of the parent or we work to suppress the pain by denying the loss altogether.  We work to believe that this might be better anyway, or that they were going to leave sooner or later, or that they needed their space to live their lives.  Yet we soon discover that no rationalization is ever big enough or convincing enough to release someone of a commitment for which there is no release.

And in the desperation of times like these we begin to realize that we’ve turned to God because He has remained permanent.  It is His permanence that becomes our sure refuge.  Our sense of stability arises from His stability.  Our ability to somehow craft a future empty of a parent that should have been part of that crafting is centered on the fact that God is a certain part of that future as much as He is a part of the present that is shaping that future.  And we have the certainty that He will never abandon us in either.

You will find "Taking It to Our Knees - Rigorous Prayers for Life's Greatest Challenges" in paperback or hardcover at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Three

The concept of sacrifice seems more suited to novels or epic movies.  It appears more an ideal; a concept that when observed from a safe distance seems wonderfully heroic, deeply inspiring and chivalrous in a way that stirs up something powerful in us that seems to be forever held hostage despite the fact that it gets stirred.  Sacrifice, as we watch it displayed from afar, awakens some internal passion that chafes against our souls in its quest to be unleashed within us.

Somehow sacrifice seems to be something that is entirely right, that is likewise entirely lost.  There are those things that we believe exist yet are lost to mankind; the things we are ever in search of not because we are caught up in some sort of shallow fascination with them.  Rather, there are those things that we know to be authentically real whose absence must be remedied by their discovery.  There are those things that we are made for, yet which are entirely absent.

Sacrifice is one of those things.  It’s something that we know we are all called to.  It’s one of those things that we know is the right thing to do; that it’s part of our humanity and represents something undeniably central.  Sacrifice is the totality of our humanity called upward and outward in a grand display of selfless behavior.  It declares that we are not made solely for ourselves, but that we are made for others.  It captivates our minds and catapults our actions to do things we never dreamt possible.  Indeed, it defines the core of our humanity; representing the ultimate action that one human being can take on behalf of another human being.  That’s sacrifice.

The Balance of Sacrifice

All of this doesn’t mean that our lives are always about other people.  It’s simply about priority and the arrangement of things in our lives.  Our culture, and in many cases our world seems bent on maximizing our personal gains in any situation.  There appears to be an inherent mentality that the self can be sacrificed, but only to the degree that the self is not actually threatened, or threatened beyond likely recovery.  Sacrifice is calculated and made clean.  Certainly, we must exercise wisdom when we take actions on the behalf of others, but a clear set of priorities would seem to dictate the manner in which we act with others in mind.

Priorities

It seems that our actions are dictated by our priorities.  There appears to be this inherent grid that we run decisions through.  That grid seems primarily to hold the welfare of self above everything else.  Clearly, that seems to be in keeping with the natural tendencies and behaviors of base human nature.

Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.  There’s some sort of sense of community, of relationship and connection that deems us only a part of a much large whole.  And as a part of that larger whole, we are obligated to preserve the whole above the preservation of self.  That dichotomy all seems rather strange because it appears to run against our natural inclinations to make certain that we’re okay and that our personal interests are protected.

What’s the End-Game?

We all ask where we want everything to end up.  At the end of it all, when our days are over and the fullness of our time, talents and energies are spent what will be left?  That’s a terribly big, and in some cases, a terribly frightening question.

If our focus is upon ourselves, then the end results of our lives will be likewise focused on us.  The benefits and resources that we will have garnered and spent will serve us and us alone.  That might make for a life that we perceived as satisfying and a good ride, but it ends at our end.  The service of self terminates at our own death.  Therefore we will have left nothing that outlives us, nothing that serves the greater good, nothing for those who remain.  It would seem that the end-game is indeed the end-game in a manner tragic and unfortunate.

What about Legacy?

What kind of footprint will each of us leave?  Will it be big enough and broad enough that others are enriched by it and find both comfort and inspiration in it?  Will it have changed lives, redirected people who were on crash courses to their own destruction, or given someone somewhere some degree of hope in a place where they saw none for themselves?  Will our legacy live on, not just for the purpose of living on but for the purpose of giving others purpose?  Are we committed to leaving something of value behind that will cost us, but will in turn be of inestimable value to someone else, someplace else?  Or are our lives spent in the service of self which means it all begins, and more tragically ends there?

In leaving a legacy, we can’t be so shallow as to leave a legacy of who we were as some sort of monument to self.  Monuments are not legacies, they are simply reminders.  A legacy is leaving something to others for the sole purpose that it gives them something valuable and needed in their own journey whether we are given the credit for that or not.  It’s a selfless detachment where we hand another human being something that may very well be life-saving without them knowing its origin or being able to credit the one who gave it to them.  It’s a gift that is given for no other purpose than the nature of the gift and the recipient who will receive it; the giver being entirely lost in the transaction.  That is sacrifice.

How Will I Live?

Sacrifice . . . it runs contrary to who we are, but it is in reality everything that we are.  The pinnacle of our humanity is ascended when we descend in the service of others.  We are raised up when we lay ourselves down.  It builds us, it builds others, and it builds families, communities and nations.  Sacrifice is the best of our humanity manifest in shining moments when everything that would diminish us is overcome and set aside.  It is all of us at our very best.  So how then will you live?