Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

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

Forgiveness often seems to be one of those things that’s a genuinely nice idea, but not really a life liberating reality.  Life is full of nice ideas; those trite sayings, gentle stories and brave concepts that would make life a whole lot better if they were really real.  Nice ideas often seem to be spun of the threads of idealism and the fabric of fanciful thinking.  The reality is that they don’t really seem to work in the real world.  Sometimes the very things that we wish were true simply dissolve and disintegrate when the reality of life hits them.  Forgiveness seems to be one of those things.

Sometimes the greatest, most profound truths seem to be the very things that are completely removed from the reality of the lives that we live.  In reality, it’s not that they don’t fit or are idealistic or naïve or far-fetched.  Most often it’s simply the fact that we don’t know how to incorporate them.  Sometimes the greatest truths are so big and so encompassing that we can’t figure out how to figure them in.  And because we can’t somehow make them fit, we assume them to be irrelevant, weak, inadequate or just plain stupid.  Such often seems the fate of forgiveness.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines forgiveness as “to grant free pardon and to give up all claim on account of an offence or debt.”  The American Psychological Association expands the definition of forgiveness “as the process of concluding resentment, indignation or anger as a result of a perceived offense, difference or mistake, and/or ceasing to demand punishment or restitution.”  Whatever your definition might be, forgiveness is about letting go in a manner so total that the offense and the restitution are released.

Obstacles to Forgiving

Forgiveness is a releasing which makes it difficult on at least three basic fronts.  First, we typically demand restitution be obtained or that justice be meted out for whatever offense we have incurred.  There is a deep sense of justice that demands correction of an offense through some sort of action that both compensates us for whatever loss we’re sustained while teaching the offending party that such actions are inappropriate and intolerable.  The act of forgiveness works against this feeling, making forgiveness difficult and contrary.

Second, forgiveness creates a perceived sense of vulnerability.  If we “grant free pardon,” do we then open ourselves up to have the same offense perpetrated upon us again?  Are we giving space and opportunity for the offending party to do to us what they did before?  In forgiving, have we relinquished power that we can no longer hold over the person who offended us in order to keep ourselves safe or make them pay?

Third, we see forgiveness as letting someone ‘off the hook.’  It’s a free pass, a mulligan, a turning away where we permit ignorance to erase that which should not be erased.  We feel we do an injustice by not handing out justice and instead waving off an offense in a manner that seems both irresponsible and ignorant.  Forgiveness is often seen as an easy way to resolve or bypass something that should be dealt with.

What Forgiveness is Not

Forgiveness is not saying that the offense was ‘okay’ or somehow less than what it really was.  It’s not watering down the offense or somehow sweeping the whole thing under the proverbial carpet in some sort of passive gesture.  Forgiveness has nothing at all to do with avoidance or passivity.  There’s nothing placating or escapist about it.  It’s not an act of weakness nor is it a means to maneuver around that which we find unsavory or downright scary.  It is in reality an act of the utmost strength, the highest form of sacrifice and the deepest manifestation of our humanity. 

The truth is, it’s simply saying that to hold the offense against the person is simply too toxic for the one holding it.  We will be offended and we will take hits that are deep, searing and violently cutting.  When that happens, we must have an alternative to holding them.  There must be a release of some sort.  Holding the offense stymies the one holding it, therefore not allowing the offended party to move on.  Forgiveness makes nothing ‘okay.’  It’s not about that.  It’s about creating freedom and release in manner that nothing else affords us.

Neither is forgiveness a means of giving the offending individual permission to reoffend.  Forgiveness comes with the understanding of the nature of the offense, as well as the establishment of boundaries to keep the offense from happening again.  Forgiveness is not permissive or passive.  It’s not about being an inflatable punching clown that pops up for the sole purpose of taking another hit in an endless series of hits.  It is an intentional act of release, not an act of permission.

What Forgiveness Is

The old saying is quite true . . . forgiveness is more for the one who forgives than for him who is being forgiven.  In forgiveness, we choose to let go of the emotional toxicity that harboring anger over an offense breeds.  We are not granting permission to the offense or minimizing it.  Forgiveness is an act of personal liberation where we are setting ourselves free from whatever was done to us.  It is not an action that invalidates the offense.  Rather, it is an action that leaves the consequences of the action between a just God and the offending party while freeing us up to move on with our lives.  Forgiveness is a choice to leave the past with those who created it so that we can move on to a future yet to be created.  It has nothing to do with weakness and it has everything to do with strength.

The Hardest Person to Forgive    

In all of this forgiveness stuff, the absolutely hardest person to forgive is most often ourselves.  There’s some sort of blockage when we are the one in need of our own forgiveness.  There’s something doubly binding when we are both the offending party and the one extending forgiveness all wrapped in one.  The duality of all of that puts us in two roles at the same time, making forgiveness doubly difficult.

Despite the inherent difficulty, it’s right here that the greatest grace (unmerited favor) needs to be extended in that we embrace both authentic remorse for offenses we’ve incurred while extending ourselves the full release of forgiveness.  Something about this dichotomy is terribly difficult, holding many hostage to mistakes far in the past that dim or even rob the hope of the future.  Forgiveness is inherently powerful enough to extend itself wholly and completely to us even when we are the ones in need of forgiving ourselves.

Freeing Ourselves

What are you holding onto and why are you doing it?  If you look closely enough you’re likely to see that the rationale for withholding forgiveness is far outweighed by the liberating release inherent in forgiving.  Take stock of what you’re holding onto and consider the worth of holding it verses the freedom found in releasing it.     

Obstacles to Prayer

LifeTalk

“I want to live a life where prayer is the first thing that I do, the second thing, the third thing, and the last thing after the prayer has been answered.”

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Many of the obstacles to prayer are things that we have not given sufficient attention to, or we think that they’re somehow normal, appropriate, or of no real concern. These are the things that present themselves as rather casual issues that are of little importance. But they can (in fact) be major obstacles to an effective prayer life.

In this podcast we’re going to outline a handful of these destructive factors that too often lay hidden in our lives. And in wondering how or why our prayer lives seem so ineffectual or hollow, we might ask if any of these factors have found a place of residence in our lives.

Obstacles to Prayer

Sin.

Sin is an intentional living outside of the will of God that places us at odds with who God created us to be. Sin is described as “anything that separates us from God.” If we are engaging in such behaviors, we come to prayer already separated from the God to Whom we are praying.

Self-Centered Agendas.

We tend to live out our lives based on our agendas and our perception of what is in our best interest. Therefore, we do not come to prayer seeking God’s direction, God’s will,

God’s insights, or God’s perspective. Rather, we come with a prepared agenda where we wrangle with God in order to achieve these agendas or obtain the resources to achieve them.

Distractions. 

Prayer becomes the thing that we squeeze into the many demands in our lives. It’s something that sits somewhere near the bottom of the rather extensive checklist that outlines our obligations and duties. We intend to give prayer space and time, but it often falls prey to the many other demands that press prayer off of our calendar.

Shiny Object and Squirrels.

There are many things that vie for our attention. In reality, most of those things are not imperative to life and living, although we grant them that exact status. It’s often assumed that if something in our life demands our attention it’s because ignoring it will have dire consequences, when in fact deferring the majority of these things is unlikely to result in any consequence of consequence. As such, in the perpetual bombardment of an unnecessarily busy life, prayer is easily set aside.

Lack of Faith. 

We are lacking in faith. The lack of faith either inhibits our prayers as we feel that we bring very little to the process, or we bring little to the process because we don’t necessarily believe in praying anyway. We must remember that the size of our faith only becomes an issue when we refuse to use the faith that we have. So, use the faith that you’ve got to increase the faith that you don’t have.

Unmet Expectations.  

We come to prayer with expectations regarding the outcome of our prayers. If those outcomes are not achieved, we feel that prayer is ineffectual or irrelevant. If it fails to generate our prescribed outcomes, we’re quick to label prayer as irrelevant or entirely powerless. Our assumptions rest in the belief that our expectations are the ones that are right for our situation, rather than being the one’s that we should explore in order to determine what might actually be right for us.

A Jaded Heart. 

We feel that God has not answered our prayers in the way that we wanted, or in the time frame that we wanted, or maybe He didn’t answer them at all. We have found God disappointing, demanding, less than generous, absent, or a God that crushes our desires despite how passionately we bring them to Him. We refuse to understand that God cannot fulfill many of our desires because it is the fulfilling that would do the crushing.  Therefore, we either refuse to pray any longer, or we do so in such a limited fashion that it can barely be defined as prayer.

The Lure of the World. 

The world is full of enticing things that have no depth and lack any substance whatsoever. And therein lies the absurdity of it all. We chase after that which we believe will do the things that we’re chasing them to do. And once we actually catch them (or in some cases realize that we can’t because nobody does), we’re struck with the reality that these things weren’t what they appeared to be, or they didn’t possess the resources that we had errantly endowed them with.   

 The Insurance Policy.

Is prayer some supplemental thing that we do out of guilt, or a sense of obligation, or to cover the holes that we might have left in our efforts to tidy up our lives? Is prayer that safety net that we keep in place just in case the world fails us, or we fail ourselves? Is prayer that supplemental insurance policy that we hold onto ‘just in case?’ Prayer is not insurance. Rather, it's the assurance that we won’t need insurance.

There are many things that create obstacles to our prayer. And we would be wise to thoughtfully inventory our lives and ferret out anything that would create and sustain any such obstacle regardless of what it might be.

You will find all of these outlined in my book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” This book is a fresh, entirely relevant, and thoughtfully targeted thirty-day devotional that will bring the power of prayer to ‘life’ in your life. You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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.

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

We yearn for security.  There is an inherent need deep within the fiber of our being that desires to be able to lean on and lean into the things around us, knowing with steeled assuredness that they will hold us firm and steady.  We want life to be safe because we have a passion to engage life.  And to engage life out to its furthest edges, we must of necessity step out of ourselves and into that which is around us.  We have to step up, step off and step out.  Any real journey is of necessity a journey beyond ourselves.  A robust journey unapologetically takes us outside of all that we are able to keep safe, into that which we cannot.  To do that, we by nature need some degree of safety in the endeavor.

Not only do we naturally yearn to lean out into life, life at many junctures demands it, and a real journey is not possible without it.  Life frequently arrays itself before us in a manner that forces us to trust; to moderate or marginalize caution and to step out onto ground or relationships or circumstances that have not entirely convinced us of their certainty or safety.  Sometimes we have to step out into things that are not of themselves safe at all. 

Yet, if we are to journey, we must step out into these things.  Likewise, if we want to embrace everything there is to embrace, we must step out into and onto all of these things for most of them do not necessarily come to us.  We must of necessity go to them; extending not only the effort stepping out, but taking the entire initiative of seeking them out as they move either largely hidden or complete obscure.  Life most often calls us outward.  It beckons with grand and rich invitations that hold out the promise of growth and great adventure.  But it does not always come to us with those invitations.  We most often must go to it.  The hard evidence of our passion for the journey is illustrated in our willingness to chase it however elusive it might be.

The Risk in it All

Life however is terribly imperfect.  It seems that there was some grand design that granted us tremendous ability and then graced life with tremendous opportunity.  There seems to be shadows of some great correlation where we were equipped to do great things and then life laid out great resources and ample space within which to do those things.  The chemistry of it all made life something potentially grand. 

Somewhere the whole marvelous arrangement seemed to have gotten marred.  Somehow it was apparently damaged.  “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), which is the ultimate loss of the ultimate gift.  The original intention of grand opportunities remains, but it now has to overcome obstacles, barriers, and various difficulties.  Life demands that we battle disappointments, cruel turns, unexpected twists and surreal pain.  Life remains for the taking, but it now comes with risk; sometimes great risk.

Betrayal as Part of the Risk

Into all of this comes betrayal.  Betrayal is a cruel reversal.  It takes the trust entrusted and uses it for purposes contrary to trust’s intent.  Trust is a powerful thing.  It willingly bequeaths both power and vulnerability when it extends itself to another or to life.  Without trust, the greatest things in life are simply not achievable.  Trust pushes out the boundaries. It allows us to extend ourselves out into places we would not otherwise venture.  Whether that trust is vested in the destination itself, who we’re journeying with, who we’re journeying for, or whether that trust is vested in ourselves, it must be present.  Trust is the prerequisite to risk and without risk little can be accomplished.

Betrayal takes trust and cruelly uses it to the advantage or purpose of the one initiating the betrayal.  The agenda is most often self-centered.  It’s about using trust to achieve an agenda that trust was not extended to achieve.  Betrayal is altering both the journey and the intent for which trust was extended.  A great gift is used for a great evil against the giver. Something painful and at times barbaric is then perpetrated.

Betrayal at Its Worst

The greatest and most painful aspect of betrayal is the belief that the very action of betrayal is not betrayal at all.  Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the façade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals; being in reality a double betrayal.  It is where the betrayer is set upon betrayal in a manner hidden and cloaked.  It is chillingly devious and it carries an impaling venom deadly to the one who extended the gift of trust.

There is also a deluded sort of betrayal where betrayal is seen as a correct course of action or a necessary agenda by the one initiating the betrayal.  Betrayal is often justified or rationalized as something other than betrayal.  At times the action is viewed by the initiator as healthy or appropriate or entirely just, and it is projected as such.  It seems the right and necessary thing to do.  Unacknowledged betrayal is the most damaging and destructive betrayal we can experience.  It presumes a violation as no violation.  In the face of great betrayal it pretends no such betrayal.  We are then left with the betrayal itself and no means of resolution with the party who betrayed us because they see no violation.  We are left not only damaged, but we are left entirely alone with no means of justice with the betraying party.

Coping with Betrayal

Betrayal wounds deeply and its effects are lasting.  Yet it has come into all of our lives and it will come again.  There are several ways to cope and heal.

First, we must recognize that betrayal is not our fault.  We may have done things that have been damaging or inappropriate, but nothing justifies betrayal.  Despite whatever our actions were or were not, betrayal is not appropriate.  There are always other means to deal with life issues.  Other options exist.

Second, betrayal is often another person attempting to navigate their life circumstances.  Sometimes those efforts are naively well-intentioned and based in ignorance or immaturity. Other times they are malicious, intended to force an agenda that the person feels can be achieved in no other manner.  Either way, betrayal is the effort of an individual attempting to navigate some circumstance.  Regardless of how or why it happened, it is inappropriate.

Third, betrayal is painful but it affords opportunity for growth.  The farther down we are thrust, the higher we can rise.  Betrayal pushes us to the darkest lows.  These places, dark and cold as they are, create opportunities for us to grow to tremendous heights.  Rather than embedding fear of people or life within us, betrayal gives us experiences and profound discernment to engage life with even greater risk knowing that our dramatically sharpened discernment provides us vision for a safer course.

Betrayal has likely come for you already.  It may have visited you many times.  You can be assured it will show itself again.  Whatever the case, it can build you or diminish you. It will not leave you the way that it found you.  Do not let betrayal betray you or your future.  May you grow and be enriched because of it.

The odds that are we’ve never met, and if we have, I hope that I was able to leave something with you in the meeting as that is my passion and my calling.

My life has been devoted to helping people.  You know, you start out with a vision to help people, and that vision is often pretty romanticized.  In your mind you envision changing people lives, and because you are, you envision changing the world.  It all becomes kind of heroic, and valiant, and courageous, and all of that.

But you soon discover that helping people (truly helping them), will ask everything of you.  It’ll drain you.  At times it will drive you to despair.  You will look pain, and loss, and abuse, and hopelessness, and shattered lives, and addictions…you will look all of that stuff in the face, and you will find yourself questioning your ability to do anything about it at all.  Sooner or later, helping people will leave you with some level of trauma, and there will come a time (more than one time) that helping people make you ask if the world and the people in it are simply beyond hope.  Helping people will ask everything of you, and at times it will take everything from you.

As I sit with people day-in and day-out, I sit there with my own pain as well.  My own life has been marked by pain, by personal devastation, by losses that I thought impossible to survive, by abandonment that left me devastated, and by disappointments that crushed me to the point that I thought that recovery (of any kind) was simply a fantasy that was too painful to fantasize about. 

And so, I live the two sides of pain.  Those of the people that I’ve served for over forty years, and that of my own pain.  And there’s nothing heroic in that, as there are untold millions of people who set out each day to make the world a better place despite the wounds that they carry as they seek to heal the wounds that others carry.  And to all of you who are the walking wounded who have given their lives over to help those others who are wounded, whoever or wherever you may be, you have my deepest admiration.

But here’s the point in all of this.  Many people mock God as either someone who only exists in the feeble-minded or those who has to find security is some fabricated myth. Or if He does exist, he’s someone who’s incapable, or incompetent, or irrelevant, or out of touch, or outmoded, or inherently judgmental, or someone who’s failed us in entirely unacceptable ways…or however we’ve labeled Him.

But without hesitation, and without any sense of contrived religiosity, or syrupy idealism, or preachy verbiage, I can tell you that God is real.  I can also tell you that I would not be sitting here without Him.  And that’s not some cute or inspiring statement that’s supposed to trigger some emotion in you.  It’s my reality.  Life would have destroyed me without Him.  God is my rock in every sense of the word.  He is sturdy in the storm, both my own and those that I work with each and every day.  He is in the turmoil, but He is above it.  He is not the cause of our pain, but He is the solution to it.  He is not some idealized myth created by weak people who can’t face the realities of the world.  He is the greatest reality in all of the world.  He is what you need.  He is the everything in the middle of your nothing.

And I know this because I’ve lived it.  More than once.  In the pain.  In the darkness.  In the loss.  In the confusion.  In those moments of deep desperation.  When hope is something that I just can’t believe in any longer because life has left no place for it.  At those times in life when I can’t take the next step because I can’t get myself off of the ground so that I can try and take it.  I know that God is all of those things because I’ve watched Him do the impossible in my life, and I’ve sat next to tens of thousands of people, and I’ve watched Him do the impossible in lives whose situations were nothing but impossible.

Our culture would deny this.  In fact, it would ridicule it and do its level best to declare that all of this is the stuff of weakness, and foolishness, and stupidity, and ignorance.  And all I know is that I’ve watched it work too many times, in my own life, and in the lives of others to know that it’s far more real than the culture that would say that it is not.

If you’re lost today.  If your pain is deep beyond imagination.  If you’re standing alone in the darkness that is always a part of being alone.  If your dreams have died.  If your spouse has left, or your child has rejected you, or your finances have collapsed, or hope has eluded you, or if you’ve come to the point that you look in the mirror and you despise everything that you see looking back at you…whatever your situation might be, there is a God that’s big enough to heal you, lift you up, restore you, grant you hope, lay a new future in front of you and grant you the energy to achieve that future.  It is not impossible, for God is truly the God who pulls off the impossible. 

And how do that I know that?  How am I convinced of that?  Because He’s done that for me.  Because I’ve watched him do it for tens of thousands of people in over forty years of walking with wounded people.  It’s real, and regardless of who you are and what you’ve done, or where you’re at, or how deep you’ve fallen, or how dark your circumstances might be, it’s available to you.  Right here, right now.  Today, tomorrow, and forever.

Grab a Bible.  Find a church.  Call a pastor.  Get on your knees and pray.  It will work.  The road back might be long, but there’s a road.  And God will walk with you every step down that road.  Every step.  May God find you in your despair, in your confusion, in your desperation, in your darkness, in your hopelessness.  And may He create in you the life that you thought to be impossible, because that’s what He does.  That is my hope, and this is my prayer for you.

The question of purpose is simple, direct, but inherently complicated. The question demands bravery. It rises on the belief that we have an utterly indispensable role to play in our own existence because it is not just our own existence. Fulfilling our purpose has an equally critical role to play in the existence of others. It is our part in this ever-unfolding corporate story that we have been granted an indispensable part in. 

What “Purpose” Tells Us:

First, We’re More Than Just the Sum Total of Our Existence

The fact that we have a purpose evidences the fact that we are more than just the sum total of whoever it is that we are. A purpose says that we have a much larger role in this thing that we call life than just the living out of our individual lives.  Life is bigger than any of us will ever be as an individual. Purpose tells us that we’re specifically designed to engage every bit of that expanse. A purpose tells us that we are far more than just the sum total of our existence because we are called to do something in an existence that far exceeds us. A purpose tells us that we are more than just “us.”

Second, There is Something Greater Than Us That We’re Invited to Participate In

The fact that we have a purpose tells us that is ‘something else’ out there. It tells us that the horizons in life don’t come anywhere close to ending at the end of our existence as the single, solitary human beings that all of us are. The nature of purpose is such that it will always be bigger than us and it always live beyond us. It grants us the opportunity of legacy. It extends our influence beyond our own death when we’re no longer here to extend it. These unshakeable realities substantiate the fact that there’s more out there than we can possibly imagine. Gratefully, a purpose tells us that we are not the end of all that there is. In fact, ‘we’ are barely the beginning, and that in and of itself is wildly exciting.

Third, We’re a Piece of a Much Larger Puzzle That Would be Incomplete Without Us

Our purpose tells us that this massive world out there, as huge as it is, is sorely incomplete without us. As big and as enormous and as complicated and as intricate as the world is, it remains less than completely complete without us. We have a purpose in this world that only we can complete. Large or small, complicated or simple, breathtaking or life giving, regardless of what our purpose is, the world will be incomplete unless we fulfill it. We are utterly irreplaceable which makes every one of us invaluable beyond any sort of monetary reckoning that we could hope to calculate. Everything that’s out there will be less than everything that’s out there if we forsake our purpose. And that fact makes us incredibly valuable.

Fourth, We Do Not Need to Surrender to the Mundane

Our purpose tells us that life is intentional. It is to live out something not in the frustration of random happenstance, but in something for which this life was purposely designed.  It tells us that we have the power and the mission to vividly enhance life, rather than living in some terribly foreboding mindset while we sit on ‘pins and needles’ anxiously waiting to see how life is going to play itself out. There is a destination that has enough meaning and sufficient value to call us to the challenges that will certainly be part of fulfilling that purpose. That we are not here to aimlessly pass by and leaving nothing in the passing.  To the contrary, our existence is designed to live on beyond our existence. To leave a bold legacy of generational impact. And to do this for those that walk beside us as well as those who will come behind us.

Fifth, We Can Deny It

Could it be that the first and foremost purpose of ‘purpose’ is to convince us that we have one? Is it likely that our purpose can only be fully manifest in a manner utterly transformational when we are convinced that we have a purpose to manifest? Possibly the most brilliant way that ‘purpose’ can do that is by granting us permission to deny that we have one. And any reasonable person would hold that if we’re putting so much thought, energy and passion into a defense of this sort, there must be something there to defend against. Therefore, it is our own arguments against having a purpose that substantiates our actually having one.

Closing

Today’s podcast is drawn from the book, “The Self That I Long to Believe In – The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem.” Get your copy today at 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.

You know, I grew up with a lot of dreams.  A lot of things that I wanted to do.  We all have dreams.  Maybe your dream was to have a great marriage.  Maybe it was to start a company that changed a community, or a nation, or maybe the world.  Maybe it was to raise solid kids, or travel, or write a book, or invent something revolutionary that made life better for other people, or live in some particular place, or achieve some level of financial comfort, or whatever it might have been. 

And as you grow older, you actually find yourself kind of refining those dreams.  You tweak them.  You roll them over in your head.  You begin to adjust them ‘here and there’ to fit the world as your understanding of the world matures and sharpens and grows and expands.  And as that refining thing happens, you begin to figure out how these dreams might actually work.  How you might actually be able to pull all of that stuff off.  It’s a really neat kind of thing. 

And in thinking out loud, I would guess that, at some level, you’ve had those kinds of dreams as well.  That you’ve played with some really cool ideas.  That there was something that you were excited about, that gave you some sort of energy or sense of excitement.  That you had some sort of vision for your life that added something to your life that you needed. 

But then life happens.  In whatever way it happens, it happens.  It happens to all of us.  And many times, whatever happens ends up killing those dreams.  They die.  They just die.  Sometimes they die before they were ever born, or sometimes the dream is actually beginning to unfold and then it dies.  However or whenever it happens, they die. 

And sometimes we try to bring them back, or resurrect them in whatever way that we try to do that.  We try to figure out how to do them differently, or modify them, or come at them from a different angle.  Or we decide to fight the thing that’s killed our dreams.  We figure that if we can eliminate whatever killed our dreams, (or at least beat it up pretty thoroughly), that maybe, just maybe, we can get our dream back.

At other times we just let our dreams die.  We either don’t know what to do, or we’re overwhelmed, or we can’t get past a sense of injustice or unfairness, or whatever it is.  And because we let it die (because we feel that we have no other option but to let it die) we refuse to ever dream again because the death of a dream is just too painful.  It’s just too much.

The world will kill our dreams.  Life has no qualms about showing up and killing the very things that we spent a large part of our lives living for.  Dreams die every day.  They die at the hands of whole bunch of stuff.  And for every dream that dies, something on the inside of the person dies as well.  The death of a dream is just too painful because a part of us dies right along with it.

I’ve had many dreams die.  So have you.  And every time one died, something inside of us died too.  But when my dreams died, here’s I’ve found.  I learned that God has a dream for each of us that will never die.  Never.  It’s just too big to die, it’s place in God’s plan is just too important to let it die, and it’s backed up by a God who never dies. 

There are many who would not agree with me.  And that’s okay.  However, I believe that God has a dream for your life that’s bigger than any dream that you could conjure up.  God’s dream for you exceeds anything that you could dream for you.  So, ask Him what it is.  Talk to a pastor.  Get into your Bible and start reading.  If you don’t have one, buy one, or download a Bible app.  Listen to Christian music.  Find a church.  God can and will use any or all of these to help you discover the dream that you were fashioned to live out.  And that dream won’t die.

“After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit, and testified, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’”

• John 13:21

Betrayal is intentional…ruthlessly so.  It is the deliberate choice of someone to hold their interests as so superior to our well-being that the cost of crushing us in order to advance their agendas is deemed as entirely reasonable and indisputably acceptable.  In this horrifically devastating scenario, we become fodder in someone’s blind pursuit of objectives that such an action will, in fact, never achieve. 

Once the perpetrator comes to understand that both the agenda and the means chosen to achieve it accomplish neither, they will quickly fabricate a distorted narrative crafted to sustain the acceptability of what they’ve done.  Such a short-sighted effort will demand repeated editing as the narratives cannot keep step with the ever-emerging realities of the betrayal.  And herein the betrayal multiplies as the increasingly frustrated perpetrator fruitlessly attempts to justify choices that are ever more intensely being revealed as flawed, failed, and beyond the scope of every fresh iteration.  

Yet, we are not human fodder.  Betrayal is not a reflection of who ‘we’ are.  It is, in fact, a reflection of who ‘they’ are.  And although the person who betrayed us will adamantly deny such a reality, we must remember that this is simply a failed means by which the betrayer will work to justify unjustifiable actions.  You are not human fodder.  You are not refuse to be discarded at someone else’s whim.  Quite the opposite…you are a child of God.  You are a manifestation of His amazing ingenuity.  You are cherished royalty.  You are a one-of-a-kind person with a one-of-a-kind calling.  That is who you are.

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.

“You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.” - Henry David Thoreau “Who am I?”

The question seems a bit overused these days. In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are. Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to whatever trend is currently trending in the culture. It’s the creation of a self suitable to the world rather than discovering who we are as both in and above the world. And so we might ask, how do we not know? How could we wake up every day and go to bed every night with this person that we are and still not know who we are? How is it that we walk through the myriad array of dynamics and demands of life and living, and somehow not see ourselves in the act of dealing with those things? How have we lived with ourselves yet missed ourselves in the living?

Well, one answer is that we don’t want to see. We don’t want to see because we fear that if we actually look at who we are, we might not like who or what we see. It may confirm our deepest fears about who we are. It may convince us that we really don’t have the capacity to achieve the dreams that we want to achieve. It may corroborate all of the negative things that people have said about us, when we’ve spent our lives fighting against believing that that’s who we are. We may choose ‘ignorance’ as opposed to ‘knowing’ so that we can continue wearing the weathered façade that we’ve found comforting, in whatever way it might comfort us.

Or second, maybe we’ve spent our energies not coming to understand who we are, but vesting those precious energies in becoming whoever it is that everyone says we should become. There are demanding social pressures to adhere to. Heavy-handed societal expectations that press us for compliance. There are those who are committed to whatever politically-correct agenda they’re committed to who are easily aroused and readily enflamed to rage should we refuse alignment with their agendas. There are the voguish trends that demand adherence lest we be labeled as outdated or just plain ignorant. There are the expectations of parents that rest heavy upon us, and the voices of well-meaning mentors that too often called us to some vision of who they thought we were. Therefore, we don’t have time to see ourselves because we’re spending our time trying to become another ‘self.’

Or third, it’s possible that we might have determined that it’s not ‘who’ we are, but who circumstances made us to be. Abuse as a child. Bullying at the hands of thoughtless people bent on propping up their own fragile insecurities at our expense. Jobs lost in acquisitions that sacrificed employees on the cold altar of budget and profit. Marriages that collapsed at the hands of spouses who decided that the trade-off for personal agendas as held against the life of a marriage and a family was legitimate. Enemies that we mistook for friends who slowly circled around behind us and stabbed us in one of the many ways that people stab others. For us, these answered the question, “Who am I?”

Or fourth, we don’t feel that there’s any identity to discover. That somehow we are the embodiment of a bunch of ‘nothing’ that will only add up to nothing. That because there’s nothing there, the need for some sort of pursuit becomes unnecessary and embarrassingly ridiculous. We are what we already know, despite how little that might be. Somehow we ended up at the shallow end of the gene pool, or we showed up late when things were being handed out. We got to rummage through the left-overs or we were looked over. There was no motivation to develop anything along the way, or the opportunities to do so simply never came our way. Therefore, we don’t know who we are because we’re pretty much nothing and we already know that.

Or finally, could it be something entirely different? Could it be that we are vast beyond comprehension? That we’ve mistaken this journey of ‘who am I’ for a destination that gives us a clear and solid answer, verses seeing it as a journey where the answer is always fleshing itself out with ever-great clarity as we go along? That we are someone who is perpetually in the process of becoming more of whoever that someone is? That we are not meant to be something that’s stagnant in time and space, but we are something that is always evolving in a manner that we are constantly advancing into time and growing in space? And to understand that is to begin to build a sense of self that will effectively begin to disassemble our negative sense of self. “Who are you?” Get this stuff out of the way, quit falling into these identity stealing behaviors, look beyond all of that and you’ll begin to see the authentic self.

Closing

Today’s podcast is drawn from the book, “The Self That I Long to Believe In – The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem.” Get your copy today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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LifeTalk

Love – A World Without It

“Love is the essence of our humanity expressing itself in actions of sacrifice so profound that we risk not surviving those expressions.”

Complacency is a tragic hallmark of our lives. We’ve certainly got bunches of it. In fact, as the old saying goes, we’ve got it “in spades.” Complacency is conceived in the bosom of familiarity, where something becomes so commonplace that we errantly render it as ‘common.’ We’ve yet to beat this tendency that we have to assume that the more we have of something, the less it’s inherent value. And so we end up taking great things, important things, even critical things for granted. And it’s at that point that we begin to lose the very things that we can’t live without because we become complacent.

Diluting of Love

One of the things that we become complacent about is love. We blithely toss around the idea of love in a manner that paints it as something of a magical storyline. It seems that far too often we’ve relegated it to the penmanship of misty-eyed novelists or the musings of our own minds, and in doing so we seem to have created some horribly diluted understanding of love. We’ve penned that anemic kind of live into a million cards, and we’ve inserted that self-same prose into tens of thousands of chapters that lay nestled between the covers of a thousand novels. We’ve got songs, and movies, and plays, and poetry, and t-shirts, and a thousand different sayings that expound on this diluted and pathetic kind of love that we’ve manufactured. Yet, we’d be wise to ask, “Is this love?” “Really?” I don’t think so.

Losing Love to Understand Love

If we want to appreciate something in earnest, it seems that we must first lose it. There’s something at the basest core of our humanity that doesn’t wake up until that part of our humanity is violently shaken. And often that violent ‘shaking’ is to lose the very thing that we need to be awakened to. Therefore, maybe the best way to understand love is to understand what life would be like without it.

And so, what would we lose if love didn’t exist? If it was suddenly gone?

Loss of Community

Take away love and we have no reason to consider our fellowman nor join him in the partnership of life and living. The sense of community that’s forged strong by empathy, fired by sympathy, and cinched tight by respect would be obliterated. The strength of community as sustained by things like conscience, and ethics, and morals, and compassion, would collapse and completely implode. Without love our communities would disintegrate, civil society would be obliterated, and the world (which is built on community) would collapse. Without love we would lose community.

Well, what else would we lose if love didn’t exist?

Loss of Self

Take away love and our own individual existence would fall into abject irrelevance. The desire to sustain ourselves would devolve to a singularly primitive savagery that would be completely dependent upon the degree of savagery that we possess to sustain our lives. We’d have no passion for living. No sense of worth or value. No sense of purpose or meaning. Hatred ‘of’ self and ‘for’ self born of the absence of love would cause us to turn on ourselves and likely destroy ourselves out of some sense that we don’t have enough value to maintain our existence in the first place. In essence, to become loveless is to undermine our own existence and any rationale for that existence.

What else would we lose if love didn’t exist?

Loss of Meaning

Take away love, and nothing would capture our imagination. We would find nothing compelling. We would never marvel at anything. We’d never be held in the mesmerizing embrace of wonder. We would never be lifted to heights of ecstasy, nor would we know the depths to which one could fall. Passion, desires, dreams, vision, purpose, and hope are all borne of love and entirely sustained by it. And when those things are gone (because love is gone) we become little more than mindless carbon-based life forms driven by a drive to exist that is no deeper than the drive to exist. Take away love and we take away meaning. And try to imagine a meaningless existence?

What else would we lose if love didn’t exist?

Loss of Existence

Finally, have we postulated that without love existence would never have existed in the first place? While we have done a bang-up job of banging up life, it’s always love that puts it all back together again. And when genuine love puts things back together, it always puts them back together better than they were before we messed them up. And so, I would be so bold as to say that if it weren’t for love, existence would have never existed in the first place. And without love, it would be impossible to maintain that existence.

Getting Back to Love

Love is far more than something that has arisen from the penmanship of misty-eyed novelists or the musings of our own minds. Love is far more than the sugary-sweet caricatures of love that we’ve woven into everything from t-shirts to holidays. Imagine life without love if you dare, and if you do you will begin to touch the periphery of this incredible thing that we call ‘love.’ You will be reminded (in a very powerful way) what love really is and what love really does. And so ask yourself, what would the world be like without love? And then ask, how do I bring that kind of love back into my life?

Closing

Portions of today’s podcast were drawn from the book, “An Intimate Collision – Encounters with Life and Jesus.” Get your copy today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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People ask me, “Is there any hope?”  And there have been times (more than one), where I’ve found myself asking the same question.  “Is there any hope?”

And I often ask myself, “What kind of world do we live in?  How dark has it all become?  How bad must it be that we somehow find ourselves driven to some point, or some place in our lives that’s so desperate that we actually find ourselves asking that kind of question?”  And I’ll tell you what, if you’re asking that question it’s because you’re in a really dark place.  And I know how dark they are because I’ve been there…and so have you.

Think about it for a minute.  Without hope, what have we got?  What have we got?  If we can’t apply some feeling of hope to our future, or a marriage that’s hanging by a thread, or a disease that could go really wrong really fast, or a child who’s gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that’s eaten up someone’s life or someone’s family…if there’s no hope that you can apply to any of that stuff…what have you got?

You know exactly what it’s like when life collapses.  We both know what that’s like.  When your dream just dies, and they can die for a lot of reasons that are just brutal.  When your marriage vanishes, and you didn’t even see it coming.  When you’ve run into so many walls just trying to get to ‘some next place’ in life, (any next place) that all you end up spending your life doing is waiting for the next wall to show up because you’re certain that it’s going to.  When you begin to realize that the damage is just too much, and as you realize that it begins to dawn on you that it’s humanly impossible to ever climb out from under all of it.  If there’s no hope that you can apply to any of that…what have you got?

If there’s no hope, what’s the sense in all of this?  Why go on?  Why try?  Why invest?  Why keep moving forward?  If there’s no hope, nothing matters.  If there’s no hope then this existence, living out whatever this is that we’re living out, all of this is meaningless.  It just doesn’t matter.  You’ve felt that.  I’ve felt it.  The world feels it. 

Hope is indispensable.  And I mean…indispensable.  And if we’ve lost it, as we all have at some time, or some place, we’ve gotta find it because going on without it is simply impossible.  It just doesn’t work.  I know that, and if you’ve lived long enough, and if you’ve faced the darkness long enough, you know that too.  Hope is indispensable.

But where do you find hope anyway?  I mean real hope.  I’m not talking about someone persons promises (because those break), or some passing fad (because those have no depth), or some vogue philosophy (because those are typically failed ideas that have been dressed up in new clothes), or political platforms (because those typically serve the platform rather than the people), I’m not talking about any of that because life is littered with that stuff.  We’re drowning in it.  I’m not talking about the latest book, or some trending podcast, or some ‘woke’ idea.  And as far as I can tell, all of that stuff promises hope, but delivers nothing.  If it did, we wouldn’t be here.

This is my experience.  I’ve had times where everything seemed hopeless.  Everything was dark…I mean really dark.  Bleak.  When all of the resources and all of the promises that this world made me, failed me…miserably. 

And when the world fails you, where do you go?  Well, you go where I went.  I went to God.  Now, that statement won’t sit well with some people, but if hope is indispensable and the world can’t give it to you, where else do you go?  What other option do you have?  But more than that, what other option would you really want anyway?  I want an option that works, that’s sustainable regardless of what life throws at me.  An option that delivers hope for my future, hope for my marriage, hope for a disease, hope for a child who’s gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that’s eaten up my life.  And there’s only one place where you find that kind of hope.  And that’s in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Get a Bible and check it out.  Go to church.  Call a pastor.  Give it a shot.  If you do, you’ll find exactly what you need in the exact way that you need it, because that’s how the God of hope operates.