Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough Craig Lounsbrough

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"
What I Want - The Frightening Call of Great Things
I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied; for satisfaction lures me into believing that happiness is found in reaching some point rather than realizing happiness is born of striving for those points.  I want to experience a resilient and wonderfully endearing sense of contentment that neatly threads itself through every part of my soul, but I don’t want that contentment to morph into the baser mentality of complacency.  I want to keep a weathered eye on every horizon, but I want to do more than just watch those horizons from some sorry distance.  Rather, I want to walk their ridges.  I don’t want to contemplate the taking of a journey.  Rather, I want to be contemplating a journey as I’m taking it.
I want to robustly celebrate the achievements and vigorously revel in the milestones in a manner completely worthy of them, but I never want to fall to the bane of mediocrity that would prompt me to see them as a terminus.  I want to develop a sturdy confidence born of the advances made, and I want to have that confidence perpetually reinforced by the successes achieved.  Yet, I pray that my failures will always serve to temper that confidence so that it never turns to rot in the form of arrogance.  And in further managing this tempered confidence, I never want it to be so strong that I errantly assume any challenge as too small to be worthy of my time.  I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied. 
For whatever reason I might do it and in whatever way I might do it, I never want to hand myself excuses to round the next summit instead of scaling it.  I never want to slothfully presume the ability to achieve a goal without holding myself accountable to actually getting on the track and running the race.  And I suppose worst of all, I never want to scan my assorted array of trophies, whether they be numerous or few, and in the scanning embrace some languid sense born of complacency that somehow it is done and that I can hang up my hat, when in reality life is never done and no hat is really ever hung.
 
Why Do I ‘Never Want’ to Do These Things?
Laziness is humanity domesticated to its own destruction.  Mediocrity is life pent up in the very iron-clad cages that we create out of the misguided notion that an ‘adventure’ is a product of those misty-eyed idealists who expend their lives chasing dreams too elusive to catch.  Therefore, we create dreams that we can cage so that they simply can’t elude us, and in their captivity we can manage them so that, God forbid, they never manage us.  And what we forget is that a dream caged is nothing more than an anemic, pasty-white wish that is always in the process of dying in whatever cage it happens to find itself.
 
We Are Made for More
We are made for more than all of that.  Our humanity yearns for the next adventure.  We desire lofty summits and distant finish lines that tax the whole of our energies in order to get us to them.  There is inherent within us this incessant sense that where ‘we are’ is not where ‘we’re going,’ and that to park it wherever we’re at is to start dying in that very place.  There is some fixed notion in our psyche and some insistent voice in our souls that will not be silenced and cannot be appeased by lesser agendas.  These call out despite the many ways we work to silence them, and in the calling out they call us out.
Sadly, in light of the calling, we too often surrender to fear and we sell-out to apathy.  We foolishly peddle our resources and pawn off our talents to lesser things so that we can hold up some small, pithy achievement to offset the gnawing guilt we experience over bypassing the greater achievements that were our calling before we were called away.  We can’t show up empty-handed, for that would work against our efforts to squelch the already s

Common sense is a ‘common’ phrase that is in reality far from common.  To add insult to injury, common sense also seems to weigh in a trite bit light on ‘sense’ as well.  It might be proper to say that common sense is neither common nor does it make much sense anymore.  Today, common sense commonly lacks sense and we are the poorer for it.
It seems rather apparent that some things in life should simply ‘be’ without any thought about whether they should ‘be.’  We would define those as the common things.  If we tinker with the idea of “common” for a moment, it would imply something that just ‘is’ because it has a place in life that’s uncontested, blatantly obvious, globally useful, intrinsically beneficial and it’s as cleanly natural as sunshine and rose petals.  ‘Common’ defines those things whose existence we simply presume without questioning what they are or what role they play.  They just ‘are’ because they’re supposed to be and we accept them as such. 
 
Common Sense
It seems that common sense should be common as well, or at least we would like it to be common.  After all, when we apply common sense things usually come out pretty good.  Even if we can’t rightly define it, the phrase “common sense” has a nice ring to it.  There’s something soothing about the idea of “common sense” as it seems to have some reliable guiding quality to it that’s much more likely to insure a good outcome.  Common sense seems to bring a sure and steady compass to situations that are short on compasses.  It seems to be the thing that will not fail us when all the craftiness, shrewdness, cunning and presumed brilliance of men who presume themselves as brilliant fails.  Common sense is the spotless and orderly notion that we smile at with a kind of soothing and pleasantly simplistic agreement.
Common sense implies a cup of wisdom, a dash of discernment and a dollop of intellectual acumen that’s blended clean and translucent.  It’s clarity in chaos and focus when all else is frantic.  It suggests the direct application of life experience, gently hemmed in by intuition and held fast by reason.  Common sense is the best of our senses refusing to react to the worst of our fears.  It appears to be a culmination and consolidation of the best of our experiences that in combination are sufficiently adequate to overcome the worst of who we are.  
 
The Absence of Common Sense
The absence of common sense seems in large part to be related to the fact that we tack so much stuff on to it, or cut so much stuff out of it, or painfully contort it to the point that we’re not certain what we’re left with other than it’s probably nothing even remotely close to common sense.  We’re prone to nip, tuck, tinker and toy with it until it’s a whole lot less to common sense and a whole lot more something else.  Common sense then gets unrecognizably blurred or worse yet it gets entirely lost in our tinkering.
What’s problematic is that once we’ve done all of that stuff to common sense, we think that what’s left over is still common sense.  If fact, we often think that we’ve refined it to the point that it’s tight, clean and logically invincible.  In reality, common sense is lost to the point that we don’t even recognize that whatever we’ve got left over after messing with common sense, it’s probably anything but common sense.  We’ve got our own derivative of something that maybe started out as common sense but is only common in the fact that it no longer makes any sense.
But we go ahead and treat it like common sense anyway.  The obvious and natural progression is that we act on it thinking all the while that its common sense that we’re acting on.  The repercussions are that we end up acting on something that’s likely distorted by our agendas or shaped by whatever the cultural bias is.  The result is that we do incredibly stupid things while applauding ours

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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, re

"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 achiev

We all throw around the idea of having a purpose, or not having one, or wondering if we’re supposed to have one, or whatever we’re wondering.  We wonder if we really need a purpose, and if so do we create it or does it already exist and we just haven’t happened to happen upon it just yet.  For some of us, we think that the whole idea of having a purpose suggests that life is much more intentional than maybe we thought it was, and that maybe we’re all part of a grand design of some sort. 
For others of us who tend to see life as more happenstance, it’s more about figuring out how we can figure ourselves in to whatever’s being figured out around us.  In that sense, we create a purpose if what’s around us appears to make it worthwhile or possibly necessary to do so.  However, or in whatever way we go about it, we all ponder this whole idea of having a purpose.  For having a purpose gives us a desperate sense of purpose when our self-esteem would tell us that we serve none.
There’s something about life that doesn’t quite make sense without a purpose.  There’s too much rhythm to life.  There’s too much that seamlessly meshes, even when scrutiny of the most exacting kind would not be able to ascertain how it possibly could.  There’s a beautiful and even mysterious connectivity that creates a dynamic unifying function, drawing everything together in some jointly corporate effort as a means of keeping everything moving and growing and flourishing.  Even the darker side of life, perpetually roiling with its chaos and anarchy has an underlying cadence that maintains the darkness and feeds the destruction.  Things have a place and a purpose in that place.    
 
We Need a Purpose
Whatever the nature of our orientation might be, it seems that we need a purpose.  There’s a lot of things that we talk about and discuss and debate and ponder and pontificate about in life.  We analyze and scrutinize a whole bunch of stuff.  And most of those discussions are really all about sizing all of that stuff up in order to determine if we want to engage in them or not.  Do we want to invest in those things, or learn more about them, or build some part of them into our lives?  Or do we categorize them as wholly irrelevant, blithely toss them aside, and move on from them to whatever the next thing’s going to be?  Most of our discussions are a part of this bit of shopping that we’re doing in order to determine to if we want to purchase the product or pass on it.
But when it comes to purpose, it’s not about shopping.  Shopping implies that we have a choice.  It suggests that we’re leisurely strolling the endless aisles of life working out those endless decisions of whether we want to purchase something or not purchase something.  There’s a sense that we can live with or without whatever it is that’s crammed onto the shelves that flank us on our left and on our right.  The majority of these things are bright and shiny accessories that simply compliment what we already have or lend a bit of accent to what we already believe in.  In the complimenting and the accenting, they don’t necessarily add to what we have nor do they detract from it.  Most of them are appealing options designed to supplement something, not sturdy truths constructed to support something.  We can take them or leave them without any major repercussions in the taking or the leaving.  That’s most of life.
But purpose doesn’t appear to be a bright and shiny accessory.  It’s not designed to ‘supplement’ anything because everything else is designed to supplement it.  In fact, it’s not an item that we choose to select or not select.  Purpose doesn’t leave us with the luxury of deciding whether we’ll choose it or whether we won’t.  It’s inborn.  It’s how we make sense of our existence as it’s played out within the rest of existence.  We have meaning because there’s a role that makes sense of our