Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture.  It stands for something lofty, but costly.  It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  “So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature.  And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same.  And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.” I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

We Are a Mess We are a mess.  We are a mess because we are a people on a mad rant.  Sadly, we have become blinded to the fact that we are blinded by a host of pathetically self-serving agendas.  And the pathetic nature of these agendas are evidenced by the fact that they are unable to stand up to the slightest scrutiny despite how rigorous our justifications of those agendas might be.  We create a litany of agendas whose basis is indefensible, for any self-serving agenda will always be indefensible. Therefore, we shut down anyone who wishes to do something as simple as dialogue with us about those agendas.  The simple and potentially enriching exchange of differing ideas and perspectives is viewed as an inexcusably prejudiced and an entirely unwarranted threat.  And such a radicalized stance is based on the insecurities of an agenda that is too weak to entertain anything other than its own indefensible platform.  Therefore, we instantly shut down dialogue in order to side-step the painful reality that the agenda is simply too flimsy and too ill-conceived to be defended.  And the fact that it cannot be responsibly defended calls into question the very legitimacy of the very agenda that has come to define who we are.  For many, this then becomes horribly frightening as it also calls into question the very culture that they are desperately attempting to create that will grant them permission to live out an indefensible agenda.  The concept of personal rights is exercised to near insanity, resulting in demands for liberties that are far more about license to be what we are not, and to do what we should not.  We have placed the desires of self over an abiding respect of the liberties that give us the ability to express those desires in the first place.  Many in our culture have utilized scare tactics simply because reason cannot support these agendas, therefore it is assumed that fear will press resistant individuals to accept those agendas.  We create paradigms that instantly and rather immediately renders anyone in opposition to these agendas as holding some sort of unacceptable bias or ignorant prejudice or ill-informed option that is immediately ruled as simply and utterly intolerable.  Once these paradigms are forced upon these individuals, they are immediately labeled as the bane of the culture and unworthy of anything but to be deported to the far fringes of the culture where all of the ignorant and uninformed are banished.  All the while, these unsustainable agendas tear at the very fabric of the culture, leaving these individuals entirely unaware that their self-declared and indefensible freedoms will be the destruction of those freedoms. In it all, we are in desperate need of perspective; of clear, clean, fresh, and undiluted perspective free of bias and wiped clear of agendas.  We are in desperate need of balance long lost.  We are in desperate need of a recalibration that pulls us away from the insanity of a culture gone rogue, to a reality where things such as selflessness, and integrity, and truth, and morality, and sacrifice, and love for all are granted permission to run rogue and live rogue.  And to do that, we need to be shaken awake and slapped upside the head in order to open our eyes and re-engage a sense of common sense.  We need to have something pull us out of our own heads for a moment in order to understand that ‘our own heads’ will only cause us to ‘head’ in all the wrong directions.  We need something that will blow the walls off of the confining and selfish vision that our agendas hold us hostage to in order to understand our need to be liberated from our tiny agendas in order to help a world that’s held hostage to horrific things that completely shame our tiny agendas.  We need to be broken open, shaken from slumber, rocked out of our mediocrity, shamed by our laziness, humiliated by our greed, thrust out of our complacency, and brought to both our knees and our senses regarding who we’ve b

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We spend our lives acquiring what we think we need to fight the battles that we think we’re fighting.  In a world fraught with fear and uncertainty, we assimilate whatever grants us this sense of invincibility and power for whatever battle we think we’re fighting.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  “I do not weaponize my life for God by rigorously acquiring an expansive arsenal of sophisticated munitions.  Rather, I empty out the arsenal of everything but God, for at that point the arsenal is filled to capacity.” I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Who are you giving yourself away to?  To what propaganda have you come to subscribe?  To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb?  Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached?  What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you into some sort of comatose complacency where you no longer engage this rare, but incredibly precious thing that we call common sense?  What podium have you obediently sat in front of that has led you to believe that you cannot think for yourself, or maybe that you can, but that you don’t need to?  Who has told you that facts are irrelevant, and that the truth is simply an irritating obstacle to be quickly discarded if they don’t neatly fit on the preferred end of some ever-changing political spectrum?  Who are you giving yourself away to?

We Like Things to Be New New.  We like new things, or things to be new, or to do away with the old to make a place and a space for something new.  The idea of ‘new’ is appealing.  And because it is, we chase it.  But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better,’ and I think that quite often we associate the two way too much.  We tend to automatically think that if something is ‘new,’ the fact that it’s ‘new’ somehow guarantees that it’s ‘better.’  Certainly, some things that are ‘new’ are clearly ‘better.’  But many are not.  And at some level we know that.  But I think that we rather casually (and maybe unconsciously) associate that which is ‘new’ as somehow, someway, through some degree of some sort of magical thinking, as always being ‘better.’  However, ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’ And because there’s this natural association of ‘new’ as being ‘better,’ we often focus on making something new, or doing something new, or trying something new, or inventing something new without really being thoughtful about whether this ‘new’ is actually ‘better,’ because in our minds, we’ve automatically associated ‘new’ with ‘better.’  And that kind of thinking is both dangerous and flawed, because ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’ Sometimes we want ‘new’ to be ‘better’ as some sort of random shotgun approach.  We think that if we try enough things for long enough, we’ll eventually hit something ‘new’ that actually (and rather surprisingly) turned out to be ‘better.’  Or we think that our situation, or our lives, or our relationships, or our finances, or our attitudes couldn’t get any worse, so we beguile ourselves into believing that ‘new’ might not necessarily be ‘better,’ but the odds are that it won’t be worse than whatever it is we’re living, or doing, or investing in, or waking up to every morning.  But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’ And so, here’s something to think about.  Why ‘new’ anyway?  Not that ‘new’ is bad…at all.  But why this nearly crazed need to always discard the old in favor of what we define as new?  Our problem is that we often see some belief system, or value system, or set of morals, or some perspectives honed by time and experience as old, or antiquated, or ill-informed, or out of their era, or out of date altogether.  They might have had value in another time, and they might have brought something meaningful to an era now passed, but things have moved on and it’s time for something ‘better.’  It’s time for something ‘new.’  But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’  And therefore, we foolishly begin to associate something that’s been around a long time as ‘old,’ rather than seeing it as ‘timeless.’  If something has come down to us through the years, or if its origins find their roots somewhere in a distant past, we casually and thoughtlessly assume that it is not applicable to today.  That things are different today.  Very different.  And that this ‘different’ demands something ‘new.’  That the ‘different’ of today renders the wisdom of yesterday as being entirely out of step.  But the fact is, some things are ‘timeless,’ which places them forever beyond any feeble or weak definition of either ‘new’ or ‘old.’  That some things, in fact most great things, never get old because they apply to our humanity regardless of the era or the time within which we live.  The deep things in life are not bound by any generation.  Rather, they fit every generation.  The great things are never outdated by time or technological advances.  Rather, they are the things that time and technology cannot move forward without.  Some things stand entirely above time, and change, and the evolution of humanity in whatever way we evolve.  No.  ‘New’ does not mean ‘better.’  And it does not because it’s not about ‘new.’  It’s about refusing to be so ignorant as to take what is timeless and attempt to force-fit it in the shallow rubrics of old and new.  Because if we continue on such a destructive path, ‘new’ or ‘old’ won’t matter because we won’t be around to

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We ignore our conscience because we want to do what it says we shouldn’t.  But, we also ignore the consequences of ignoring it.  Consider this “Thought for Life:” “Disabling your conscience is like disabling your smoke detector.  It doesn’t stop a fire.  It just leaves you ignorant of the fact that there is one.” I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" Not Where We Were - Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we’re going in this thing called life.  For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined.  For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered.  For many, where they’re going is defined by the tasks of the day, rather than enlarged by a vision for tomorrow. In many cases where we’re going is far more rigorously defined by all the places where we don’t want to go, rather than the places where we do want to go.  At other times its definition is rather handily shaped by the opinions of others, or it’s carved directly from the bedrock of the value systems that have been built into our lives throughout the whole of our lives.  For others, it’s based on the need to avoid the pain of our past or somehow prove our worth in the face of a self-image that lays battered and bloodied.  Vague or refined, we all have some sense of where we’re going.  And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else. Some of us are not necessarily in conscious pursuit of wherever this place is.  We have this instinctually primal sense that it’s there and we intuitively assume that our path will take a natural course to wherever that place is.  Then, there are others of us who are myopically focused on where we’re going to the degree that everything that we do is wholly defined by that singularly beguiling destination.  Some of the more adventurous souls among us nimbly pursue that destination, spiritedly pulling in as much of everything that we can along the way to accentuate both the journey as well as the destination.  In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we’re going.  And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.    The Detours We Create Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going.  There are those times when where we were going was bafflingly mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination.  At other times the place where we’re going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it.  At such times we craft some other less intimidating and thoroughly unfulfilling destination.  Sometimes our destination is to set a course away from our destination so that we can dispense with whatever responsibility or obligation our original destination might have demanded of us.  And then in the magic of life, there are those times where we have actually pursued some authentic destination with such rigorous tenacity that the trajectory of our efforts has catapulted us past our destination to places that are everything of our furthest and fondest imagination.  However, it might play out, we’re all headed somewhere.   The Detours Life Creates But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm’s length of it.  There’s a sense that something intrinsically unjust, stealthy and evil is always about and on the prowl, and whatever it is, it’s bound to show up if it hasn’t already.  When it does, it undoes everything that we thought was secure and certain, wreaking havoc on whatever our journey had been to that point.  And to whatever degree it wrecks the road underneath our feet, we’re left in a blurring trauma that renders our journey disjointed, our destination uncertain, and our lives dispirited.   The Explanation of Detours Missed How It Happens Yet, more often than not it’s the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are th

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We run after a lot of stuff.  Our time, our energy, our finances, and much of our lives are spent chasing stuff.  And when we catch that stuff, we typically find that it doesn’t do for us what we thought that it would do for us.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”   “The insanity of it all is that the search for that which will fill us incessantly drives us to pursue the very things that will empty us.  Yet, the greater insanity is to find ourselves utterly perishing in our emptiness and yet declaring to our dying day that the emptying was the filling.  And that is emptiness of the most chilling sort.” I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

“Right now, it’s Saturday for me.  I’m between what was and what is yet to be, living squarely between a death of sorts and the unknown of the ‘what next?’  It is my Saturday.  If the ‘yet to be’ is nothing more than what is transpiring right now, my future will be shrouded in the thick cold of bitter hopelessness.  A shift in a slightly different direction, and there may be jubilation.  Either way, right now it’s Saturday for me.”   An Intimate Collision  Ever been in the “in-between?”  You know, something’s gone (whatever that is), but whatever’s coming next hasn’t showed up yet.  Or, life shut down in one place and it hasn’t opened up someplace else.  Or, there’s this huge hole in our lives where some ‘thing’ or ‘someone’ used to be, and now that ‘it’ or ‘they’ are gone, we’re waiting for what’s going to show up and settle in that gaping hole within us.  We lost a friend, or we lost a job, or we lost a home, or we lost a parent, or we lost our confidence, or we a lost a goal, or we lost a sense of self, or we lost a marriage…or whatever we lost.  And whatever’s next after these losses is nowhere in sight, and because it’s not, we’re stuck in the “in-between.”  And we hate being here. But while we’re there (because sooner or later we will be there), we would wise to remember that the “in-between” is nothing more and nothing less than the step to our next step.  It’s not a place where we’re stuck.  It’s not a place where the “wheels came off” and we can’t get them back on.  That’s our impatience talking.  Rather, it’s a place within which we are being made ready for the next step.  But because we’re so incredibly impatient, we don’t give this time of preparation the time it needs to prepare us.  And often our greatest mistake is to force ourselves forward by fabricating the ‘next thing’ so that something showed up and we can move forward because it did.  Or by shoving something into the places where whatever we lost used to be, and then moving forward without being ready to move forward because none of that stuff we shoved in there fit…or maybe it did fit, but we put it in there prematurely.  Or worse yet, we delude ourselves into believing that we really didn’t lose anything, or at least anything significant, and we just keep on forging forward to some destination that (in reality) no longer exists, or has shifted to a different place or moved to a different time.  None of that works.  What we need to remember is that the “in-between” is not where our lives are stopped.  It’s not some bottomless hole.  It’s preparing you for your life.  It’s a recalibration, not a reversal.  It’s an end, but not a dead-end.  So, if you’re in the “in-between,” learn from it, listen to it, be observant of it, tease out the lessons in it, and let it prepare you because the opportunities that it has for you aren’t going to be there forever because the “in-between” never lasts forever.

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is: “If I don’t passionately desire freedom for all of my fellowmen, it’s likely that I haven’t been sufficiently freed from my selfishness so that I might see their captivity.” Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.