Episodios

  • Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Seven

    Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Seven
    Apr 15 2026

    "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.
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    6 m
  • I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark

    I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark
    Apr 13 2026
    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 ...
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    11 m
  • Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Six

    Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Six
    Apr 8 2026

    “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.
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    5 m
  • Backwards - The Grand Reversal of Easter

    Backwards - The Grand Reversal of Easter
    Apr 5 2026
    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...
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    11 m
  • Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Five

    Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Five
    Apr 1 2026

    “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.
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    6 m
  • Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Four

    Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Four
    Mar 25 2026

    “…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.
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    6 m
  • Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Three

    Taking It to Our Knees Daily Devotional - Day Three
    Mar 18 2026

    “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.
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    5 m
  • ”Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Life’s Complex Journey” - Part Four

    ”Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Life’s Complex Journey” - Part Four
    Mar 13 2026
    "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 ...
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    12 m