Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To? 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 int…

Where Did All The Time Go? “Rush often results in waste and moments forever lost. Attention to time is inattention to the life that fills that time. So much can be lost.” “Where did all the time go?” We ask that all the time. However, it’s not where the time went. It’s what we were doing with the time while it was going. Think about this. When it c…

What I Would Say to the World I often think about what I would say to the world. In the pain, confusion, fear, and rampant disorientation…what would I say? With the deceit, the manipulation, the less than admirable agendas being floated on all fronts…what would I say? With marriages fracturing under the weight of a culture gone rogue, with teenager…

“When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?” We dig holes. Lots of them. With all kinds of shovels. But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re diggi…

What Is Success and What Is It Not? “Success”. People chase after this thing that we call “success.” But in the pursuit of this elusive thing that we call “success”, maybe the better question is, “What is success”? How do we define it? How does the culture define it? How do the people that we spend our time with, or live with, or work with, or play…

We hear a lot of things. A whole lot of things. We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information. It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that. Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy mosaic…

There Is No God - Evidence There is no God. It’s not an unfamiliar statement. In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’ I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God. Therefore, out of conve…

“In full uniform, the color guard marched by as part of the parade. And as they did, he forced his horribly slumped and deeply aged body out of his worn wheelchair and stood to ram-rod attention. He held a salute until the guard had passed, and then he feebly collapsed back into his wheelchair. As I stared in ever-warming admiration, emblazoned acr…

“The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.” Too often we don’t care, or that’s what we tell ourselves. We work really hard not to care because we’ve figured out that caring is just too risky, in whatever way it happens to be too risky for us. We get the idea in our head that ‘not’ caring is just easi…

"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 peop…

“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 …

“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 a…

“…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…

“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…

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’” Psalm 27:10 There are many things that are meant to be forever. There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never questioned because they are designed to be permanent. Their role in our lives had nothing of a temporary nature built into them. Therefore, we have no …

“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 dee…

The front porch was the door to the world “out there.” As a kid, it was the stepping off point to the world that never forced us to step off. It was the place through which the outside world would come into mine; monitored and managed in a way that didn’t make the world safe, but that pared and neutered it sufficiently to make it safe whenever it w…

They leave sporadically. Some of them go at the first hint of fall’s advance. Others hang around until the first snows herd them southward as a rancher with heavy-footed cattle lumbering across pasturelands; gorged on the last of summer’s grasses. The air is sullen and stilled by their absence; the void of song leaving a hole wide and gray. Trees s…

Did you ever run with leaves: a wild race born of wind and liberated foliage? It’s a race, but more than that it’s really an invitation to partnership and farewell. Racing with the leaves was not about finishing first; rather it was about a romp enjoyed in the midst of a transition being celebrated. It was playing with a friend before that friend w…

It’s eight feet at best, if even that. When you’re a kid you run with the natural assumption that life will fall in your favor. It grants exceptions and kind of looks out for you. You think of life as some sort of doting grandparent and adventurous friend all in one; inviting you out to wild frolicking play while hovering close enough to catch you …

Trust. How do you define it? Typically our definition of it is terribly basic and somewhat shallow. We seem to define it as that ability to rest fully and completely in something or someone. That's about as far as we take it. Yet, the incredible power of trust suggests that it is more . . . much more. Remove trust from a relationship and that relat…

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 purp…

Success has been accorded an endless array of definitions. Some of them are crafted to make failure seem more like success so that we can limp through life and fail without remorse or guilt. Other definitions are quite lofty, written to give us opportunity achieve in a manner that has little to do with the achievement and everything to do with rest…

“Who Am I?” What the Question Evidences “Who am I?” The question seems a bit overused these days. It’s something more like a vogue, trendy kind of question that pulls us out of the doldrums of living among the masses and plants us in the more desirable currents of the intellectual mainstream. In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtf…

The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem “We’re driven. Whether that’s for our good or our ill, we’re driven. That drivenness may be born of a free spirit bent on living with unimpeded freedom, or it might be a drivenness used to hold ourselves captive. It might be a drivenness to face ourselves, or a drivenness to…

Do we realize that the choices that we make today lay the foundation for tomorrow's outcomes? Do we really think that things just happen, or do we understand that what happens today is the consequence of a series of choices that we made yesterday? We seem to stand stunned and perplexed by what we see in our culture. But are these things really happ…

I often think about what I would say to the world. In the pain, confusion, fear, and rampant disorientation…what would I say? With the deceit, the manipulation, the less than admirable agendas being floated on all fronts…what would I say? With marriages fracturing under the weight of a culture gone rogue, with teenagers taking their lives before th…

He was four years old . . . barely. Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living. He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life. I love Corey. I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not. He is innocence untainted and un…

Dean was deaf. It was that simple, but it was inordinately complex at the same time. Life can have its sinkholes. Sometimes there’s a bunch of them, enough of them to cause a broad and crippling implosion where things just cave in all around us. Life then becomes a litany of foggy responses to trauma where we move zombie-like through whatever the d…

Darren and a cheap plastic fish; it was a dollar store bin filler indelibly stamped with “made in China” that bordered on being junk. There were numerous needs in Darren’s life, so numerous that he himself was lost in them. They were pathetic and endless, so it seemed anyway. A plastic fish was little more than a cheap toy that momentarily anesthet…

Filth described her very well. While it was an apt depiction, it failed to embrace the fullest description of what she was. Some lives seem to be nothing more than a brutal manifestation of the accumulated slag and scum that is leftover in the wake of some departed tragedy. These people become the thing that life has done to them, being so irrepara…

You Are Silent Now -Remembering the Sacrifices “You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never know you. And being one of those you never knew, I would give all I have to clasp your hand one single time,…

How do we change a nation? We might start by changing ourselves first. Change begins with us. We know that, but we also doubt that changing us changes much of anything else except us. How far does that kind of change go? Does it really have a broad sweep and a wide impact? Does it really count all that much? In the scope of history, much less the s…

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" I Was Thinking - To Think Outside the Box(s) I was thinking. And the more I thought, the more I realized that there is a whole lot to think about. But in my thinking, I thought that most of our thinking (despite how much there is to think about) is really pretty standardized and chafing…

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" To Believe In Something Better - The Rise Against What Is Our humanity is ingeniously fashioned in a manner that it can handily break the realities that would seek to break it. Our existence need never be held hostage nor pressed into servitude to the sordid realities of all that is hap…

"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 an…

"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 experi…

"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 an…

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 astound…

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 astound…

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 we…

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 w…

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.”…

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 th…

Too often we don't take the time to really ask why we support what we're supporting. We get swept up in some energizing movement, or we're utterly captivated by some cause. Something feels inherently good and the premise that drives it appears sound. We find that an army of people have raced to the forefront of this cause, or it's embraced as long …

Our freedoms are not a "right." They are, in fact, a "privilege." They are not ours to abuse. Rather, they are ours to cherish. But as we abuse these rights by demanding our right to them or exercising them in ways that will destroy these very freedoms, we forget that they are fragile. Very fragile. They are not permanent. They are not guaranteed. …

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 fellowme…

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We need to stop. We need to put down our calendars, set our phones aside, strip ourselves of the voices incessantly clamoring for our attention and listen. Just listen. For life is not what we’re chasing. It’s what we’re leaving behind in the chasing. Consider this “Thought for Life:” “Rich is the person who …

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 we…

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. We build bridges or barriers. If you think about it, everything that we do builds one or the other. And the function of a bridge is quite different than the function of a barrier. Consider this “Thought for Life:” “Every decision will build a bridge or a barrier. Therefore, what stands in front of you at this…