“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“Christmas is a vivid and brilliantly revealing lens. And if we dare to look at ourselves through this rich and telling lens, we are able to clearly see the majesty within ourselves that we’ve so foolishly forsaken. But rather than leaving us saddened and forlorn by what we’ve abandoned, this lens also possesses ample power to give us back what we …

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

Christmas In a Box As the snow began to quietly début winter’s arrival, I made my yearly descent to the basement. Rummaging through the backwaters of the musty root cellar, I spied the dusty stack of aged boxes with the word “Christmas” hastily scrawled across their cardboard sides. Inside of them lay the wonder of Christmas embodied in carefully c…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

The gift of Christmas (the gift of God’s Son) empowers us to do all of what we were designed to do, but will fail to God unless God empowers us to do it. It is the liberation from everything that we were ‘not’ designed to be and not designed to do. It is the opportunity and the power to finally, finally be our authentic selves. And then, how about …

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

We must take Christmas out of the cultural boxes into which we have thoughtlessly crammed it. We must free it of the confines of our stupidity, we must release if from the filthy hands of our greed that shaped each box, and it must be freed of the bane of special interests that attempt to seal these boxes tight. And once we’ve done all of that, we …

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

Christmas - Our Need for Rescue Rescue. It is hard to admit that we need to be rescued. We think ourselves to be smart enough, cunning enough, strategic enough, and enough of whatever it is that we need to be enough of to save ourselves. We tediously craft an endless array of things to rescue us from the things that we previously crafted to rescue …

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

The Tragedy of Gutting Greatness Have we forgotten Christmas? Or more tragically, have we never really known it at all? Have we embraced some pathetic derivative that is but a thin and emaciated shadow of something that we have found intimidating and demanding because of how grand it is? And so, do we diminish great stories out of our fear of them?…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

Christmas - We Forget We forget. In the middle of our own agendas, we forget. Consumed by the incessantly shifting tides of the culture, we forget. Caught up in the ever-changing maze of politically correct ideologies, we forget. With bills looming and jobs teetering and marriages faltering, we forget. With value systems crumbling and leadership ch…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

Welcome to LifeTalk Christmas Rescue “I’m not certain that the greatest thrill was actually being rescued. Rather, I think that the greatest thrill was finally realizing that I would be. And the cry of an infant two thousand years ago was that realization.” That’s Christmas. It’s our rescue. It’s our prison break. It eliminates our need to erase, o…

“Christmas was God deciding to do what we didn’t deserve in order to save us from what we did.” - Craig D. LounsbroughBy Craig Lounsbrough

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope. A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations. This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those r…

Welcome to LifeTalk Thanks for joining us for this Thanksgiving Edition Here's some quotes drawn from today's podcast to help shape your attitude and enhance your sense of Thanksgiving: “Thanksgiving demands that we set aside the cultural narrative and be thankful for all of the things that the narrative says are not enough.” It’s not about the thi…

“Thanksgiving is an attitude that must be rooted in the ‘gift of life’ if we ever hope to be thankful for the ‘gifts’ of life.” - Craig D. LounsbroughBy Craig Lounsbrough

“It is my hope that despite the gravity of the trials, we will never forget that the privilege to live life always offsets the difficulties involved in the living of it. This is the essence of thanksgiving.” - Craig D. LounsbroughBy Craig Lounsbrough

Being Thankful - Greed or Gratitude We all have personal agendas, and typically we have quite a boatload of them. Many times when it comes to personal agendas, we can become so entranced and subsequently driven by them that the actual cost of achieving them often becomes a secondary consideration, or maybe not even a consideration at all. When we’r…

“An attitude of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to give way to a brooding sense of entitlement, the scourge of greed, or any other lesser attitudes that keep company with such things.” - Craig D. LounsbroughBy Craig Lounsbrough

Thanksgiving. To the destruction and detriment of those who live there, it will perish in an environment within which a sense of entitlement and greed rules the day. Conversely, on the opposite end of that spectrum, a sense of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to giv…

Flying with the geese. Following the seasons instead of being left behind in whatever season that we are in. Taking wing and launching ourselves off to new horizons, fresh goals, untainted opportunities, and unexplored places. To live life as an ever-unfolding adventure that is always anticipating the next adventure. We want to live life like this.…

Rich living has nothing to do with wealth...depending upon the kind of wealth we're referring to. Rich living is found far more frequently in impoverished lives. It is in these lives that the clutter of material wealth is absent so that these lives are free to see what is truly precious. Life is not about the pursuit of 'stuff.' Rather, it's about …

Rarely do we rise to the pinnacle of our capabilities. However, all too often we readily descend to the dismal pit of our inabilities. We’re remarkably human, but we’re terribly primal at the same time. We have the ability to access an intellect that has no equal in all of creation, yet we defer to something more animalistic that’s all too common i…

We quite naturally and quite appropriately presume that to live in the world, we must understand the world. We know quite well that to navigate this complicated and frequently fragile existence of ours, as well as have any hope of emerging on top in some form or another, we must understand what we’re navigating. If we don’t understand the terrain a…

We always have, and we always will have the intrinsic need to believe in something. Life is a journey whose demands will always exceed whatever personal assets we might possess in an attempt to meet those demands. Life always has and life always will require more of me than I have within myself to give it. All of my accumulated resources meticulous…

I am only one. That’s all I am. I am only one and I will always be only one. I was born as one, I will live as one, and on the day of my death I will die as one. In this journey that we all call life, I am and will always be completely restricted and wholly limited to being one and only one. And all of those daunting realities strike me as miserabl…

Integrity - To Understand and Live It Integrity. You’ve heard that “Integrity is doing the right when nobody’s watching.” It’s not about being a crowd pleaser, or working to get some sort of edge. It’s not agenda driven, other than we do the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing…and that’s not an agenda. That’s a conviction. It’…

At times, the innumerable dialogues regarding the state of our nation appear to be less dialogues and more something akin to agenda mongering and rights crusading. It seems that we have hijacked the solemn rights and sacred liberties afforded us and have forced them into servitude around our ego-centric agendas and myopic special interests. The alt…

It's Not About Being Ordinary It’s not about being ordinary, because we all are. In talking about myself, I’m about as ‘ordinary’ as they come. But, it’s not about being ordinary. It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things. That’s the beauty of it. We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be…

We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity “Whatever you see within yourself, let it be the whole of yourself. For too often we have been brutalized by our own sense of inadequacy and we’ve been held hostage to the lesser choices born of such a debilitating sense of self. Know this, that latent within you there lies more than ample resources begging …

The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it. All of us run thick with untapped potential. We are rich with possibility and formidably equipped to tease the cusp of the impossible and to overcome it in the teasing. The essence of our being is immens…

Thinking It's Over When It's Not It’s over…we tell ourselves. It’s over. Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back. The loss is too big. The obstacles are too daunting. Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in. We’re one person (just …

Becoming Accountable Accountability…might it be time to be accountable to who we’ve become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be? Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we’ve become? And once we’ve done that,…