Eight Things That Prayer is Not We can ask what prayer is. That’s a great question. But it might be better if we ask what prayer is not. If our prayers aren’t working right, or if we’re not feeling any kind of energy, or if there’s nothing that we’re connecting with, or our prayer life has become some flat, boring routine, it might be that we’re en…

Today we’re going to talk about self-esteem. To one degree or another, at one time or another, each of us deal with feelings of low self-esteem. We questions ourselves. We have doubts about ourselves. And so, I want to give you some thoughts that will help you build and maintain a strong self-esteem. Let’s start with this thought. It reads this way…

Think About It You are what you choose to be. Life is not a dictated script. It’s far from being something to which you have to surrender. Yes, there are things that we did not ask for that we have to deal with. Regardless, whatever our flaws there is always room to do something about them. Always. Some option always exists. There are always possib…

"Despite the challenges, the river never reverses its course. Rather, it decides to cut fresh banks, fashion serene inlets, feed swirling eddies, sweep away fallen timber, lavish the floodplains with rich nutrients, and declare by actions such as these that the cowardice of reversal would never have created rivers this magnificent." - Craig D. Loun…

Let’s start here. Think about this thought: “Too often we have stripped our single greatest asset of its power and hobbled it to the degree that it has come to be viewed only as a pathetic last resort. Yet despite our incessant meddling, this asset nonetheless remains a first resort so potent that it never needs a last one. And that asset is prayer…

Everybody seems lost these days. People don’t like to admit that, or they refuse to admit that…but everybody seems lost these days. I suppose that the greatest kind of ‘lost’ is to be ‘lost,’ but to deny that you’re ‘lost,’ even though you are. That’s about the worst kind of lost that I can think of, and we certainly see a whole lot of that kind of…

New Years 2025 Wisdom to Start the Year How do we live differently this year? I mean, with intentionality. With some sense of purpose and meaning that’s way beyond just living out our lives in order to meet some set of obligations that we’ve confused with real living? How we live with some deep sense of satisfaction and personal enrichment? How do …

New It Does Not Mean Better What is “better?” I mean, the definition of “better.” When we change something, we tend to label the change as “better,” whether it’s better or not. If we adjust something, or alter something, or eliminate it altogether, we define the changes that we make as “better.” We initiate new programs, or we reconstruct old ones,…

Have you ever gone so far in a bad direction that you feel there’s no coming back? Is there a point where we’ve screwed up things so badly that there just can’t be a new beginning? Is the carnage that’s a result of our bad decisions, or our poor relationship choices, or our career failures, or our financial mis-management…does the carnage of all th…

Crafting the New Birthing a New Beginning She was born into an emerging America in 1890. Through the ninety-five years of life that stood in front of her she would watch an Industrial Revolution unfold, Henry Ford roll out the Model T, and Edison light the world. She would read the headlines of dough boys marching off to fight a Kaiser in what was …

The New Year Refusing to Be Relegated to the Sidelines We stand on the escarpment of a New Year. In many ways, it seems that what lies ahead doesn’t rally us with energizing hope, but rather it seems to rattle us with deep apprehension. From the vantage point we stand on at the beginning of this New Year, the landscape that lies ahead looks uncerta…

A Clean Slate The Possibility of a New Start With the New Year we long for a fresh start. We want to wipe the slate clean, removing the smudges and the smears. We want to get rid of the errors, the poor choices, the misguided decisions and the bruising flops that populated the previous year. We want to wipe away old habits, clean up destructive beh…

Great things scare us, as they should. If something doesn't scare us then it's probably not all that great. All of us are called to great things. Those things will likely be different for each of us. However, in whatever way they are great, they are great. We are not here to pass through this existence as some distant observer of whatever's going o…

Great things are hidden in small things. That sounds terribly illogical. Yet, it's only illogical because we don't really understand the nature of great things and that their greatness is marked in part by their ability to inhabit small things. Greatness is not so much about size or importance as it is about meaning and value. It's not necessarily …

“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…

If we fictionalize the story of Christmas as some fanciful tale spun in the backwaters of history and people long removed, in that action we have succumb to the debilitating belief that the only viable idea of rescue is fiction. And I can think of few things that are sadder than that.” - Craig D. 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…

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 us that ended up stranding us. W…

“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…

What am I listening to? What is it that I fill my head up with? Whatever we listen to is eventually what we will become. We can pretend that's not the case, and we can lead ourselves to believe that we can manage the stuff that we let into our heads. But the fact is, what we list to is eventually what we will become. However, the worst of it is tha…

“For the power of Christmas rests in the fact that we will never completely understand the vastness of it, but that will never stop its ability to completely transform the fullness of us.” - Craig D. LounsbroughDe către 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…

“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. LounsbroughDe către Craig Lounsbrough