Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone Quotes

“The priceless lesson in the New Year is that endings birth beginnings and beginnings birth endings. And in this elegantly choreographed dance of life, neither ever find an end in the other.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Am I a storm-waster? For it is within the fury of the very storms within which I cower that I find resources for my growth that are entirely absent on calmer days.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“To destroy that which seeks to destroy me, God invites me to stand against it until it stands down and then falls down.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Ignorance might be bliss, but it also has teeth.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Although it pains me to admit it, I am quite familiar with the holes in life. And this familiarity is due to the fact that I spend far more time in these holes than I spend on the paths that brought me to them.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Easter is a time where we are reminded that conclusions in man's mind are beginnings in God's plan.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“One of a mother’s greatest gifts is to teach her child that to grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water’s edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore. And that lesson can be best taught by a mother who stands before her child dripping wet.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“It would be wise to define ‘living’ as walking in the fullest expression of who I am, verses wallowing in the confines of who I’m not.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“We can hide a lot of stuff until God shows up, for when God shows up nothing is hidden, which includes both our embarrassment and His forgiveness.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“To build refuges of my own making is to construct fortresses of sand at ocean’s edge, where the relentless tides of time will leave my most magnificently constructed walls as perfectly flat sand. And now that I am subject to the very tides that destroyed these walls of mine, I am left with the reality that my single and sole refuge can only be the God who created both tides and sand.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“God would have us cherish even the smallest of blessings, for in taking a blessing for granted we are well on our way to taking it to its grave.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“We recklessly attempt to disguise our ‘greed’ by dressing it in the garb of other nobler ideals such as ‘rights’ and ‘privileges.’ Yet, if we dare dress ‘greed’ in an authentic sense of thankfulness, greed will suffocate within the folds of that very clothing.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“After digging a thousand wells of my own and stumbling upon a thousand others dug by the hands of thirsty men, I have yet to realize that the only well that can satiate every thirst is the one that men will never dig.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“A parent holds within their hands the gift of a child to which they must expend the gift of themselves. And in such a monumental outpouring, the parent will lose both the child and the gifts given, but they will possess the far greater gift of knowing that they gave both.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“I while away my time wishing I were someone else when simply being me is the most magnificent thing I could ever wish to do.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Although I am far too frequently convinced otherwise, with God a dead-end is only the death of an end.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“With God, a mountain is only a road waiting to happen.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“We want greatness, but we prefer it tamed and on a leash short enough for us to control it, yet long enough to allow it to retain some remote yet diminished flavor of greatness.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“To ‘live’ is to realize that without the journey the destination is nothing more than a task rigorously completed rather than an experience riotously lived.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Every parent is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn’s soul begs for the artist’s touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“The child you hold in your arms is your gift to a future that you will not see. Therefore, we must turn a blind eye to ourselves and selflessly pour the best of ourselves into our children while rigorously sifting out the worst of ourselves. And once we are utterly spent by such daring gestures, we will shockingly discover the resulting emptiness as astonishingly filled.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Eons ago, the creative genius of God foresaw that it would take the shattered pieces of my ‘yesterday’ to construct the sturdy portal to my ‘tomorrow.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“If I so much as dare to intimately probe the reflection I see in the mirror, I am filled with the tormenting fear that I might be repulsed. God invites us to boldly probe the reflection in the mirror so that we might be released.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Being a mother is not about ‘birthing a child into the world.’ Rather, it is about repeatedly ‘birthing into the child’ a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“I have forged many things that I believe to be things of great beauty. Yet if God is not a part of them, they are entirely counterfeit and I have been robbed blind by the work of my own hands.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Without unreservedly surrendering myself to God, whatever place I might raise myself to remains nothing more than a step or possibly two off the hard basement floor of life, for of myself I can be utterly assured that I will never step out of the basement.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“How often is my tidy and well-appointed world nothing but the thin veneer of an imagination that I’ve chosen to use in the service of denial, rather than a gift I’ve chosen to exercise out of a passion for change?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living

“Sometimes what is said to be a gift may appear more of a curse only because the greatest gifts of all are the gifts that have enough disruptive force to break us out of everything that’s breaking us. And God loves us far too much not to give us exactly those kinds of gifts.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Profound Living