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 …

What Is Right and What Is Not? What is ‘right?’ What provides our guiding function? What is our “north star?” Our constant? Our set of rules that keep us civil? Our code? Or… is our code the commitment to the absence of a code? What is ‘right?’ The question, “What is right,” must be asked without our efforts to choose what is ‘right,’ or to think t…

Why Is the World Like This Anyway? Why is the world like this anyway? Why is the world so much of what we don’t want it to be like, and a whole lot less of what we do want it to be like? Why is it so incredibly difficult to create the kind of world that we all would love to live in? How is it that we’re able to visualize what we would actually like…

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 …

What Is Our Narrative? What is our narrative? What is the story-line that we’ve authored to explain our world, or allay our fears, or justify our agendas, or excuse our behaviors? What is the narrative that we’ve created to give ourselves permission to do whatever we want permission to do? What are the story-lines, the spins, the bits of fiction th…

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…

Change - It Begins With Us Change. It’s needed for sure…just look around. But if our posture is to wait for someone else to create the change that we’re waiting for, we’re probably going to just keep right on waiting. As a part of my own processing in trying to understand what change is, and how ‘real’ change is caused, I wrote this: “Change. It's …

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…

Am I Passionate for the Right Things? “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 e…

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. Sometimes we feel helpless. In the midst of tragedy, or painful losses, or devastating moments, we often feel that we are helpless to do anything other than standby and watch. Yet is that really all that we can do? Consider this “Thought for Life:” “Prayer inserts me into the middle of any battlefield regardl…

What Are We Focusing On? We can be very focused people. We can decide that there is something that we want to do, or not do, or get, or not get, or complete, or not complete, or argue, or not argue, or whatever it is that we want to focus on. Indeed, we can be very focused people. In fact, we can be focused to the point of being quite stubborn abou…

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life. It’s my sense that God doesn’t need me to speak to you. He’s quite capable of doing that without me. But there are times when I sense that He wants me to speak something of Him to you. And this is one of those moments. Consider this “Thought for Life:” “I don’t always preach God, for His existence is obvious.…

We Reap What We Sow We reap what we sow. In other words, what we do is never free of an outcome that will be shaped by what we do. The ‘cause-and-effect’ of life is such that what we do will always cause an outcome that is fashioned directly by what we do. Despite the fact that we often think (or would prefer to think) that what we do is somehow is…

Common sense is a ‘common’ phrase that is in reality far from common. To add insult to injury, common sense also seems to weigh in a trite bit light on ‘sense’ as well. It might be proper to say that common sense is neither common nor does it make much sense anymore. Today, common sense commonly lacks sense and we are the poorer for it. It seems ra…

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: “Decisions based on timeless truths will never leave our tomor…

Repentance Reconfigured Standards We all have standards, even if our standard is not to have one. We all live by something, even if it’s the denial of that ‘something.’ There’s some sort of inherent code that creates a framework that provides direction to our actions. There’s a paradigm that we all work within. Call it genetics, call it cultural, c…

"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part One We yearn for security. There is an inherent need deep within the fiber of our being that desires to be able to lean on and lean into the things around us, knowing with steeled assuredness that they will hold us firm and steady. We want life to be safe because…

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: “I am left with no alternative than to look beyond the efforts…

Fear – How We Create It Fear. We all have it. Sometimes it’s just this slight apprehension, or this bit of inner angst, or this uncomfortable twinge that we experience. At other times it’s utterly overwhelming, leaving us helplessly paralyzed and violently shaken right down to the core of everything that we are. At certain times and in certain situ…

"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 …

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: “Disabling your conscience is like disabling your smoke detect…

It's Time to Listen 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 s…

Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st century America. Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself. We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough to …

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: “Love is the essence of our humanity expressing itself in acti…

Better or Worse? Will the choice that you’re about to make, make you better or worse? Will it improve your life, or diminish your life? The fact of the matter is, it’s going to do one or the other. And because it is, it’s worth asking the question, will it make me better or worse? But that question itself can be clouded by a whole lot of things. Fi…

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: “Running from what we fear is like throwing a bunch of stuff i…

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…

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Two Forgiveness often seems to be one of those things that’s a genuinely nice idea, but not really a life liberating reality. Life is full of nice ideas; those trite sayings, gentle stories and brave concepts that would make life a whole lot better if they were re…

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: “It comes down to 'fear' and 'faith'. 'Fear' of what stands in…

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…

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone – Simple Truth’s for Profound Living” Someone once uttered the timeless saying that “timing is everything.” There’s something about things happening in a certain order in a certain time that makes it all fit in a certain way. We sense a natural and correct progression that, if followed, leads to success or happines…

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 mo…

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…

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: “Who are you sending into the future and how are you sending t…

“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…

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Three The concept of sacrifice seems more suited to novels or epic movies. It appears more an ideal; a concept that when observed from a safe distance seems wonderfully heroic, deeply inspiring and chivalrous in a way that stirs up something powerful in us that se…

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…

“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…

“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…

How many times have you felt that there’s just no use? There’s just no sense in going on. You know, we’ve made way too many mistakes. Or the hole that we’ve dug, or the hole that misfortune dug is just too deep. And it really doesn’t matter who dug it anyway because, either way, we’re not getting out it. We failed out of college, or we didn’t go to…

People ask me, “Is there any hope?” And there have been times (more than one), where I’ve found myself asking the same question. “Is there any hope?” And I often ask myself, “What kind of world do we live in? How dark has it all become? How bad must it be that we somehow find ourselves driven to some point, or some place in our lives that’s so desp…

You know, I grew up with a lot of dreams. A lot of things that I wanted to do. We all have dreams. Maybe your dream was to have a great marriage. Maybe it was to start a company that changed a community, or a nation, or maybe the world. Maybe it was to raise solid kids, or travel, or write a book, or invent something revolutionary that made life be…

The odds that are we’ve never met, and if we have, I hope that I was able to leave something with you in the meeting as that is my passion and my calling. My life has been devoted to helping people. You know, you start out with a vision to help people, and that vision is often pretty romanticized. In your mind you envision changing people lives, an…

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 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,…

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 …