Quotes by Counselors - Page 10

To be an end in myself is to bring an end to myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To be ‘one’ in one’s own hands is to be ‘one.’ To be ‘one’ in the hands of God is to be ‘one’ that is far too vast to be counted.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
At some point I hope to have grown sufficiently in both stature and wisdom to understand that I cannot deliver myself from myself, and that God alone can save me from me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it’s translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we’ve too often doomed ourselves to be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To save myself I must face myself, which may be the hardest of all things to face.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can’t help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can’t help but marvel.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Self-serving biases and self-centered agendas are cotton jammed in the ears of our conscience. Even if truth shouts, we can’t hear it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I don’t know who I am apart from everyone else, I probably need to spend some time apart from everyone else.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The death of our self-worth begins at its appraisal, for such an action erroneously implies that our worth can be quantified.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I can’t quite figure out what an ego is, all I have to do is look for the thing that’s killing itself in the very act of feeding itself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I’m my biggest fan, the only person in the stadium is probably me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Ego is borne of the need to ‘prove’ oneself instead of making the choice to ‘be’ oneself. And so maybe we need to begin curbing the birthrate.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Whatever the item is that I have chosen to give you, it is nothing more than the receptacle within which I have placed the whole of myself. If it is empty, it is not a gift.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If it’s about me, I can be assured that there will be a bunch of empty chairs in the auditorium of my life; save the one I’m sitting in.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The thing that I’m most likely to collapse under is not the weight of the stresses that stand around me, but the ego that sits within me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would surmise that we must cherish the resources that God has given us to achieve a goal more than we cherish the goal itself. For if we fall victim to the pursuit of the goal alone, then the goal has suddenly become our god.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A conviction borne of God amply possesses the potency and power to brazenly reach beyond the possible in order to topple the impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I am always standing at the bottom of the mountain longingly looking up, in all probability it is because I have heeded the pillaging dogma of mediocrity which persistently tells me that the dream is not worth the climb.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am what no one else is, and in the hands of God I can do what no one else does. And if I dare set such a truth in motion I will change my world.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To find one’s purpose is to discover one’s worth, discern one’s direction, wholly dedicate oneself to the journey, and forge an unbending determination that I will not leave the world the way I found it. This week's blog outlines the finding of our purpose.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
How often do I stand in abject terror and raw trepidation before the impossible peaks that soar to impossible heights in front me, when God turns to me and calmly says “what mountains?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Every advancing step I take toward my goal of comfort is yet another retreating step I take away from God's goal of the impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To avoid the cost incurred in pursuing great things we opt for ease and blithely abandon great things. The sheer recklessness of such a pathetically apathetic trade-off will eventually cost us a life squandered, which in the end is the greatest cost of all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Calm for too long begs the question of whether we're in an all-out pursuit of life, or we're all-out of the pursuit of life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
The hallmark of great dreams is not their possibility but their impossibility, and the fact that it is the very notion of the ‘impossible’ that inspires us to go and accomplish them anyway.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am most thankful for what I don’t have, for had my life’s wish list been filled in the manner I had chosen I would be steeped in meaningless trinkets verses bathed in God’s treasures.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My vision of what God can do is nothing more than a fleeting glance of the backside of the ‘possible,’ while God is inviting me to the forefront of the ‘impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The presence of a path doesn’t necessarily mean the existence of a destination.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I thought myself sufficiently shrewd to make whatever decisions I wanted to make, and then to be able to sufficiently steer those decisions away from the rather dark and nasty places they would naturally take me. And I stand oddly perplexed that suddenly everything around me is dark and nasty.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Most journeys are armchair calculations strategically charted in some reclined state that are designed to allow us to embark upon a grand journey without ever leaving the armchair. However, real journeys are absent of furniture.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The barrier to our future is often the very plans that we’ve created to get there.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There are often two sets of goals in life: those that we establish, and those that really matter.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is the fool who declares ‘I am ascending the summit,’ while he’s toddling around in the ditch.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Although I regularly convince myself otherwise, because I aim at something doesn’t necessarily mean I have a target.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The goal of comfort is at the self-same time the abandonment of great accomplishments.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Due north’ on my compass is largely ‘due’ to the fact that in ‘due’ time I have been ‘unduly’ lax in recalibrating my compass. And I’m apparently ignorant enough to wonder why I’m lost.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I’m chasing the wrong thing, what I’m chasing will end up chasing me. And in the end, I’m less likely to be the one doing the catching.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Undoubtedly, our weariness is not based on the fact that we’re running. Rather, our weariness is all too frequently based on the fact that many of the things that we’re running from are the very things we should be running to.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I fear that should I seek out the treasures around me, they might by comparison reveal that I have not cultivated the treasures within me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To fully understand how utterly amazing we really are we must first understand all of the things about us that are not, and then we must make our habitation where they are not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
To realize your potential you must look beyond the end of yourself, realizing that where you end is most likely where you actually begin.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The adult within me would be much wiser to learn from the child within me rather than focus on the demand that the child within me grow up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Real patriotism embraces the wholly immovable belief that without freedom, the essence of the human soul and the life-breath of the human spirit is doomed to perish for lack of space and absence of light.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Great difficult is the dogged bedfellow of great wealth, which always renders great wealth as less than great. Yet, great wealth as bequeathed by God is robustly free of such travails, which always renders it greater than great.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can amass countless fortunes and yet stand with empty hands. I can seek God and have fortunes that fill countless hands.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The key to understanding if something is truly precious is to ask if we can hold it, for things truly precious cannot be held.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is possible that our present-day discussion about needs might be framed more by secular psychological theories than by Scripture. If this is so, we should be careful about saying, "Jesus meets all our needs." At first, this has a plausible biblical ring to it. Christ _is_a friend; God _is_ a loving Father; Christians _do_ experience a sense of meaningfulness and confidence in knowing God's love. It makes Christ the answer to our problems. Yet if our use of the term "needs" is ambiguous, and its range of meaning extends all the way to selfish desires, then there will be some situations where we should say that Jesus does not intend to meet our needs, but that he intends to change our needs.
Edward T. Welch
Jesus came to give us life so unimaginably beyond anything that we could ever hope to conceptualize that wonder cannot help but be our constant companion.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Jesus came to give us life without leaving out any of life in the giving.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To strategize a rescue mission irrefutably capable of saving every human being is leagues beyond our ability to comprehend, and enormous beyond any resource we possess to execute. And to embark upon just such a mission fully knowing that without our death the mission will fall to failure is bravery of the greatest sort imaginable. Yet, that is exactly what Christmas is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough