Quotes by Counselors - Page 13

Most of the things we deem as impossible are only impossible because we’ve given them permission to be impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe the real miracle in any miracle is our ability to believe that despite our own depravity, in the eyes of God we are worthy of a miracle.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Faith means I chose not to know, which is different than ignorance which refuses to know.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Five of the most dangerous words I know: ‘What’s in it for me?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When I find that stubbornness continually overrides common sense regardless of the logic of my argument, it seems that the only effective solution is to tell them to go ahead and stick their finger in the socket. And what I find is that what my argument failed to solve, electricity does quite nicely.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sometimes I doubt and sometimes I believe. And I like not making myself believe when I am doubting, and not making myself doubt when I am believing. Surely neither God nor Accident need my consistency.
Hugh Prather
And so, it is always the case that the past is irreparably land-locked, and the future has yet to land. And here we are, living out our lives on the precariously thin line which separates the two.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We incessantly vacillate between what’s behind us and what’s before us depending on the current barometer of our courage and the ambivalent nature of our vision.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can’t change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and the stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future what the past was not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To assist us in climbing the mountains is marvelous. To level the mountains and altogether eliminate the climb is miraculous. And at times I think that God prefers the latter because it emboldens us to face the former.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can ruthlessly press my imagination out beyond its very edges, and even in such a remote place I have not begun to touch the barest periphery of God’s imagination.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To dress up today in the threadbare garments of yesterday is to create an impoverished tomorrow.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
The present is too often squandered grieving the past or fearing the future, which makes the present nothing more than a cheap facsimile of what was or what will be instead of what it could be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Whatever I ‘align’’ myself with are the very things that will create a ‘line’ into my future.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I were to be brutally honest with myself, how often is my journey actually a path designed to circumvent my journey?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we’ve somehow become convinced that the script we followed ‘yesterday’ can’t be edited, it will be incredibly difficult to tell the difference between ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The road from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is a map yet to be written with the pen I hold in my hand.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The road ahead is not some predetermined path that I am forced to trod, but it is a rich byway that I can help create.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
One of the things that therapists do if you are suicidal, like a trick, is ask you about the future. They want to know what your plans are. Do you want to be the president? Do you want to be a rock star? They want to know if you want to live later even if you want to die now.
Albert Borris
We can breathe in the sweet scent of a tepid summer’s meadow after the kiss of a warm rain, and in the very same moment we can stand utterly breathless underneath the expanse of untold galaxies that breech the very edges of the universe itself. Such are the privileges we enjoy because of God’s unimaginable imagination.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I have found my journey to be a maddening tangle of wandering ‘rabbit-trails,’ a labyrinth of incessantly circular passages to nowhere and back, and a plethora of assorted ‘dead-ends’ fraudulently disguised as paths of great promise, it can only be because I have mindlessly exchanged God’s compass for mine. Therefore, it would appear that another exchange might be in order.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In reality, is being sedentary a choice to run from our calling by not running after it?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
With God, a mountain is only a road waiting to happen.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If life is nothing more than a journey to death, autumn makes sense but spring does not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Could it be that we lost something because had we not lost it, we would have lost ourselves?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When the world does its level best to devalue me in ways that are nothing short of brutal, all it does is evidence my value. For why would it expend such massive amounts of energy attempting to destroy something that’s not there?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To maximize our lives we think that we should get up and join in the race. Yet, we rarely consider that maybe it’s less about joining a race and more about actually creating one.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In too many instances we have settled for a world of our own shaping that is shaping up to be in terrible shape.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Jesus came to give us life to the very edges of life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To take this one shot at life and live it with God is to take this one shot and have it reverberate across and around my world as if it were a million shots and more.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When will I realize that without God my world is draped in shadows between which there is not a single ray of light? And when will I recognize that with God, my world is deluged in light between which there is not a single thread of darkness?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Doing life without God is not doing life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s not that I’ve ‘faked my own death’ as the saying goes. Maybe it’s that I’ve ‘faked my own life,’ and in doing so I’ve yet to realize how dead I really am.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
The art of living is to rise above lesser things so that we can truly enjoy great things. And the message of Christmas is the greatest of all things.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Life is not about getting everything right, as much as it’s about working to live right.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our actions in the present build the staircase to the future. The question is whether that staircase is going up or down.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To let something go is to participate in a much greater dance that we call life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We’ve yet to comprehend the impervious reality that to gain ‘life’ we have to do the most scandalous thing imaginable, and that is to work ‘against’ the whole of our humanity and give everything away. And yet to give everything away is to work ‘with’ the whole of God’s character.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can live out our lives, and in the end realize that we never really ‘lived’ a day in our lives.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It may be that we’re not seeing the wonder in life because all we’re doing is wondering how we’re going to survive life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can fill our lives with ‘stuff,’ but as we do we’re concurrently filling our lives with the obligation to maintain that ‘stuff.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The worst denial of all is being in denial that we’re in denial in the first place. And I would wonder if that’s not exactly where most of us live out most of our lives.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe we ought to consider that sometimes the most destructive outcomes in our lives are the ones that we’ve created.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest dividends in life are those that we give away.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we’re missing life it’s probably because we’re expecting it to reveal itself to us, rather than realizing that life is revealed by us looking for it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If safety is my goal, living life is not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The miracle is that the brilliance of the miraculous can live in the blandness of the mundane. The greater miracle is that we have enough brilliance in our own blandness to see it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s really a rather simple thing to bring balance to my anger. All I need to do is remember that the ‘hand of cards’ that have been dealt to me pale in comparison to the ‘deck of cards’ that I’ve thrown at others.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It wasn’t until I slowed the car and rolled down the windows that I realized I spend most of my days driving ‘through’ life without driving ‘in’ life. So, I’ve decided to walk because the pace is slower and the windows are always down.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I don’t necessarily sit around inviting life to knock me down, but when it does I don’t wait around for an invitation to stand back up either.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I pray that I am sufficiently stirred by the rumor of great things to seek the God who created this single thread that I am, and to marvel at a vision magnificent enough to cause this God to weave from this single thread a tapestry most resplendent.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Apathy is giving up when we need to get up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough