Quotes by Counselors - Page 16

Oh God, please find it within your heart to grant me a heart that looks after itself only because it has first looked after others. And help me to realize that anything less is not a heart.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
While we tediously check our weaponry before entering into battle, do we check our hearts? For without exception, that is the greatest weapon of all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Despite how utterly massive they might be, it is never the size of the arsenal nor the strength of the warrior. Rather, it is a heart bent on sacrifice that is the most potent weapon of all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is in opposing the world’s lies that we impose truth in our hearts.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Healthy people will marry healthy people because you will always end up with the person whom you believe you deserve.
Debra Fileta
The wife's list, no matter how long or short, communicates to the husband, "I don't like you. I don't accept you. But if you perform the way I think you should, then I will like and accept you." And no matter how long the husband's list may be, it says in like manner to his wife, "I don't like you either. But if you stop caring about things so much, if you stop feeling the way you feel and noticing the things you notice, then I will accept and like you.
Jeff VanVonderen
An ending is only happening because at some point it was a beginning. And if an ending is dependent upon a beginning, I would be well advised to focus on the miracle of beginnings verses the pain of endings.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I must be ever so careful to remember that my pain is a precious salve that when used in the service of others can heal a thousand wounds and more. And I must likewise remember that if I do not use it as such, I have done nothing more than wound myself yet again.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Pain dutifully reminds me that the world is terribly imperfect, but it faithfully helps me appreciate the world on those days when it’s a little closer to being perfect.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There is no doubt that the most effective way to heal my pain is to purposefully put it to work healing the pain in the life of another. But that means I must endure the pain of not focusing on 'my' pain.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Pain is nothing but growth waiting for us to give it permission to grow us up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Although I’ve been thoroughly conditioned by pain to see it otherwise, an ending is nothing more than the backside of a beginning.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Without mountains, we might find ourselves relieved that we can avoid the pain of the ascent, but we will forever miss the thrill of the summit. And in such a terribly scandalous trade-off, it is the absence of pain that becomes the thief of life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Thankfully, the nature of pain reminds us of what the ease of pleasure foolishly allows us to forget.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
For love to eliminate pain is to waste it, for it is love alone that possesses sufficient force to bend pain against everything that would break us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have finally come to realize that it’s being forced to be honest with myself that’s made my pain painful all along.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Undoubtedly, failure is growth in pain’s disguise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Failure is information encased in a shell of pain.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My soul is utterly frantic for that single place of perfect refuge from which I can clearly see the winds rip and hear the tempest tear, yet despite the ferocity of the tumult I rest in such a sublime peace it is as if neither existed at all. And if I have not yet found such a place, it is because I have not yet found God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Peace is achieved when our conscience rests in the fact that we’ve engaged in ‘right’ living, verses believing that living is a ‘right.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am selfish by habit, but sacrificial by nature. Therefore, I’d be wise to develop the habit of following my nature.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My worth is not based on the ‘work of my hands’ despite how feverishly I might work and how audaciously successful I might be. Rather, my worth is based exclusively on the astonishing fact that I am the ‘work of God’s hands.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To fall down is to face the weakness of my humanity, test the mettle of my character, and push the limits of my strength. Therefore, falling down will tell me who I am far more clearly than most things I might learn when I’m standing up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Instinct is all of our humanity being deliberately honest with all of life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are not built for mediocrity, but we build it into our lives nonetheless.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
More often than not, the foolishness of our humanity drives us to destroy the very things that we need to keep ourselves from destroying ourselves. And because that’s the case, God will never allow us to destroy Christmas.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s not that I can’t remember. It’s that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The legacy I leave will be unimaginably enhanced by the legacies I received. Therefore, I must be wise enough to embrace the history of those who have gone before me so that I can shape the future of those who will go ahead of me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To forget is to render the pages of history as entirely blank, and the lessons of history as never taught.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Starting over is opportunity informed by failure, which is opportunity made intelligent.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am likely to fail if I have determined the cost as too high or my intelligence as too low. Yet, if I think about it, the real failure rests in believing either of these to be true.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Intelligence without wisdom is nothing more than stupidity that looks smart.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our best-laid plans are often our worst-made decisions.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To lead solely on the behalf of those being led is the utter pinnacle of fatherhood, and it is sad that so few ever stand on the summit.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often there is this sinister greed that pulls at my coattails, subtly whispering in the ear of my soul that it is within my rights to tuck away a few dark trinkets to toy with when the tedium of righteous living gets a bit boring. But God would suggest that I empty my pockets.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
Hope is oxygen to the soul, and God is the oxygen of hope.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am thankful that I can be thankful, for if thankfulness did not exist my heart would be irretrievably imprisoned by the crazed twins of acquisition and possession, and my soul would exist as a forever slave to greed.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My sin murdered Him. And out of this self-loathing shame borne of the understanding that I could perpetrate such a heinous act, I am barely able to raise my head sufficiently to ask what crazed insanity would prompt Jesus to walk out of an empty tomb for the single purpose of pursuing a decaying soul that murdered Him? And I would be wise to consider that the question itself is asked only because I have yet to touch the barest periphery of God’s love despite the fact that because of an empty tomb it stands right in front of me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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 the 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
Directing praise to oneself is to cash in on the ego in order to bankrupt the soul.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What I allow into my head finds its way to my heart, which is a porthole to my soul. Therefore, I might be wise to consider the state of my soul, and then walk this process backwards.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Humility is the greatest shaper of souls and crafter of character, for it wipes away all the grandiose things that we spend so much of our lives pretending to be, so that we can spend all of our lives being the exceptional person that we were actually created to be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Given the lethal enormity of sin and the inestimable value of a single soul, a baby in a manger and a man on a cross makes more sense that anything else I will ever be able to possibly imagine.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We must clean the lens of our hearts to see the state of our souls. However, too often the former is too dirty to even know that the latter exists.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The romantic within us is a harbinger of our deepest desires.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Without a beginning I am pouring the whole of my existence into the building of endings, while the cross and the resurrection declare that God is incessantly building beginnings from the collapse of endings.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A nation aimlessly drifting away from God is a nation for which prayer is a rudder and praise is a sail. And it is the man or woman on their knees that builds the former and gives wind to the latter.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own ‘god’. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a ‘god’ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be ‘god’ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The length of the fall is dictated by how far we had climbed. The outcome of the fall is dictated by whether we’re holding on to that which we’re climbing, or we’re letting God hold onto us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When standing face to face with myself, I far too often refuse to look in the mirror. When standing face to face with God, there is no place where a mirror is not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The yardstick that we frequently use to determine if something can be restored is based on the handful of inches that we bring to the process, when God shows up with an infinite amount of miles.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The drum to which we march reveals the conductor to whom we’re listening.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am always trying to figure God out so that I can figure Him in. But after a while I figure that I should just let God be God, and figure that He’ll figure it all out anyway.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The worst of me is the raw material from which God molds the best of me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are quick to surrender that which we deem as long dead, when God is quick to restore that which He deems as never really having lived.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Without a doubt, the most ingenious plan I could ever hope to devise would be to trade my plans for God’s.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The worst thing that I can do is humanize God. The second worst thing that I can do is deify myself. And the best thing that I can do is to avoid both.
Craig D. Lounsbrough