Quotes by Counselors - Page 2

I will either adamantly prioritize my agendas at the expense of the truth, or I will consistently bring my agendas into unrelenting obedience to the truth. And if for some reason you’re trying to determine who I truly am, the choice I make will tell you.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We want to 'write in' our plan and 'write out' the consequence. When we do that, we're headed 'right back' to what we foolishly thought we could 'write out.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I have refused to risk, I have in the self-same decision refused to love. And if indeed I have refused to love, tragically I have refused to live. And when will I realize that that in and of itself is an unacceptable risk.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My life is a series of invitations accepted and invitations rejected, and the place I now find myself is often a result of accepting the wrong invitations and rejecting the right ones.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
More times than I can remember I look around and I ask why the hole I’m in looks so strangely familiar. Probably because it looks a whole lot like all the other ones I dug before I got around to digging this one.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Nearly everyday life leans over and says, ‘Come on down!’ But standing at the bottom looking up, it’s finally dawned on me that it’s not these invitations that have dug this hole. Rather, it’s the fact that I accepted them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would be an utter fool to let my journey be defined by the denial of the journey.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The step that we are on is only a step to the next place, and no step regardless of how massive is ever a destination.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can only climb the mountains because there’s a valley that makes the mountain a mountain.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can only get to God through God. Every other possible avenue is a dead-end before it even starts.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I simply can’t look into the heavens on a crisp starry night and somehow bring myself to believe that the gaping expanse that engulfs the whole of me is the product of chance happenstance. And neither can I believe that the gaping expanse that rests within me is anything less.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A lie is my attempt to tamper with the truth so that I need not face the truth. Yet as shrewd as I think myself to be, I would be wise to understand that God designed truth as ultimately tamper-proof.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To assume that I and I alone have all the answers is to eventually find myself entirely alone without any answers.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe it’s a whole lot less about focusing on the fact that we’re all victims and a whole lot more about the changing the fact that we’re all careless, as that is what victimized all of us in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
At the very point that I’ve taken something for granted, I have at that same moment taken it to its grave. And if I look around, I realize I’ve cultivated quite a cemetery.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In a very tragic kind of way, sometimes things have to be gone before I fully realize that they were ever there.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Such is the power of truth that even the slightest whisper of it can handily drown out the most boisterous of lies, which may explain why in many instances God only needs to whisper.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Greatness demands that I understand that I am not nearly as big as I thought myself to be, but that I am capable of becoming far bigger than I ever imagined myself to be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It might not be about perfection. Rather, it may be that that which is imperfect is that which has the most character.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To love those who hate us is to refuse to borrow their hatred.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Easter is a time where we are reminded that conclusions in man's mind are beginnings in God's plan.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Has it not ‘dawned’ on us that many of the things that we incessantly blame others for are actually things that our actions originally set in motion? Or, are we too weak to experience a ‘dawning’ of that sort?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Oh yes, I am frequently driven to an enraged frenzy by the blatantly crass actions of others. But to be painfully honest, that anger is much less driven by the reality of their actions and far more fueled by the realization that everything I am is everything that I hate in them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
True evil is unlikely to receive an invitation from us, so it clothes itself in just enough truth to make itself look appealing and then it looks to unpeel us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The real promise in too many promises is a promise that I’m going to be disappointed.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The reason placing blame repeatedly fails to work is that I repeatedly place it on everyone else instead of where it actually belongs.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The fear of getting knocked down is less about the pain of the fall and more about the embarrassment in having fallen. And so, to rid myself of the latter is to reduce my concern about the former, which means I just unleashed my life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Failure is not the deterrent for the next try. Rather, it is information that empowers the next step.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Whatever the depth of our darkness, God navigated it eons before it was dark. And whatever the duration of our nights, God was there long before it ever turned to night. Therefore, despite our frequent feelings to the contrary, there is no place we might be where God was not lovingly waiting for us an eternity before we got there.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
With God, being lost is nothing more than an idea that never has and never will be anything more than an idea.
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
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
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
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
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
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 be dreadfully remiss not to think that God would painstakingly craft something an intimately ingenious and inexplicably intricate as my life, and that by virtue of such sheer brilliance I should not examine it with the greatest precision and unleash it with the fullest abandon.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It would be infinitely more prudent to be a single “David” standing with God, than a million “Goliath’s” standing without Him.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What insanity propels me to incessantly invest in a world that never ceases to fail me? And what ignorance bewitches me so thoroughly that it keeps me from investing in a God who never ceases to be unfailing?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We must leave Christmas to be what it is, for to reduce it to the stuff of myth and whimsy is take the single and sole hope of a dying humanity and obliterate it. And I would contend that such an action is insanity of the greatest sort.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The best way to see majesty is to strip away everything that pretends to be majestic so that which is fake wholly collapses in the face of that which is majestic. And God in a manger is likely the most remarkable example we have of such a monumental truth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am not the sum total of my accomplishments, for no matter how much I exhaust myself acquiring those accomplishments, the sum total of them will always be far too trifling to ever reflect my true value. My value rests in the fact that I am an accomplishment of God so incalculably valuable that He gave up Himself rather than give me up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I incessantly look for water in wells dug by men, and I have drunk enough sand to prove it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Why is it when I pursue the praises of men I find myself with everything that I’ve looked for but nothing that I need? That’s because I have an extraordinary habit of looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe consequences are dear friends in stealthy disguise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I wholly unleash my imagination and forcefully stretch it out beyond its own edges, even at such a point I can only imagine a thin shard of this most immense God. And even though it is but a thin shard, it will nonetheless be mesmerizingly colossal.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Loss eventually arrives when something departs. Grief is working through both.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We would prefer all gain and no loss in life, yet that would gain us nothing more than great loss.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you haven’t figured it out yet, an absolutely certain way to lose something as quickly as possible is to forget the privilege you have to possess it in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I have attached anything to sacrifice other than loss, I have at some level assumed a pay-off. And if I’ve assumed a pay-off, I’m only assuming a sacrifice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It‘s utterly astounding that every time I get knocked down God’s mercy compassionately raises me to my feet; His grace thoroughly brushes off every trace of assorted filth I accumulated in the fall, His word precisely recalibrates my direction to insure the success of a journey resumed, and once all of that is completed He gently leans over and whispers, “How about another run?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
As it peaks over the horizon, does not a sunrise whisper the opportunity to try again. And if the day passes and our efforts were stunted by the bane of our insecurities or blunted by the challenges of life, does not a sunset invite us to rest before it whispers the same message the next morning?
Craig D. Lounsbrough