Quotes by Counselors - Page 2

Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it’s adhering to our scripts or not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Disappointment focuses on ‘what is not,’ and completely misses the far greater reality of ‘what now is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We live with this tortured feeling that we must create that which in reality we have the privilege of finding.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have diligently disciplined my life to search out life’s gifts in the places where life stores its scraps.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sacrifice is a passion that unleashes everything away from us so that it can be drawn into everyone around us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Teenagers can spot hypocrisy a mile away and here I was telling them how to cope when they witnessed the shambles of my own life and how I was living.
David W. Earle
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
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
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
Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain.
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
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
Despite my best effort to make myself as large as absolutely possible, life will always be larger than me. That simple fact makes God not only a likelihood, but a necessity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The sure path to tomorrow was plotted in a manger and paved on a cross. And although this sturdy byway is mine for the taking, I have incessantly chosen lesser paths. And maybe it is time to realize that Christmas is a promise that I can walk through the world and never get lost in the woods.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe what I need to be rescued from is the feeling that I don’t need to be rescued, for without a doubt this is the most difficult rescue of all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There’s not much that I can find in places where there is nothing to find. However, to avoid facing God I find myself spending a lot of time in those very places.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My heart says, ‘This way.’ The world says, ‘That way.’ God says, ‘I am the Way.’ And if perchance I choose to listen to the first two, I’m going to find myself so far off the ‘way’ that being lost becomes the ‘way’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
An exceptional future can only be built on the transformation of the mess I’ve made, not the elimination of it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Is it possible that my walls are specifically erected and intentionally reinforced out of the fear that God calls me to an existence without walls? And if this is so, do I realize that I am the warden of prison that I created in which I myself am the prisoner?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
One of the greatest lies is to believe that we don’t have value. One of the greatest mistakes is to act on that belief. And the greatest liberation is found in looking at the cross of Christ and realizing the enormity of the lie.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Every tomorrow is an outcome of what I do today, and the beauty of it all is that today is happening all the time.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Dreams are ideas where the collar has been removed and the leash has been thrown away.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I’m perplexed by the fact that I’m constantly lost, maybe somewhere in my head I’ve determined that being lost serves a greater purpose than being found.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Is the goal I’ve set been determined by a desire to avoid the goal I should have set?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Apathy is unconditional surrender where we are driven into hiding by unrealistic fear, and firmly held there by the misinformed belief that we are helpless to do anything other than hide. Therefore, apathy survives solely on lies and can be completely abated by truth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Why is it that none of the things I construct ever make me feel safe? The answer lies in the fact that safety can’t be created. It can only be found. And the only thing I've found that’s never been created is God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Bravery is not found in getting knocked down. Rather, bravery is found is getting back up knowing that you’re going to get knocked down again.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The only reason I can’t jump in and engage life is that I’ve told myself I can’t. Yet I can’t helping wondering would happen if I told myself I could?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Fear tells me that while there might be a host of people who wish to stand beside me in times of crisis, the tangled wreckage is sometimes so enormous that the best of their efforts leave them stranded at a great distance. And standing desperately alone surveying the carnage that holds all others a bay, God suddenly taps me on the shoulder, leans over and whispers, 'how about a little demolition?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I must look at the 'nature' of God, not the 'nature' of the challenge. For the former means everything and the latter means nothing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Most of our fears are borrowed. Since that’s the case, we should get busy returning them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I am brave enough to stand against those who have been groomed by fear, I will recognize that where I get knocked down is all about where life begins, and has nothing to do with where it ends.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The paralyzing fear of being lost is fed solely by the irrational fear that we will never be found.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s not about the elimination of fear. Rather it’s about the elimination of the feeling that the elimination of fear is necessary before we take the next step.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Be absolutely assured that we will die long before our own deaths if we ever allow the fear of adulthood to kill the wonder of childhood.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can certainly run from a lot of things. But when we eventually pull up exhausted and entirely out of breath, we are rather shocked to discover that we haven’t been able to create any distance between ourselves and what we’ve been running from regardless of how fast we might have been running and how far we think we might have gotten.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I spend a tremendous amount of time carefully choosing the roles I wish to play so that I can run from the role I was born to play. And if I keep on doing that, I will eventually set foot in my grave never having set foot on the stage.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If there’s any redeeming quality that I can find in running away from something, it’s that I’m on my feet. Now all I’ve got to do is alter my direction.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I’m not the author of my fears, but I sure feed them really well.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often it’s about what stands before us, not what stands within us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often we make it more about what stands before us, and we miss all that stands within us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s not about describing someone as that’s typically an attempt to make whatever they are comfortable for whoever we are. Instead, we may wish to skip the agenda of the description and embrace the wonder of the person.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I want to ‘think’ that I have all the answers. But if I ‘think’, I soon realize that what I thought to be answers were guesses. And if I ‘think’ yet again, I begin to realize that since God has all the answers He never hands me a guess.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To think that we grasp the fullness of life is to say that by holding a mere drop of water in our hands we are able to understand the immensity of the ocean.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Do I make up some ‘god’ in my mind, or do I make up my mind to know God?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Intelligence and wisdom are certainly compatible, however they are rarely seen in each other’s company.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe the truth of it all is that we’re just too fearful to give our faith enough running room to realize that this precariously thin path that led us to the end of this life is dwarfed to obscurity by the infinitely vast byway that begins immediately on the other side.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I scan the expanse of my heart and find it empty of everything except emptiness, it is because I ‘poured’ the whole of my passion into something other than God. And anything other than God will always be too ‘poor’ to be able to ‘pour’ back anything that can fill that kind of emptiness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Strength other than that received from God is just hype manufactured by men.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
So, there’s this hornet’s nest. And there’s this long stick. And then there’s me. How I walk away from all of this will depend on whether I realize that some things go together and some things don’t no matter how hard you try.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you can get others to believe that your random guesses are actual answers, they’ll never guess that you never understood the question in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If there’s one thing that’s irrefutably absurd, it’s believing that we can separate intelligence from wisdom and still have it be intelligence.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Imagination envisions what could be. Reality states what is. And when my journey is shaped by one of these at the exclusion of the other, I will eventually wake up on some road facing the ‘reality’ that I’m far more lost than I could have ‘imagined’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s not that I’ve been invited to the hole I’m standing in. It’s that I accepted the invitation.
Craig D. Lounsbrough