Quotes by Counselors - Page 3

In choosing to exchange precious principles for worthless impulses, I have far too often bankrupted my soul in order to bankroll my ego.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We recklessly attempt to disguise our ‘greed’ by dressing it in the garb of other nobler ideals such as ‘rights’ and ‘privileges.’ Yet, if we dare dress ‘greed’ in an authentic sense of thankfulness, greed will suffocate within the folds of that very clothing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A cause that only serves me is much like a door on the edge of a cliff, it doesn’t open to anywhere good.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I constantly pack my pockets full of worthless trinkets, and in such misguided gorging I leave my heart empty and my soul emaciated because I have forgotten everything but trinkets.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I craft most of my own tragedies without ever having even the remotest understanding that it is I myself who have done the crafting.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Commitment is a promise to a cause. Being non-committal is a promise to catastrophe.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There are consequences to ignoring consequences that are a consequence of my blatant unwillingness to learn from my consequences.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the facade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s not so much about the cards you’re dealt; it’s a whole lot more about whether you play them well, or play them at all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Often self-love is replaced with self- loathing, compounded by beating ourselves up. We become experts at putting ourselves down, judging ourselves, and finding fault. This creates deep shame that says “I am a mistake” instead of saying “I made a mistake.
David W. Earle
This woman’s size protected herfrom the hurts of the worldbut it also imprisoned her soul. As the merry-go-round revolved, she ate another French fry,as a silent scream frozen on her face.
David W. Earle
A spiritual hell I lived in … hating the God of love and knowing the god I served … hated me!
David W. Earle
Her screams are heard across generations who dared not scream and died without joy,in silence and isolation.
David W. Earle
Idolatry is always subject to the law of diminishing returns.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
Every life is a canvas and every interaction is a brush, therefore we’d be wise to consider how we handle the paint.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The wisdom to be on the throne of one’s life must surpass the wisdom of the one being ruled, otherwise I will squander the whole of my life in the most appalling ways. By virtue of that reality, I would be wise to get out of the chair and invite God to have a seat.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
They sought the pain they knew so well and called it love.
David W. Earle
Loving those who hate us means wantonly setting the stage and orchestrating the situation in a way that’s sure to result in a production of great personal calamity. But to not love them is an even greater calamity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In the midst of our worried searching we recklessly abandon the treasures that life has bestowed upon us in the mad hunt for that which we wish to bestow upon ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas seems to say that paradise lost and longed for does not have to be paradise given up on.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas was a response of the choice of mankind to take its existence into its own hands and chart its own course, liberally scripting its own ethics, crafting its own moral system, and choosing to believe that it was the creator and therefore master of its fate. Christmas is a response to mankind reeling off the pages of history and splattering the blood of lives and generations wasted along its free-wheeling course.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is God saving mankind from the folly of mankind’s grandiose sense of greatness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is God being relentless to the point that He would die in that relentlessness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Shrewdly crafted political agendas, innately complex philosophies, man-made religions, governments and regimes of every sort, and all the endless volumes of man-manufactured wisdom and penned prose all completely failed to redeem mankind and make us better. When the best of our efforts failed to redeem the worst of our behaviors, God declared enough as enough and a baby was born.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is a response to bring mankind back, to restore some original intent that could never be even remotely restored by any effort of mankind regardless of how grand or majestic any such effort might be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is not something that sprang from the musings of some person who creatively devised caricatures of elves, spiraling candy canes, visions of a magical city whose foundation was nestled in the far reaches of the North Pole, or embellishments of a kindly bishop spun by myth into a bearded old man in a red suit.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and most costly rescue mission in all of human history.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is a clandestinely ingenious script that outlines a plan to reclaim mankind through a strategy unimagined and unimaginable. This strategy involved God writing His own death into the script.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We cannot humanize the fact that the story was penned to have the eternal God, Who Himself knows no beginning nor is in need of one, choose to experience a beginning. That is genius in and of itself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas was an ingenious plan designed by God to lay siege to the hearts of all men by submitting Himself to the greed of all men.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas was about understanding that servanthood would win the hearts of men for eternity, where raw power might win them only for a moment, if at all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is not a story birthed of a humanized god for it simply doesn’t fit into the rubric of such an emaciated plot.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There’s something inherently majestic about Christmas that seems to have been abandoned by us; something flippantly cast aside, something that was foolishly abandoned and was tragically forgotten in the abandonment.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If Christmas is a universally comprehensive and keenly clandestine rescue mission strategically crafted by God Himself eons before the rescue was necessary, it would naturally follow that if it is doomed to anything, it is doomed to incontestable success.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe the greatest hope of Christmas is that what it purports to be is exactly what it is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sartre felt that Hell is other people, but precisely the opposite is true. Hell is being left alone forever with no other reality than your own consciousness of yourself. It is being locked in a casket of your own internal chaos with no hope of a window, or door leading in light from outside to give you a moment's respite from yourself. Hell is the refusal of the gift of the other.
John Eldredge
The ‘deep pause’ needed to cultivate wonder is far too often back-filled with an incessant busyness, as busyness errantly presumes a ‘deep pause’ to be deeply wasteful.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My wisdom absent of God’s wisdom is nothing more than a best-guess.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
For what shall we do when we wake one day to find we have lost touch with our heart and with it the very refuge where God’s presence resides? a
John Eldredge
We describe a person without compassion as “heartless,” and we urge him or her to “have a heart.” Our deepest hurts we call “heartaches.” Jilted lovers are “brokenhearted.” Courageous soldiers are “bravehearted.” The truly evil are “black-hearted” and saints have “hearts of gold.” If we need to speak at the most intimate level, we ask for a “heart-to-heart” talk. “Lighthearted” is how we feel on vacation. And when we love someone as truly as we may, we love “with all our heart.” But when we lose our passion for life, when a deadness sets in which we cannot...
John Eldredge
In the end, it doesn’t matter how well we have performed or what we have accomplished—a life without heart is not worth living.
John Eldredge
If you are where I was before my process began, you can't imagine the place of victory, the place you can be free from the dominating desire for sexual stimuli. I am here to tell you that there is a place of freedom that you can know--a place where your desire for purity will subdue the lust of the flesh.
Bruce Lengeman
The initial confrontation of the root is the most critical part of this journey.
Bruce Lengeman
When life beats us down, we often do not feel worthwhile to ourselves nor to anyone else. Often, we try to hide our feelings of inadequacy in pursuit of perfection, which develops into self-loathing. If only we can be perfect, then we can be okay.
David W. Earle
Suddenly I grasped what was happening- they were all trying to save me. I never thought I was worth saving.
Albert Borris
For example, I can doubt that 2 + 2 = 4; however, my doubting does not change the equation. When I test out that formula and find that it is true, then that becomes my reality. How can anything become real until it is tested in the crucible of doubt?
David W. Earle
Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to the precipice of our own limits in any and every situation?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the backs of ordinary people who simply chose to do extraordinary things.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Although we may face untold numbers that by their sheer mass appear to render us as little more than a speck in the face of them, a single person standing with God amidst any mass will always be an indomitable majority.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it’s louder.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Consequences need not be the obstacles that I dread, but the direction that I need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Speaker calls the Christian counselor to look at each person as soul embodied with unique challenges that move us. This is not, he says, the first step before we get on to important business but vital in and of itself.
Edward T. Welch
When we actually refer to God’s blueprint, we gladly work in fascinated conjunction with it, suddenly realizing that any other action outside of that blueprint is foolhardiness and lunacy of the worst sort.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Uncommon solutions can always overcome problems of the most common or uncommon kind if I am sufficiently committed to overcoming them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would be quite wise to realize that I will never craft a solution that will be the ‘end-all,’ and that God’s ability to craft perfect solutions never ends ‘at-all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
By approaching my problems with "What might make things a little better?" rather than "What is the solution?" I avoid setting myself up for certain frustration. My experience has shown me that I am not going to solve anything in one stroke; at best I am only going to chip away at it.
Hugh Prather
Can anything be called an achievement if it does not simultaneously enhance the life of someone other than the one who has done the achieving?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I suppose that one of my greatest problem lays in the fact that I have assumed a blessing to be something that is mine for the taking, verses being something that by sheer exposure to it takes me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To savor the simple privilege that every day I have a sunrise to bathe in, a storehouse of opportunities to romp through, the thick wrap of relationships to keep me warm, a God who meticulously tends to every detail round about me, and it all costs me not a dime. What madness would keep me from being eternally thankful for all that?
Craig D. Lounsbrough