Quotes by Counselors - Page 3

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
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
The problem with the ‘herd’ is that our voice is never ‘heard’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The ‘fact’ of my actions frequently collide with the ‘fiction’ of my words. And at what point will I live what I say, so I will avoid what I do?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A ‘good’ father will tenderly cultivate his children. But a ‘good’ father who is also a ‘brave’ father will let the children without cultivate the child within.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The key problem I encounter working with wounded, depressed, and unhappy people is a lack of connection…starting from a disconnection from themselves and then with others. This is why love often becomes so distorted and destructive. When people experience a disconnection from themselves, they feel it but do not realize the problem.
David W. Earle
Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it’s adhering to our scripts or not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We have a choice. We can be jaded by what we’ve lost, or joyous over what that thing had accomplished while we had it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is the length of the journey that ripens the joy of the outcome.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Have we ever thought to consider that God allows things in our lives to die so that in that death we might come to the precious realization of how little we’ve actually lived in the first place?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Disappointment focuses on ‘what is not,’ and completely misses the far greater reality of ‘what now is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can only begin the process of saving myself when I surrender to the reality that I can’t. And what greater place to surrender that reality than to an infant who surrendered Himself to me so that I might surrender myself to Him.
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
Mediocrity is ‘purpose’ left to rot in minds ensnared in the deluded rationalization that vision is nothing more than a collection of fanciful dreams constructed by an imaginary God.
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
We focus on the reasons why we ‘can’t’ at the expense of the far greater reasons why we ‘can’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
One of the most terrifying questions of all might be, ‘Will I unleash myself to live before death unleashes me from the ability to be unleashed?’ And in retrospect, maybe it’s not the question that’s terrifying. Maybe what’s terrifying is the answer.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Mediocrity is the companion of passivity and will not heed the call of great things. Courage is the companion of sacrifice and cannot help but heed the call of great things. And we are left of our own accord to choose one or the other.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe I need to immerse the fabric of my soul in torrential nature of Christmas, and in doing so to finally understand that it is the very thing that can make the world what I so wish it were.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I see only my bias, I have surrendered to a single myopic lens through which to view the world. If I dare to surrender my bias, I will spend the rest of my life seeing the world and throwing away lenses.
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
Every parent is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn’s soul begs for the artist’s touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My decisions determine my destination long before I ever get there. And once I do get there, I suddenly realize this is not the destination I had in mind because what I had in mind was the fantasy that my denial had created verses the reality my choices crafted.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The drum to which we march reveals the conductor to whom we’re listening.
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
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
Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I often think myself to be so ingenious that I don’t even realize that my own plans may actually be my own undoing. Therefore, I might be wise to realize that God’s plans undo what I’ve done that’s undoing me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To only see ‘death’ in death is to somehow assume that death itself is a barrier so abrupt that God Himself is halted by it. To see ‘life’ in death is to understand that death is a sprawling horizon to a new beginning that God created long before death ever thought to show up.
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
Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have yet to learn that I am not designed to carry the burden of men. Rather, I am designed to carry the love of God so that I might soothe the burden of men.
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
I pray for sufficient wisdom to understand that wisdom apart from God is the stuff of opinion tainted by the rot of bias. And if I am somehow apt to confuse such rubbish with wisdom, I will think myself wise but find myself living in a landfill.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In one way or another, every mission that I have ever set out on to rescue myself is yet another mission that I end up needing to be rescued from. Hence, there is God.
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
Our prayers are something akin to delivering a list, verses surrendering a life. The former will always leave me creating the next list, while the latter will leave me creating a new life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A father teaches his children that the battle is not determined by the enemy that stands around them, but by the God Who stands within them. And that lesson can only be driven home as they watch their father stand around them, while God stands within their father.
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
If the light we have is continually engulfed by the darkness in a way that makes the darkness even darker, maybe we should think about getting our light from Someone else before it gets a whole lot darker.
Craig D. Lounsbrough