Quotes by Counselors - Page 3

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
A hole is a space where everything has been moved out so that opportunity has space to move in.
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
I tend to walk around convinced that any amount of forgiveness that I could extend could never possibly compensate for the offenses that I’ve had to endure. Yet, maybe the greater offense is that I’ve got that backwards.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Most of the things we deem as impossible are only impossible because we’ve given them permission to be impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe the real miracle in any miracle is our ability to believe that despite our own depravity, in the eyes of God we are worthy of a miracle.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When I find that stubbornness continually overrides common sense regardless of the logic of my argument, it seems that the only effective solution is to tell them to go ahead and stick their finger in the socket. And what I find is that what my argument failed to solve, electricity does quite nicely.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we’ve somehow become convinced that the script we followed ‘yesterday’ can’t be edited, it will be incredibly difficult to tell the difference between ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The road from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is a map yet to be written with the pen I hold in my hand.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The road ahead is not some predetermined path that I am forced to trod, but it is a rich byway that I can help create.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Could it be that we lost something because had we not lost it, we would have lost ourselves?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When the world does its level best to devalue me in ways that are nothing short of brutal, all it does is evidence my value. For why would it expend such massive amounts of energy attempting to destroy something that’s not there?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To ‘live’ is to realize that without the journey the destination is nothing more than a task rigorously completed rather than an experience riotously lived.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our actions in the present build the staircase to the future. The question is whether that staircase is going up or down.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest dividends in life are those that we give away.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
In our frenzied attempts to catch up with life, we run right past it. Once we have run past it, what we are in reality attempting to catch is ourselves.
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
God’s decision to reach out in such dramatic fashion as to lay all rightful privilege aside and be born into abject destitution tells us that His passion for us exceeds our desire for Him. And maybe we should commit to evening that up a bit.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The roads of life are paved wide and skirt the mountains. And these very roads are choked with a steady stream of pathetically pedantic travelers who in reality have no intent of traveling. And if we are to discover the real travelers, much less join them, we will find them out on precarious paths that defy the roads and scale the mountains.
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
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