Quotes by Counselors - Page 10

Rhetoric can be easily recognized for it is delightfully sweet sounding but it is utterly void of sacrifice, which means it is utterly void of substance. Christmas is irrefutable evidence that God never engages in rhetoric.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Instinct is all of our humanity being deliberately honest with all of life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What excites us the most or likewise scares us the most is when something is exactly what it says it is. And when it comes to Christmas, we’re going to end up finding ourselves on one side of that line or the other.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I can trust the word of a friend, why do I question the word of the God of the universe? Go figure. Sin is truly bizarre." [Running Scared, p. 111]
Edward T. Welch
It is inevitable that I will leave a legacy simply because I cannot walk through life without leaving footprints as I walk. Therefore, I would be wise to consider the path before I make the prints.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It's not that "today is the first day of the rest of my life " but that now is all there is of my life.
Hugh Prather
Whatever might be taken from me need not leave me with a deficit in its wake.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I have become so pathetically dulled that I hold freedom as my right and the privileges of liberty as my due, I can stand beside the stilled graves of a thousand soldiers fallen in defense of freedom and not feel a thing. And my most solemn prayer is that I will never be this.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Pain dutifully reminds me that the world is terribly imperfect, but it faithfully helps me appreciate the world on those days when it’s a little closer to being perfect.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Easter is the final solution to the finality of death.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Faith is the resplendent key that liberates me from the impregnable confines meticulously constructed from the raw material of my disbelief.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The more severe the dysfunction you experienced growing up, the more difficult boundaries are for you.
David W. Earle
Everything I touch makes me a little bit more like the thing I’m touching, so I’d better start paying attention to what I’m touching.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Objectification is a critical reason why an abuser tends to get worse over time. As his conscience adapts to one level of cruelty—or violence—he builds to the next. By depersonalizing his partner, the abuser protects himself from the natural human emotions of guilt and empathy, so that he can sleep at night with a clear conscience. He distances himself so far from her humanity that her feelings no longer count, or simply cease to exist. These walls tend to grow over time, so that after a few years in a relationship my clients can reach a point where they feel no more guilt over degrading or threatening their partners than you or I would feel after angrily kicking a stone in the driveway.
Lundy Bancroft
Jesus came to give us life to the very edges of life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What would behoove me to instantly declare God not to be God unless He followed my script in some tediously exacting manner? I must confess that I am less likely to believe that it’s a matter of some narcissistic demand that I freely pen my own script. Rather, I think it’s fear that I’m too inadequate to follow God’s.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I much prefer not to fall, unless of course I am falling into the hands of God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I ‘see’ is but a single thread and solitary shard of what ‘is’, for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The challenge is never based on the size of the obstacle that stands before me. Rather, it is dictated by the degree of faith that rests within me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we fail to instill a fixed sense of confidence in our children, we will raise handicapped children who have no handicap other than the conviction that they believe they do.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is a bold act of emboldening sacrifice and the most selfless gift ever granted the rebellious lot that we are.
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
Sitting on the hot seat of change requires much courage, patience, and persistence.
David W. Earle
Parents know all about the verses related to how children should behave but not so much about those that remind them about how they should behave.
Jeff VanVonderen
The message of Christmas is a message of hope when all other such messages created by men can do nothing more than be hopeful.
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 sacrifice is not the theme of my life, there’s no sense telling the story.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We forgive those who harmed us. And then, with an open heart, we simply as Jesus to heal us.
John Eldredge
Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If no one has boundaries…how can there be any transgression?
David W. Earle
Suddenly finding myself imprisoned in the ruins of the fortresses I created, I realize that that which I built to protect me has now become a labyrinth that is set to destroy me. And laying spent in the rubble, I finally realize that there is only one fortress and I cannot create it because there is only one God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I admit that at times my prayer for my children is nothing more than vocalized unbelief aimed at God.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.
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
Consequences need not be the obstacles that I dread, but the direction that I need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The difference between a ‘man’ and a ‘father’ is that the former shares his genes, but latter gives his life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have forged many things that I believe to be things of great beauty. Yet if God is not a part of them, they are entirely counterfeit and I have been robbed blind by the work of my own hands.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is the restraint of patience that yields the magnificent in life.
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
Has he ever trapped you in a room and not let you out?Has he ever raised a fist as if he were going to hit you?Has he ever thrown an object that hit you or nearly did?Has he ever held you down or grabbed you to restrain you?Has he ever shoved, poked, or grabbed you?Has he ever threatened to hurt you?If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we can stop wondering whether he’ll ever be violent; he already has been.
Lundy Bancroft
If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Prayer is such an intimate act, a place of vulnerability. It is, hopefully, when we are our least guarded, our most honest selves. And this is good, of course; this is as it ought to be. When we come to God, we certainly want to come as honestly and openly as we can; we want to be our truest selves before him. Prayer lets us be in a place of need.
John Eldredge
It is the state of the heart within us that determines the nature of the triggers we will pull outside of us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would suggest that our imagination is a tiny shard of God’s infinite genius that we have within us simply because we were created in God’s image.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To forget is to blithely toss aside the hard lessons that were hard won by others before us, thereby needlessly dooming us to endure the hard lessons that are likely to be forgotten by those who will follow us. And it is altogether reasonable that in order to avoid this repetitive trouncing, God graciously granted us memories.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
No person, collection of people, institution, government or organization of any kind can in any way promise to meet all of my needs for no person, collection of people, institution, government or organization possesses the array of resources necessary to do that. And so, I am left with the reality that either there is a God who can meet all of my needs, or I’ve been stranded in an existence that created me with needs that the existence itself cannot meet.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If there is any solace to be found in the carnage of September 11th, may I find it in understanding that the potential to do great good can handily rival the tendency to carry out great evil. And out of that understanding may I commit in my own life to make certain that in such a critical rivalry I will ensure that towers will never fall because of me, but people will be raised up due to me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Making oneself large involves intentionally making oneself small.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Abuse counselors say of the abusive client: “When he looks at himself in the morning and sees his dirty face, he sets about washing the mirror.
Lundy Bancroft
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
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
The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can't change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and a stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future was the past was not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sooner or later I will realize that the very things I most desperately need are the very things I am unable to give myself. Therefore, I will either be left despising the fact that I am doomed to live out a life that is perpetually empty, or I will realize that an empty tomb is the single thing that will eternally fill me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Rather than being incensed by the nature of the bruise, maybe we should be inspired by the possibilities in the bruise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Your children should not have to act appropriately so that you can feel like a valuable person. It is not their job to validate you or erase past relationship indictments against you with their performance. In a healthy Christian family children are not there for the adults, adults are there to be resources for their children.
Jeff VanVonderen
Maybe I don’t have enough beginnings in my life because I fought against the endings that were about to birth those beginnings.
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