Quotes by Counselors - Page 17

The eyes of love have 20/20 vision when focused on another, and become entirely blind when focused on ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Reasonably speaking, we can see the cross as entirely possible. But in considering Easter, we see an empty tomb as entirely impossible. And is it possible that God had to do the impossible to finally get our attention?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Boredom is useful to me when I notice it and think: Oh I'm bored there must be something else I want to be doing ... boredom acts as an initiator of originality by pushing me into new activities or new thoughts.
Hugh Prather
The scars from mental cruelty can be as deep and long-lasting as wounds from punches or slaps but are often not asobvious. In fact, even among women who have experienced violence from a partner, half or more report that the man’s emotional abuse is what is causing them the greatest harm.
Lundy Bancroft
As we review our worries, we should make it a habit each day to God, "what is it I should focus on today"?
Eddie Capparucci
To live safely within the realm of possibility is to know nothing other than that which is possible. To live boldly within the realm of God is to experience everything that’s impossible.
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
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
We tend to perseverate on the fact that as far as we might have fallen, there’s always another bottom underneath the one we’re laying on. Yet, for every bottom underneath us, there’s always endless opportunity above us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
With God, a mountain before me is soon to be a memory behind me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Should the king in exile pretend he is happy there?Should he not seek his own country?His miseries are his ally; they urge him on. Let them grow, if need be. But do not forsake the secret of life; do not despise those kingly desires. We abandon the most important journey of our lives when we abandon desire. We leave our hearts by the side of the road and head off in the direction of fitting in, getting by, being productive, what have you. Whatever we might gain – money, position, the approval of others, or just absence of the discontent self – it’s not worth it.
John Eldredge
Could it be that we lost something because had we not lost it, we would have lost ourselves?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I continually focus on what I don’t have, my life will always be completely empty despite the fact that it’s completely full.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The fear of getting knocked down is less about the pain of the fall and more about the embarrassment in having fallen. And so, to rid myself of the latter is to reduce my concern about the former, which means I just unleashed my life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I cannot make my kids obey. But I can control my responses to their disobedience—that is, I can respect their choices and provide wise consequences for their actions, so they can learn just as much about wisdom from disobeying as from obeying. And I can respond in ways that create an environment in which their poor choices are their problem.
Jeff VanVonderen
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
Although the typical abusive man works to maintain a positive public image, it is true that some women have abusive partners who are nasty or intimidating to everyone. How about that man? Do his problems result from mistreatment by his parents? The answer is both yes and no; it depends on which problem we’re talking about. His hostility toward the human race may sprout from cruelty in his upbringing, but he abuses women because he has an abuse problem. The two problems are related but distinct.
Lundy Bancroft
God’s eyes readily see beyond our actions, for our actions are simply fear and selfishness pretending to be us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sadly, I put my dreams to bed long before they ever had the chance to get tired.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
We must clean the lens of our hearts to see the state of our souls. However, too often the former is too dirty to even know that the latter exists.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate, but it is crafted hard by the hands of God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To love those who hate us is to refuse to borrow their hatred.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The best way to see majesty is to strip away everything that pretends to be majestic so that which is fake wholly collapses in the face of that which is majestic. And God in a manger is likely the most remarkable example we have of such a monumental truth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
God chose to deliberately venture into and intentionally occupy depths far below and infinitely beyond that which any human has ever descended, and then to raise Himself back up to glory from those horridly dark places. And I pray that we never miss the fact that Christmas is God’s invitation for us to join Him in the rising.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe we need to reflect on the fact that the patience of God always outruns the impatience of our greed, and that His love always outweighs the greed that outweighs our love for Him.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I’ve prayed, I never have to worry about being the first one to show up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Dreams must be chased, for if we wait for them to chase us we will live a life of waiting.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To seek the praise of men as our motivation is to abandon truly great things, for more often than not truly great things elicit the ire of men far more than they garner their praises.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The burdens I carry on my back are in direct correlation to the weight of my ego.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What I do is the truest mirror of who I am.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Be confidently assured that any ‘gods’ that we build will always have veracious appetites, and sooner or later they will gorge themselves on that which built them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Good tells us that our agenda is the agenda of the person next to us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I too often allow people to become a sterile commodity to be bartered in the service of my greed, and in doing something so absurdly reckless I foolishly barter away everything that meets my need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Heaven shows up all the time. But we plan our time so that we show up in other places.
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
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
The problem with the ‘herd’ is that our voice is never ‘heard’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We ignore the Holy Spirit when we position ourselves at the center of life. - From the Book: Removing Your Shame Label.
Eddie Capparucci
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
The central attitudes driving the Demand Man are:It’s your job to do things for me, including taking care of my responsibilities if I drop the ball on them. If I’m unhappy aboutany aspect of my life, whether it has to do with our relationship or not, it’s your fault.You should not place demands on me at all. You should be grateful for whatever I choose to give.I am above criticism.I am a very loving and giving partner. You’re lucky to have me.
Lundy Bancroft
But whether you stay or go, the critical decision you can make is to stop letting your partner distort the lens of your life, always forcing his way into thecenter of the picture. You deserve to have your life be about you; you are worth it.
Lundy Bancroft
In a very tragic kind of way, sometimes things have to be gone before I fully realize that they were ever there.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I thought parenting was going to reveal my strengths, never realizing that God had ordained it to reveal my weaknesses.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
While real sacrifice is committed to the result, it relishes the effort
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
In the thoughtlessness of my incessant hurry, I have made God an ‘addendum in’ my life verses the ‘agenda of’ my life. And what I need to hurry up and realize is that with these priorities positioned as such, what I am hurrying to is my own demise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is, I think, a far lesser offense to blatantly ignore God’s directions for our lives rather than arrogantly think ourselves shrewd enough to be able to bend them to our liking without breaking them and therefore breaking ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Although I rail against it, death is the dark demarcation beyond which I am at the mercy of my own end. To the contrary, an empty tomb says that my end is at the mercy of God’s beginning.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it’s translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The assumption of ‘rights’ is the cancer of privilege.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We really can’t afford to live our lives walking in some sort of introspective darkness as if the darkness is the only thing that we can walk in.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Discouragement is the cancer of great things.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Addiction does not cause partner abuse, and recovery from addiction does not “cure” partner abuse.
Lundy Bancroft
We can’t even remotely fathom that whatever is ending for us is always more than an ending.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too many of us view liberty as something that ‘just is,’ and too few see it as something that ‘is’ only because someone, somewhere was faced with the formidable reality that to keep liberty meant paying a stiff price.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am pressed to admit that I don’t have the capacity to understand the bloodied horrors of a cross and the wild exhilaration of an empty tomb. But at the point that I think I completely understand God, I have at that very point humanized Him and in that very action I have lost Him. Therefore, I much prefer to simply marvel.
Craig D. Lounsbrough