Quotes by Counselors - Page 18

To lust for something is desire turned selfish and gone mad. To embrace God’s passion is desire turned selfless and gone mindful.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Once I finally understand the immensity of my own impoverishment, I am finally in a position to see the enormity of God’s majesty.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Words can be honed to crafted perfection by the finest wordsmiths. Yet, if we trust solely in the expanse of them to explain this God of ours or articulate our experience of Him, we will have brutally destroyed the very things we are attempting to explain. And if I should do that, no words can describe how badly I wish I had no words.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest prayers that I could ever utter come from the heart. And when I pray that way, I rarely need to open my mouth. Therefore, maybe I should think about talking less.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sometimes the idea of living as a hermit appeals to all of us. No demands, no needs, no pain, no disappointments. But that is because we have been hurt, are worn out.
John Eldredge
Far too often, it is at the moment where we finally stand on the very precipice of some great thing that we turn and abandon it, for it is at these seminal moments that fear wins and greatness dies. The beauty of Christmas is that God steps over precipices.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Humanized gods are too small to captivate my imagination, or be worthy of my fullest allegiance.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
An idea without sacrifice, regardless of grand it might be, will never be anything more than an idea.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The intellectual support for UNBELIEF is about as stable as the stock market.
John Eldredge
Independence that has declared its ‘independence’ from the sure and certain compass of sound morals is nothing more than rogue greed having scantily dressed itself in the garb of independence while running off the cliff of anarchy.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The only reason I can’t jump in and engage life is that I’ve told myself I can’t. Yet I can’t helping wondering would happen if I told myself I could?
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
I often wonder if my imagination is one of God’s choicest gifts bestowed upon me to deliberately break me free from the frequent doldrums of my humanity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I cannot live without you. For to attempt to do so would be to rob both of us of each other, and that is thievery of the greatest sort.
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
If I were to sit down and count them, how many of my prayers were tainted by the seduction of greed? None, simply because nothing of that sort is a prayer.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Holiness leads to wholeness and wholeness leads to happiness.
Leslie Vernick
When someone obtains peace and serenity, this shines a bright spotlight on others’ own unhappiness making their discomfort even more apparent.
David W. Earle
Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I've concluded that I learned far more from my failures than from my successes.
June Hunt
Jesus came to give us life so unimaginably beyond anything that we could ever hope to conceptualize that wonder cannot help but be our constant companion.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The reason placing blame repeatedly fails to work is that I repeatedly place it on everyone else instead of where it actually belongs.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To destroy that which seeks to destroy me, God invites me to stand against it until it stands down and then falls down.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The father who has selflessly poured himself into the life of his children may leave no other monument than that of his children. But as for a life well lived, no other monument is necessary.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The problem is not that we don’t recognize the truth when we hear it. The problem is that we don’t want to recognize what the truth might mean for us if we hear it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If safety is my goal, living life is not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The balancing act we parents attempt is convincing our children: 1. You are loved more than you can imagine. 2. The world does not revolve around you.
John Eldredge
It is the length of the journey that ripens the joy of the outcome.
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 more we connect with our Spiritual self, the uglier sin looks. From the book: Removing Your Shame Label.
Eddie Capparucci
God is the greatest nurturer of all.
Eddie Capparucci
I sometimes react to making a mistake as if I have betrayed myself. My fear of making a mistake seems to be based on the hidden assumption that I am potentially perfect and that if I can just be very careful I will not fall from heaven. But a 'mistake' is a declaration of the way I am, a jolt to the way I intend, a reminder I am not dealing with the facts. When I have listened to my mistakes I have grown.
Hugh Prather
I am what no one else is, and in the hands of God I can do what no one else does. And if I dare set such a truth in motion I will change my world.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Fear tells me that while there might be a host of people who wish to stand beside me in times of crisis, the tangled wreckage is sometimes so enormous that the best of their efforts leave them stranded at a great distance. And standing desperately alone surveying the carnage that holds all others a bay, God suddenly taps me on the shoulder, leans over and whispers, 'how about a little demolition?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The truth is, we tend to train people how we want to be treated. If others know you have wishy-washy boundaries then they are free to walk all over you; the results…you become a doormat. We have actually trained others to do this when we will allow people to wipe their muddy feet on us. After all, we are doormats.
David W. Earle
The key to understanding if something is truly precious is to ask if we can hold it, for things truly precious cannot be held.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
How often do I stand in abject terror and raw trepidation before the impossible peaks that soar to impossible heights in front me, when God turns to me and calmly says “what mountains?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I cannot create greatness as I can only create weak facsimiles. And in sorting through the innumerable facsimiles around me, I will only happen upon true greatness when I happen upon the true God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I recently heard a talk about identity in which the speaker said it's almost as though we are born into a world in which we are constantly being labeled by others -- our parents, our friends, our family, and people we don't even know. Each person, from the outside looking in, comes up with a label to slap onto us without our permission. Some labels are kind and some are truthful, but many of them are lies. And sometimes we leave the negative labels on so long that we believe what they say; we allow those labels to define us.
Debra Fileta
If I don’t know who I am apart from everyone else, I probably need to spend some time apart from everyone else.
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
Imagination envisions what could be. Reality states what is. And when my journey is shaped by one of these at the exclusion of the other, I will eventually wake up on some road facing the ‘reality’ that I’m far more lost than I could have ‘imagined’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can only see life as this most miserable accident that I have been forced to endure simply because I refuse to see it as the most astounding plan that I have been privileged to engage.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Authentic love is deciding to live on a one-way street where all the arrows point down the street and not a single one of them point back up to where I’m standing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We’re constantly presented with opportunity, or the opportunity to create opportunity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To recklessly excuse a failure is to believe that I’ve effectively erased it from the story of my life, when I’ve actually imprinted it in indelible ink.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Risk is the clue that our dreams are both real and great.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I am sufficiently brave to extract the cancer of fear, I have effectively gutted my conviction that what stands before me is impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
An ending is only happening because at some point it was a beginning. And if an ending is dependent upon a beginning, I would be well advised to focus on the miracle of beginnings verses the pain of endings.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We have the power of the pen to write the next chapter, and the privilege to author the page in whatever fashion we choose. Yet, seldom do we understand the power of the pen and the privilege of the page.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It has nothing to do with who I am as compared to everyone else. It has everything to do with who I am in companionship with God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Tragedy descends, and in the carnage our enraged cynicism screams ‘If there was a God, He would not have allowed this!’ And somehow we’ve conveniently forgotten that once upon a time He allowed us to tell Him to go away, and once upon that time we allowed ourselves to take Him up on that offer.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can feel the hurt. There's something good about it. Mostly it makes me stop remembering.
Albert Borris
I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are about the hurried business of living life while missing it in the very process of living it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what’s there, and not angry for what’s not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Everyone needs a place to be honest.
David W. Earle
Uncommon solutions can always overcome problems of the most common or uncommon kind if I am sufficiently committed to overcoming them.
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