Quotes by Counselors - Page 20

If I can draw the slightest smile across a single face obliterated by pain, in that act I will have begun to understand the power of an ordinary human being to perform the seemingly impossible in the life of another human being. And how can that experience do anything less than drive me to try and make the world smile.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
No one escapes some degree of chaos for it is so ever prevalent; it is the human experience. This realization does not mean we can’t improve. It does mean we can accept our state of chaos, lighten up on ourselves, have fun, and work on improving…we are a work in progress. Enjoy the journey.
David W. Earle
To declare myself as a genius immediately evidences that I am not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I must not imagine what is ‘not’ as a means of escaping what ‘is’. Rather, I must understand what ‘is’ and imagine how I can make it what it is ‘not’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The art of living is to rise above lesser things so that we can truly enjoy great things. And the message of Christmas is the greatest of all things.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I have not been both soothed by love and on the opposite extreme left devastated by it, I will never understand its power nor respect its majesty.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The issue is becoming so absorbed in positioning ourselves ahead of everyone else that life becomes nothing more than an endless strategy.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Contrary to popular opinion, we are all a vast brotherhood of human beings whose very survival hinges not on what we keep, but on what we give. And it is in the giving that we not only survive to live another day, but we thrive to celebrate another day.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The more we construct lives that prioritize safety, the bigger the prison we construct around ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Undoubtedly, failure is growth in pain’s disguise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What is an adventure, I might ask? And in the asking, I might begin to understand that my adventures are sorely limited to the confines of my lackluster imagination. Therefore, an adventure of the most robust and wild sort must be constructed by an unlimited imagination. And unless I am mistaken, only God has an imagination like that.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often it’s about what stands before us, not what stands within us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Faith is the most unexercised muscle known to man.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Do I make up some ‘god’ in my mind, or do I make up my mind to know God?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Hope is oxygen to the soul, and God is the oxygen of hope.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Although it pains me, I must admit that I have never found what I ‘need.’ And I am in this place because long ago I took it upon myself to decide what I ‘want’ to need, verses surrendering to what I ‘need’ to need. And thankfully I have realized that God made Christmas everything that I ‘want,’ but more so He made it everything that I ‘need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you are aware of chronic or severe mistreatment and do not speak out against it, your silence communicates implicitly that you see nothing unacceptable taking place. Abusers interpret silence as approval, or at least as forgiveness. To abused women, meanwhile, the silence means that no one will help—just what her partner wants her to believe. Anyone who chooses to quietly look the other way therefore unwittingly becomes the abuser’s ally.
Lundy Bancroft
We can fill our lives with ‘stuff,’ but as we do we’re concurrently filling our lives with the obligation to maintain that ‘stuff.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Change will not successfully happen unless the emotional component is solved.
David W. Earle
What this world needs now… more balloons and clowns
David W. Earle
I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest abuse that we perpetrate on liberty is our assumed right to it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Of course God does outrageous things. But in reality, what insanity would prompt me to follow a God who did anything less?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Is God like the Greek god, Zeus, sending down lightning bolts to cause catastrophic events? Does God decree when tragic or untimely deaths occur? Does God have a list and when your time is up, you die? Is it “God’s will” these events happen? On the other hand, do tragic events happen because of laws of nature or the law of averages?
David W. Earle
It would be wise to define ‘living’ as walking in the fullest expression of who I am, verses wallowing in the confines of who I’m not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Dream extravagantly, for God has imbued us with ample imagination to dream out to and across the very periphery of the impossible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his partner of plotting to harm him, he seems paranoid. It is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill. Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically “normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.
Lundy Bancroft
I hold in my hand a million ideas and more. But if I am puzzled as to why they have never leapt out of my hand and been birthed into the realities they were crafted to be, it is likely because the other hand has withheld the sacrifice that is necessary to birth an idea.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The worst denial of all is being in denial that we’re in denial in the first place. And I would wonder if that’s not exactly where most of us live out most of our lives.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am thankful that to be attuned to the needs of another attunes us to the world, and that if I stay attuned only to my needs I will always be a stranger to the world.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Being lost without grasping the rather obvious fact that we are lost is by far the best guarantee we have that we’re going to stay lost.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Let us be so taken up with the knowledge of God's goodness and the desire to fellowship with Him that our emotions are warmed and our outer man reflects great love. Although we must not seek emotional experiences for their own sake, we must not shun them merely because others misuse them or ignore God's instructions on worship.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
If you can get others to believe that your random guesses are actual answers, they’ll never guess that you never understood the question in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Suddenly I grasped what was happening- they were all trying to save me. I never thought I was worth saving.
Albert Borris
I did my best parenting by prayer. I began to speak less to the kids and more to God. It was actually quite relaxing.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
My fear of standing alone often pressures me to stand with a rather unsavory group that embraces a rather unsettling belief system which leaves me wondering why I left the promises of God for the company of people.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Through the eyes of men an utterly irrational birth followed by a terribly improbable execution are miscues of the most pathetic sort. And all I can say is that I’m immeasurably thankful that I’ve been given access to the eyes of God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The promises of God hold up long after the promises of the world have blown up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
This imbalance causes resentments within the over-responsible and dependency with the irresponsible person and this dynamic becomes the destructive life-pattern not conducive to happy families.
David W. Earle
I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it’s louder.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Commitment is a promise to a cause. Being non-committal is a promise to catastrophe.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The culture of women in the church today is crippled by some very pervasive lies. "To be spiritual is to be busy. To be spiritual is to be disciplined. To be spiritual is to be dutiful." No, to be spiritual is to be in Romance with God. The desire to be romanced lies deep in the heart of every women. It is for such that you were made. Are you ARE romanced, and ever will be.
John Eldredge
Shrewdly crafted political agendas, innately complex philosophies, man-made religions, governments and regimes of every sort, and all the endless volumes of man-manufactured wisdom and penned prose all completely failed to redeem mankind and make us better. When the best of our efforts failed to redeem the worst of our behaviors, God declared enough as enough and a baby was born.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
People who are unwilling to talk about deep personal issues do not trust their own emotions.
David W. Earle
I do not walk into the storm unless I have been called into the storm. For the former is arrogance and the latter is obedience.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Avoidance is paying forward that which I would be much wiser to pay off.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The power of a thing is not based on the power it actually possesses. Rather, it is much more about the power that we permit it to possess.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
At this moment God might not necessarily be a necessity, but know that His absence will of necessity eventually result in His necessity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The change most needed in our lives isn't change in our situations and relationships but in us. The thing God is most intent on rescuing us from is ourselves.
Timothy D. Lane
Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you are looking for love under rocks or bringing home water moccasins, you might be confusing love and pain.
David W. Earle
Worry’s magnetic attraction can only be broken by a stronger attraction, and David is saying [in Psalm 27] we can only find that attraction in God Himself.
Edward T. Welch
More times than I can remember I look around and I ask why the hole I’m in looks so strangely familiar. Probably because it looks a whole lot like all the other ones I dug before I got around to digging this one.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
God has hewn out a hidden path more glorious, tantalizing and adventuresome than the path trod by most, and it is a path seen only through the eyes of our wounds, felt solely through the heart of our losses, and singularly traversed by those with a limp in their step.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The hand of God is wonderfully evident at those times when He pens stories whose lines we ourselves are far too fearful to pen or whose imaginations are far too limited to envision. And I would unashamedly suggest that the Christmas story is that very story.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Either we are running ‘from’ what we fear or running ‘to’ what we fear. The former is a choice controlled by fear, the latter is an action inspired by it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we are merely a chance product of ‘random happenstance’ and nothing more, doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of ‘random happenstance’ with such methodical complexity?
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
Jesus was and is the greatest restoration specialist of all time.
Craig D. Lounsbrough