Quotes by Counselors - Page 5

If my heart is set on pursuing real treasures, my mind must be fixed solely on the privilege of enjoying them and freed of the obsession of owning them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Late one night, during a toss-and-turn fretful sleep, I pondered my crisis. No solutions were on the horizon. I, again, wasted my psychic energy with prayer. Nothing. No angel on a white cloud. No rainbow’s pot of gold. No way to control the people I loved. As I rolled over and put the pillow over my head attempting to block all that was negative, I silently screamed for rescue. Then, in a far away and distinct part of my brain, a small voice said, “You have to do this on your own.”I thought, “Was that the best You can do?” This god, to whom I was desperately sending burnt offerings of my own humiliation, couldn’t send an avenging angel or a wise man imparting wisdom? All You can give me is this feeble message of abandonment? At that moment, I quit believing in that god.
David W. Earle
Love that is fueled solely by feelings will suddenly find itself out of gas on a long road with no gas stations.
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
Death reminds us that life is a temporary privilege, not an endless right.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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
If my decisions constantly heed the voice of the world, I can be completely assured that I’m going to end up in a ‘world of hurt.’ If my decisions heed the word of God, I can be completely assured that this ‘world of hurt’ isn’t anywhere near my solar system.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The darkness that follows a sunset is never so dark that it can change the inevitability of a sunrise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To blithely discard the spent kernels of something that has ended is to discard the very resources that have painstakingly been harvested from that ending from which a spirited new beginning will be cultivated.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The real promise in too many promises is a promise that I’m going to be disappointed.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Today is WOUND FREE WEDNESDAY! You start to feel it during the Holiday season; a tug in your heart, the friction within your soul, all the past complicated feelings that rise up. Choose to stay in the moment with the life you are living NOW instead of allowing the past to dictate you choices, feelings, and responses. Be love, be compassion, rise above the past and stay in the moment. BE the GRATITUDE that is within you.
Midge Noble
Healthy people will marry healthy people because you will always end up with the person whom you believe you deserve.
Debra Fileta
It might behoove us to realize that isolation is the absence of all the senseless clutter, and all the incessant racket that would keep God from having ample room to show up and sufficient silence to be heard. Therefore, isolation may actually be the place where we are least isolated.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The death of our self-worth begins at its appraisal, for such an action erroneously implies that our worth can be quantified.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The journey was brutal, the results were glorious.
Bruce Lengeman
To ‘pretend’ is to say that I’m willing to waste the precious energy that it takes to pretend, and I’m unwilling to cultivate the bravery that it takes to be real. And I am at a complete loss to pretend that either of these aren’t true.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Truth is its own defense, therefore if something can’t speak for itself, it’s not truth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If it’s the benefit to myself that drives my decisions, I can know that I’m driving down a long road with a short bridge.
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
The child you hold in your arms is your gift to a future that you will not see. Therefore, we must turn a blind eye to ourselves and selflessly pour the best of ourselves into our children while rigorously sifting out the worst of ourselves. And once we are utterly spent by such daring gestures, we will shockingly discover the resulting emptiness as astonishingly filled.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When we leave this life, we only get to take two things: the love we received and the lessons we learned.
David W. Earle
It is when I am cold, alone, bitterly forlorn and shuttered from all hope that you will see who I truly am. And my goal is that at those most precarious of moments, what you will see is Jesus holding you through my tears.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I feign fullness, but in reality I am achingly empty. And it is because I too often sit at the table of the world instead of the feet of God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To look beyond our horizons is to acknowledge that we’ve hemmed ourselves in by creating them in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often fantasy is not a rich elaboration of life designed to enhance our existence, rather it is our pell-mell escape from life with the intent of exiting this existence. And the most imaginative fantasy of all is to somehow think that I can do that in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The clash is born of the fact that the child within me sees with undiluted clarity what the adult within me is incessantly working to deny. And in these most vexing moments, to be the adult is to defer to the child.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
You can't fight a battle you don't think exists.
John Eldredge
If I have refused to risk, I have in the self-same decision refused to love. And if indeed I have refused to love, tragically I have refused to live. And when will I realize that that in and of itself is an unacceptable risk.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
What in the world would ever lead to me believe that life is a series of opportunities that are readily available to everyone else but me? What really leads me to believe such an atrocious lie is that I don’t believe in myself sufficiently to engage those opportunities in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
As a product of Anglo-Saxon-Protestant culture, I am familiar with its centuries-old tradition of hiding its abuse of women under pretty packaging.
Lundy Bancroft
Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way, for recovering from a traumatic situation is all a matter of how we think about what happened. It is not so much about what happened to us as what we make of the circumstance.
David W. Earle
We can certainly run from a lot of things. But when we eventually pull up exhausted and entirely out of breath, we are rather shocked to discover that we haven’t been able to create any distance between ourselves and what we’ve been running from regardless of how fast we might have been running and how far we think we might have gotten.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would be quite wise to realize that I will never craft a solution that will be the ‘end-all,’ and that God’s ability to craft perfect solutions never ends ‘at-all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Any dream that I am absolutely confident I can achieve should immediately be discarded for the simple reason that it is simply too small.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Why is it that we don’t worry about a compass until we’re lost in a wilderness of our own making?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own ‘god’. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a ‘god’ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be ‘god’ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you look for God in your relationships, you will always find things to be thankful for. When God reigns in our hearts, peace reigns in our relationships. This work will only be complete in heaven but there is much we can enjoy now.
Timothy S. Lane
Mature adults gravitate toward new values and understandings, not just rehashing and blind acceptance of past patterns and previous learning. This is an ongoing process and maturity demands lifelong learners.
David W. Earle
Sometimes the very things that we’re expending our lives to sustain are the very things that are killing our ability to live. And against our blind and frequently raging protests, these are the very things that God let’s die so that we can live.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Only God understands how incredibly far we’ve fallen, and only God understands how incredibly far we can rise. And only we can determine if we’re going to wallow in the mediocrity that is born of the refusal to understand either.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
No, I am not powerful nor do I wish to be, for it is God using my weakness that makes me potent and I would never wish to surrender that.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sacrifice” and “self” both begin with the same letter, but the spelling is way different after that.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Fairness is not something to which we are entitled. Rather, it is something for which we hope.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our minds have a great capacity for deception. This does not mean we are necessarily dishonest but if we are not careful, when our brains do not have answers, our minds will create them.
David W. Earle
The worst of me is the raw material from which God molds the best of me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In order for a person to be able to “turn our lives and our wills” over requires something very difficult for a spiritually wounded person to accomplish - Trust. Yet, to accomplish this step, trust of the spirit must be present.
David W. Earle
To forget is to render the pages of history as entirely blank, and the lessons of history as never taught.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Why would God create a defective product? Why would a God who gave me free will require any certain belief? Why would a God powerful enough to create the universe need me to justify His existence? Why would He want me seeking favor with Him to manipulate my entrance to some afterlife?
David W. Earle
Faith revels in the liberating fact that only a terribly miniscule part of life lies within the constricted confines of my reach, and that I am graciously invited out to live in a place beyond my grasp.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
By approaching my problems with "What might make things a little better?" rather than "What is the solution?" I avoid setting myself up for certain frustration. My experience has shown me that I am not going to solve anything in one stroke; at best I am only going to chip away at it.
Hugh Prather
It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and most costly rescue mission in all of human history.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up with more demands because he believes his needs are your responsibility, until you feel drained down to nothing.
Lundy Bancroft
Purpose declares that the trajectory of my existence and the course of human history were intentionally set to collide at this precise moment in time because what I have to offer human history is desperately needed at this precise time.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If it’s about me, I can be assured that there will be a bunch of empty chairs in the auditorium of my life; save the one I’m sitting in.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
This woman’s size protected herfrom the hurts of the worldbut it also imprisoned her soul. As the merry-go-round revolved, she ate another French fry,as a silent scream frozen on her face.
David W. Earle
In God’s vocabulary, ‘lost’ is an unnecessary adjective that is easily erased by the adjective ‘found’ if we would simply be brave enough to hand Him the eraser.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
As I have explained in earlier chapters, abusiveness has little to do with psychological problems and everything to do with values and beliefs. Where do a boy’s values about partner relationships come from? The sources are many. The most important ones include the family he grows up in, his neighborhood, the television he watches and books he reads, jokes he hears, messages that he receives from the toys he is given, and his most influential adult role models. His role models are important not just for which behaviors they exhibit to the boy but also for which values they teach him in words and what expectations they instill in him for the future. In sum, a boy’s values develop from the full range of his experiences within his culture.
Lundy Bancroft
Being a mother is not about ‘birthing a child into the world.’ Rather, it is about repeatedly ‘birthing into the child’ a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that the cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother.
Craig D. Lounsbrough