Quotes by Counselors - Page 3

No matter how dark your situation seems, there are blessings you can find and focus on. God is always faithful. - From the Book: Removing Your Shame Label.

Eddie Capparucci

We don't need to pray to prove that we're properly pious or really serious. Instead, we pray because we are completely assured, and because the Father hears our prayers because they come to Him through the lips of His dear Son.

Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

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

God is too great to be glorified only through the lives of His victorious children. He is glorified by our suffering and even by our sin. His sustaining strength is glorified when we walk through the furnace of affliction.

Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

Other people feel love when we listen without judging and accept them without demanding change. We all desperately require these basic needs. When we can do this for another, we are indeed that person’s angel.

David W. Earle

The worst of it is that while we continue to sink deeper into the muck and mire that we’ve created, in the very descent itself we ignorantly declare that in reality we are rising. And until desperation has crippled us sufficiently to confess the lie that we are lifting ourselves out of this mess, and until the panic of utter hopelessness has driven us to completely surrender all of the pathetic contrivances that we’ve fashioned that have put us there, we will never realize that God has readied solid ground that stands but a single step away

Craig D. Lounsbrough

When we choose to stay down, we are in reality confusing wisdom with cowardice. When we choose to stand back up, we are using wisdom to overcome cowardice.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Despite my incessant desperation, I simply cannot paint the perfect picture within which I would wish to live out my life. And because I cannot, God picked up the brush of love, positioned the canvas of history and painted a manger.

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

I can be absolutely assured that any endeavor of which God is not a part is most certainly a step backward. And any step backward is at least two steps behind where I’d be if I’d have gone forward in the first place.

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 hands of man can manufacture many things both penetratingly brilliant and utterly astounding. Yet, despite their amazing dexterity and profound skill they cannot manufacture hope. Such a masterpiece as that is left for the hands of God and a manger crafted by those hands.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

One of a mother’s greatest gifts is to teach her child that to grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water’s edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore. And that lesson can be best taught by a mother who stands before her child dripping wet.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The best I can do is to ‘pretend’ that I’m my own god. But in the pretending I have to pretend that I’m not pretending, and somehow that doesn’t sound very god-like to me.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

In reality, is being sedentary a choice to run from our calling by not running after it?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Once faith dies, the death of hope follows hard on its heels.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

In a relationship with God, our most secret places once thickly cloaked and meticulously hidden away now stand before us utterly and entirely exposed. And it may be that this dreaded fear is the single thing that keeps us an arm’s length from God, and forever a single step away from His blessings.

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

To be alone with myself in the space of silence is horrifying, for I know with the utmost certainty that in that space I will hear the very things that I constantly use the clamor to drown out. And so the question becomes, how long can I keep up all the noise?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Under this aura of perfection he knows how flawed he really is but his intact denial system keeps this awareness suppressed in the far recesses of his mind.

David W. Earle

The image of God infused in us never sees the light of day in the service of self, but it becomes the light of day in the service of others.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Christmas is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

To calculate sacrifice is to attempt to sacrifice safely, and safe sacrifice is one of the most outrageous oxymoron’s I can think of.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The years have simply reconciled us to the fact that we are all here for the transformation.

John Eldredge

One of the obstacles to recognizing chronic mistreatment in relationships is that most abusive men simply don’t seem like abusers. They have many good qualities, including times of kindness, warmth, and humor, especially in the early period of a relationship. An abuser’s friends may think the world of him. He may have a successful work life and have no problems with drugs or alcohol. He may simply not fit anyone’s image of a cruel or intimidating person. So when a woman feels her relationship spinning out of control, it is unlikely to occur to her that her partner is an abuser.

Lundy Bancroft

If I choose to take the pen from God and write the story of my life without Him, I better have plenty of erasers and a whole lot of white-out. Better yet, I should invest in a good shredder.

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

I am only one, but that is infinitely better than being none.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Am I a storm-waster? For it is within the fury of the very storms within which I cower that I find resources for my growth that are entirely absent on calmer days.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

What we’re searching for will determine where we arrive, or if we arrive. And right in the middle of such risky choices, Christmas is God perfectly solving the problem by showing us what to search for and then bringing it to us.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Oh yes, I am frequently driven to an enraged frenzy by the blatantly crass actions of others. But to be painfully honest, that anger is much less driven by the reality of their actions and far more fueled by the realization that everything I am is everything that I hate in them.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

ALCOHOL HAS NO BIOLOGICAL CONNECTION TO ABUSE OR VIOLENCEAlcohol does not directly make people belligerent, aggressive, or violent. There is evidence that certain chemicals can cause violent behavior — anabolic steroids, for example, or crack cocaine — but alcohol is not among them. In the human body, alcohol is actually a depressant, a substance that rarely causes aggression. Marijuana similarly has no biological action connected to abusiveness.

Lundy Bancroft

We can only climb the mountains because there’s a valley that makes the mountain a mountain.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

It is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Too often the spotlight that highlights our successes burns out quickly, while the spotlight that scrutinizes our failures is a long-life bulb.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves

Hugh Prather

How often is my tidy and well-appointed world nothing but the thin veneer of an imagination that I’ve chosen to use in the service of denial, rather than a gift I’ve chosen to exercise out of a passion for change?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Sacrifice is a noun in my vocabulary that should be a verb in my life.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Despite all of our incessant tinkering, we can’t manufacture the things we most desperately need. And if perchance we do, they will never be more than pathetically emaciated facsimiles that will leave us emaciated. And until we finally realize that we can only ‘find’ these things, we will never sense any compulsion to ‘find’ God.

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

The world brazenly touts freedom as both the inalienable right and morally liberating justification to mindlessly play in the filth that lies all around me. And the slight bit of sanity that yet remains within me asks, ‘what raging madness would prompt me to incessantly wallow in the very things that will eventually swallow me?

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

All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

As I contemplate a relationship with God, I find that I’m afraid to ride on the coattails of the infinite. But what I fear more than that is spending my life in the coat closet.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

It’s not about inviting great things into our lives. Rather, it’s about accepting the invitation of great things to step out of our lives.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

I incessantly look for water in wells dug by men, and I have drunk enough sand to prove it.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Christmas is a response to bring mankind back, to restore some original intent that could never be even remotely restored by any effort of mankind regardless of how grand or majestic any such effort might be.

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

The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The anticipation of loss is much more frightening than the actual loss as anticipation leaves room for the imagination to create that which, in all likelihood, will never transpire.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Mediocrity is a path cleared by fear, leveled by apathy and paved by comfort.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Is safety the ‘dream’ that will kill all of my other ‘dreams?’ For the truth is, no ‘real’ dream is safe.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The length of the fall is dictated by how far we had climbed. The outcome of the fall is dictated by whether we’re holding on to that which we’re climbing, or we’re letting God hold onto us.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I see only my bias, I have surrendered to a single myopic lens through which to view the world. If I dare to surrender my bias, I will spend the rest of my life seeing the world and throwing away lenses.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Surrendering is intentionally laying down the power I possess. And have I considered that the power I lay down is often more powerful than that which I’m laying it down in front of? Therefore, I would be wise to recognize that surrender is less the absence of power and more the presence of fear.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Making amends is not only saying the words but also being willing to listen to how your behavior caused another’s pain, and then the really hard part…changing behavior.

David W. Earle

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

There is that gnawing feeling that we are far more than what we believe ourselves to be. Maybe it’s time to believe the gnawing.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

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