Through the Eyes of a Lion: Facing Impossible Pain, Finding Incredible Power

by Levi Lusko

When God opened Gehazi’s eyes to see the unseen, he still saw the enemy soldiers. They didn’t go away. Why was he no longer afraid of them? He now understood that the thing that had him surrounded was itself surrounded by God. So it always is.

when you don’t recognize the value of what you have in your hands, you will always get from it far less than it is worth.

This might surprise you, but God doesn’t always get what he wants, and neither do we.

“There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.”1 That’s how God rolls. He is

better at saving than you could ever be at sinning.

I started to think a lot about butterflies and how if you cut them out of their cocoons or help them out in any way, they will never develop the strength they need in their wings to be able to achieve takeoff.

They have to struggle out in order to come into their own. Flight only comes after the fight.

The fingerprints of God are often invisible until you look at them in the rearview mirror.

Discerning God’s calling is more a relationship than a route, more journey than destination. It’s about who you are becoming more than where you are going. Perhaps it’s less about what you do and more about how well you do whatever you do.

There are very few things more defining than the people you choose to do life with.

There you have it, straight from Paul’s mouth, a three-word description of what it’s like to have someone you love die: “sorrow upon sorrow.” The phrase is intense in the original Greek; it is a nautical term that describes waves crashing on the shore.3 If you have experienced the magnitude of the grieving process, you know how appropriate the metaphor is.

hurting with hope still hurts.

Any physical miracle is just a delaying of the inevitable.

When our spiritual batteries are running low, all we have to do is wait on the Lord and ask him for strength. God promises that help will flow in response to such a request. And this strength is not something that you might need—there’s no doubt you will need it. Isaiah said even the youths will faint and be weary; the young men will utterly fall. Young people are those with the most strength of anyone.

You gotta cue the eagle. I discovered that, in moments when I was stumbling, if I called on the Lord and strengthened myself in the name that’s above every name—the name of Jesus—I could rise from a heap on the floor with renewed power. The Holy Spirit would energize me and give me what it took to keep pedaling through the pain.

In a survival situation you can last three weeks without food, three days without water, three hours without shelter in extreme conditions, and three minutes without air. But you

can’t make it three seconds without hope.4

The most important battle is the one you fight within, in your mind and heart, to not give up. If you give up hope, you won’t have the motivation to ...

The more we are filled with the Spirit, the more heaven comes near.

You must train for the trial you’re not yet in. The

worst time to try to get ready for a marathon is when you are running one.

God used our suffering to bring a blessing to someone else. This is how God rolls. He puts to use what he puts us through.

The things God deposits in your spirit in the midst of suffering are the same things that someday other people will desperately need.

If you would be willing to step out in faith and serve other people when you’re in the fire yourself, you will find a huge boost in volume, because you are plugged into a microphone called pain.

every time I have pushed through and let God use my pain, I have been glad I did—not just for any help it brought to those who suffered the loss, but also for the peace it brought my own heart.

the more impossible your pain, the more incredible the power he will bring out of it.

If you’re alive on this earth, you desire Jesus, whether you recognize it or not. Jesus is the answer to the ache within.

When your heart is properly focused on the things that are to come instead of paralyzed by the hard and the horrible things you have had to handle, you are postured to be effective in the present.

To the degree that you cultivate your sense of longing for the next world, you will be able to combat the deadly hypnotizing pull of this one.

He knows that we matter to God, though, and since he can’t hurt God directly, he inflicts pain on him indirectly by hurting us.

He was describing the way the people of the Roman Empire had been tricked into giving up their freedom as citizens belonging to what was once a republic. They allowed the emperors to take away their power to vote, elect their own

officials, and govern themselves. These priceless things had been purchased on the cheap. All it had taken was grain and games. Food and entertainment. Bread and circuses.

These emperors found that as long as people weren’t hungry or bored, their freedom could be stolen.

This destruction by distraction is difficult to detect when it’s happening, because it doesn’t involve bad things but good things that take the place of the most important things.

It is through constantly setting our minds on things above that we will be able to see through the temptations of the trivial here below and set aside the weights that hinder us from running our races with joy.

Heaven is our native land and home to us, and death to us is not the dying hour, but the birth hour.

The only way for you to see God do the kinds of things he desires to do in and through you is to run toward the roar again and again and again.