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

by Levi Lusko

Trust me when I say this: the issue isn’t whether your life is going well or falling apart; the question is, what makes you so sure you can tell the difference? Things are seldom as they appear.

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.

As the adage goes, I had too much of the truth in me to be happy in the world, but too much of the world in me to be happy in the truth.

Corrie Ten Boom’s sister Betsie said, “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.

Charles Spurgeon, one of the most punk-rock preachers the world has ever seen, once advised a group of young men he was mentoring not to go into the ministry if they could help it. If you can do anything else, he told them, do it! Be a banker, practice law, be a surgeon, and glorify God by doing so. Only become a pastor, he advised, if you literally can’t not. Do it only if, as it was with Jeremiah, God’s Word is a consuming fire inside your bones and you are unable to hold it back.2

I thought I was walking away from so many possibilities by moving to the wilderness, but God blessed my willingness to embrace obscurity and lay down everything I had by giving me even more opportunities.

Life in real time is messy. The fingerprints of God are often invisible until you look at them in the rearview mirror.

if you don’t get impatient, his plans will become increasingly apparent to you.

We treat the subject of God’s will as though it were this crazy, exotic, mysterious thing, but in truth it’s far less cryptic than that. 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. It’s not something you have to sit around waiting for; it’s something that’s all around you, even now. It’s here and it’s ready, if you would just open your eyes. We get hung up on the particulars of God’s concealed will, but—assuming you are walking with him and obeying his revealed will—you can do what you want or go where you want and trust that he is the one leading and guiding through your thoughts and desires. Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (ESV).

True to the promise of Jesus, as we sought first the kingdom of God and his righteousness all these things were being added to us (Matthew 6:33). We were living out things we wouldn’t even have dared to dream.

C. S. Lewis wrote, “Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”

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

The Bible says twice that Jesus groaned in his spirit. This was no ordinary sigh. The Greek word used here means “to bellow with rage.”6 It is a word that is so strong it is normally used to describe the angry snorting of an agitated horse. Have you ever seen a horse that is ticked off? Ears back, one hind leg up on tiptoe, ready to kick the teeth out of the first person stupid enough to walk through the impact zone. And there’s the telltale throaty, slow whinny escaping its teeth. You wanna give a wide berth to an animal like that.

So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. (vv. 1–8) Digging into these verses gave me strength and peace in ways I will never be able to articulate. Paul basically says that this life is a camping trip. Instead of canvas and poles, we are all bivouacking in flesh and blood. But what goes up must come down. The more you use a tent, the more trashed it gets. Paul would know this better than anyone. He was a tentmaker, the old school equivalent of a one-man REI. This skill subsidized his ministry and is why we use the phrase a tentmaking job to describe a bivocational minister’s other employment. The word tentmaker in the Greek literally means “tent repairer.” Paul didn’t just make new tents; he would patch up beat-up, old ones. Eventually, though, a tent would be irreparable, so the person couldn’t use it anymore. That is death. No camping trip can last forever. Eventually the fire must be put out and the tent taken down. We all must break camp sooner or later. But, Paul insists, when that happens, all is not lost. When this tent dissolves, we have a house in the heavens. In the Roman Empire, tents were often used as temporary dwellings while houses were being constructed. When the home was finally ready, you left the cramped tent. The departure was an upgrade.

Charles Spurgeon once preached, “Death, as it pulls away our sackcloth canopy, will reveal to our wondering eyes the palace of the King in which we shall dwell forever, and, therefore, what cause have we to be alarmed at it?”2

During the plagues under Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a staggering third of the city of Rome died.3 Mourning and grief were pervasive. People were hopeless and stunned. A historian noted that, in contrast to the prevailing despair, the Christians seemed to carry their dead in triumph.4 This is how God intends for us to face the grave and why the resurrection of Jesus is of such vital importance. Paul argued that if Christ is not risen, than all of Christianity is undone (1 Corinthians 15:14).

The very word cemetery itself comes from the Latin word dormitory and means “sleeping place.” When the coffin lid closes it sure seems final, but it is only a temporary arrangement. One day Jesus will give a wake-up call to the bodies in the dorms, and they will rise. This promise is the hardest to remember when you need it the most, but you must force yourself to look at death through this lens.

People commonly say “Rest in peace” or “RIP” as a final salvo over a grave. God has three different words for you to hold onto in faith as you approach the death of believers. Those three words are “Raised in power!” Because of Jesus, you can be solid as a rock and as immovable as an aircraft carrier until the moment when your own personal flying horse comes to bring you home.

God has taught my heart to sing again, and tucked away in the minor key, I hear his promise of all that is yet to come.

Just as pregnancy has a pleasurable beginning and a painful ending, grief starts with something brutal and ends with something beautiful: heaven.

Our third-born daughter, Daisy, is probably the most sensitive one in our house. She is sweet, thoughtful, and delicate. Not too long ago, my wife was doing devotions with the girls when the topic of problems came up. Jennie asked the girls if they had any problems they needed God’s help with. Daisy blurted out her response immediately: “Well, Mom, I have a problem. My problem is that it’s taking too long to get to heaven.” I feel the same way!

The evangelist Billy Graham said, “What oxygen is to the lungs, hope is to our survival in the world.”

I’ve heard that in Air Force survival training courses, instructors teach something called the “Rule of Threes”: 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

Dr. Meg Meeker observed, “Physicians can often tell the moment a terminally ill patient gives up hope. Death comes very quickly afterward.”5

The word forerunner in Greek is prodromos. It describes a pilot boat that would go ahead of a large vessel and bring its anchor into a harbor that was difficult to navigate. In the ancient Roman Empire, the port of Alexandria was notoriously dangerous. Large ships would pull up to the edge and stop until a prodromos could come and grab the anchor. Once it was taken to shore, the ship could be slowly and safely winched in.6

My friend Carl Lentz told us, “It’s better to win ugly than to lose pretty. The secret is to keep showing up.”

The creed of the smoke jumpers (an elite group of firefighters that are like the Navy SEALs of firefighting) is, “Do today what others won’t; do tomorrow what others can’t.”

Right now you are in training for a trial you’re not yet in. Public victory comes from private discipline. If you are willing to do the hard work now, then when dark days come, you will be ready. Your hands will rise to the heavens by instinct. Verses packed with hope will burst out of your heart. You won’t even have to think about what to do; your spiritual muscle memory will be honed. You will have people positioned in your life to hold you up and have your back. You will not faint in the day of adversity. Your trial will not be easy or over quickly, but you will get through it. Your anchor will hold within the veil, and one day the forerunner will bring you safely to the other side.

This is how God rolls. He puts to use what he puts us through.

The more we hurt, the louder we become. This is why, though it is tempting, you must not be selfish with your pain. The things God deposits in your spirit in the midst of suffering are the same things that someday other people will desperately need.

When you’re going through a trial, it’s easy to block out other people who are hurting. You might think, I can’t worry about them. I’m sorry other people have it bad, but I’m just barely coping. I’m hanging on by a thread. I could hardly get out of bed this morning, so I just need to focus on me right now. No one will blame you. But you are wasting the anointing oil your crushing produced. 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.

There are two reasons why your volume gets louder as life gets harder. First, when you’re going through a great time of trial, people around you tend to get quieter. Their voices hush out of respect. Smart people walk on tiptoe around hearts that are on fire.

When you’re a Christian and you’re going through a great time of difficulty, you will notice that those around you who don’t know Jesus Christ—especially those you’ve shared your faith with before—will lean in extra close. Their ears perk up. They want to see if what you have advertised is going to prove true in the product demonstration. You told them that Jesus is the light of your world. Well, now your power has been cut, and they want to see if you can glow in the dark. You’ve told them that Jesus is the anchor for your soul; he is the solid rock you can stand on. Now everything around you is giving way, and they want to find out if you’re going to sink in the sand. If they do see your claims proven true, you’ll find a greater willingness on their part to trust Christ in their own lives.

The second reason your volume gets louder when life get harder is because in trials, you can hear God better. Why is this? Because he comes closer! That’s what we find in Psalm 34:18: “...

C. S. Lewis wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is His ...

You’re actually better fit for ministry in the crucible of pain. You have a stronger voice to project and to declare, and it’s easier to belt from the diaphragm of your soul when you’re hurting. It’s counterintuitive, but in the middle of my hardest mess, I’ve found ministry to be a great strength waiting to be tapped into. It was welling up within me—a greater desire than ever before to tell the whole world that Jesus Christ can turn off the dark—because I experienced it myself. Right there, at ground zero, in the valley of the shadow of death. As hard as it was to claw our way through on hands and knees in those moments, Jennie and I found that when we poured our pain into ministry, whole new levels of usefulness opened up. There’s perhaps no time you are as powerful as when you minister in the midst of pain.

hard times are a passport that gives you permission to go places you wouldn’t get to any other way. Pain can open doors that would otherwise remain locked. There are avenues of influence. There are situations and opportunities you will stumble upon that would never have been yours had things gone well. Interactions, conversations, moments of great usefulness you probably never would have seen had it not been for the chemotherapy, doctor’s visit, or trip to yet another rehab facility to pick up your son.

I love sunsets, but I love sunrises too. I love them more than ever before now that my daughter is in heaven. (Sometimes when they are extra wild, we look up and joke that Lenya was able to help.) And I’ve noticed something: it’s the cloudy, stormy days that produce the best sunsets. Clear days are more fun, but the stormy ones serve a purpose. They give the potential for a killer show in the sky.

God trusted me with this trial for a reason, just as he saw fit to give you your cross to bear. And the more impossible your pain, the more incredible the power he will bring out of it. It’s his ratatouille—his specialty, a signature move that he has mastered. I heard someone once say that God gives his toughest assignments to his most trusted soldiers.

God doesn’t cause bad things to happen, but he is sovereign, and nothing happens outside his permission. The devil is the one ultimately responsible for evil. Sometimes it seems that life is out of control and more is given to us than we can bear. But everything is under God’s control, and he leads us to breakthrough when we worship, no matter what we’re going through. His endgame is to sabotage all your suffering and use what was meant for evil to accomplish his purposes. He has the devil’s credit card number on file and is more than able to make him pay for the damage he does.

You need to actively be on the lookout for every way you can redeem the hell you are put through by shining your light in the darkness. Your suffering is being used to create the anointing oil for the next level God wants you to reach. Squeeze every drop out of your trial. Let nothing be wasted. Hold nothing back. None of your tears have fallen to the ground unseen. God has a plan to put each of your difficulties to use like a seed that goes into the ground and brings forth a harvest of righteousness. I also want you to believe in Jesus’ name that there will come a day when the devil will regret ever asking God’s permission to give you your trials, because you will end up twice as blessed as you started out.

God wants you to shine brightly. He wants you to reach more people. He wants you to take more ground, and the only reason he has allowed you to be doubled over in grief is so he could pick you up and help you reach new levels of influence you never could reach otherwise. God’s up to something! He’s turning your mess into a message. He’s turning your pain into a platform. He...

As Randy Alcorn, the Yoda of all things related to heaven and the author of many books that gave Jennie and me great peace when Lenya went home, put it in a talk I heard: “You have been made for a person and a place. That person is Jesus, and the place is heaven.” Until you’re tapped into that knowledge, your heart will be restless.

There’s a technical term for what I was feeling: nostalgia. Nostos is the Greek word for “return home,” and algos means “pain.” Return home + pain = discomfort you feel when longing to get back to your home. Nostalgia is a bittersweet longing for the past, the sentimental, wistful feeling you get thinking of happy days gone by. It’s wanting to recapture something you once had or once felt, some point in your life that was a golden time. It’s the way you feel watching a certain movie at the holidays or baking something from a recipe your mom used when you were growing up. It’s the pictures you post on Instagram on Throwback Thursdays.

I read that because of social media and how short our attention spans are, nostalgia has been accelerated. Things go from “current” to “classic” much faster than they did for previous generations. It once might have taken decades for nostalgia to kick in; now things are “in” and then “out” and then quickly cycle back as “old school.” You’ll see something and go, “Man, I remember that!” Uh, yeah—that’s because it was only ten years ago!

The interesting thing about spiritual homesickness is that it’s not actually a desire to go back to a place where we used to live. It’s an aching for a place where we will live one day. What we have is a case of future nostalgia: we’re homesick for a place we have never been. The ache we can’t shake can find its fulfillment only in heaven. That’s why the apostle Paul said, “For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4).

C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series ends with many of the characters in the country of Aslan the Lion, where they find they can run as fast as a horse without being tired, reunite with friends, and eat fruit that makes the juiciest peach in our world seem like wood. Aslan observes, “You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.” Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.” “No fear of that,” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?” Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them. “There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.” And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.9

More than anything, Satan wants to take you to hell, but if he can’t do that, he’ll try to keep you from taking anyone to heaven.

You can see this illustrated in the wilderness temptation of Jesus, when Satan stood behind Jesus and told him to jump off the temple (Matthew 4:5–6). Why would the devil tell Jesus to jump? Because he couldn’t push him! I guarantee that if he could have, he would have. But he could only whisper in Jesus’ ear, not make him do it. So it is when Satan comes your way with his bag of tricks. He doesn’t want you to know this, but he can’t make you do anything. You always have a choice. In that way, you are more dangerous to yourself than the devil is. He has to check with God before he can wreak havoc in your life, but you can do great damage to your calling without getting approval from anyone.

Sticks and stones aren’t the only weapons in Satan’s arsenal. He often resorts to something much more dangerous, something I call panem et circenses. Wikipedia that if you want, but I’ll save you the time—it’s Latin for “bread and circuses,” and it’s part of a quote from a Roman writer named Juvenal from around 100 AD: “For the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions—everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”1