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

by Levi Lusko

During the Imperial age, under men like Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Octavian, and Nero, as many as 135 days out of the year were dedicated to games: gladiator matches, chariot races, juggling competitions, elaborate mock naval battles, and beast hunts with exotic animals imported from far-flung provinces of the empire.2 These emperors found that as long as people weren’t hungry or bored, their freedom could be stolen. In the process, the emperors could turn themselves from kings into gods. The free food and endless entertainment acted as an anesthetic. They kept people amused while their liberty was taken. It was poison laced with sugar, and it was incredibly effective.

The leaders the people trusted were slowly subjugating them, and they loved them for it. They shortsightedly gave up things that mattered for things that were over in a short period of time. In the book The Hunger Games (and the movie based on it), this concept is played out in the future. The name of the capital city, Panem, is a nod to Juvenal’s quote, as are the excess and indulgence depicted in the film among Panem’s citizens, who feast and then vomit so they can keep eating. And though my editor will probably insist I tell you it has been debunked by historians, legend has it that at the height of the Roman Empire, among the super-rich, many decadent feasts included vomitoriums, where you could puke and then continue partying.

And let me tell you, if you think he’s bad as an enemy, he’s much worse and much deadlier to have as a friend. 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.

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.

The devil wants to steal your power and neutralize your impact. His goal is to trick you with the trivial and get you to spend your life focused on the superficial, so that you are kept from your calling and deprived of your destiny. If he can keep your attention diverted until you are dead, he will be able to get you to do to yourself what he doesn’t have the power to do to you. His endgame is to play the fiddle while the life you were meant to live goes up in smoke.

Hearing this statement would have immediately fired off bells for the Philippians he was writing to. The city of Philippi was not a part of the empire—it was a Roman colony. Unlike those in neighboring cities in the region of Macedonia, those who lived in Philippi enjoyed Roman citizenship, which was a really big deal. The majority of those in Philippi had never set foot in Rome, but they were under its protection and its privileges. In the annals of Rome their names were recorded. Though they were far from Rome, it was technically their home. They lived in Philippi, but their citizenship was somewhere else.

In the book Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, Dr. Meg Meeker described parenting as “walking around with your heart outside your chest. It goes to school and gets made fun of. It jumps into cars that go too fast. It breaks and bleeds.”

There are gifts you get from God in the midst of grief that you would never have had the bandwidth to receive if everything was going as planned.

When the Hubble Space Telescope first launched, hopes were high that it would return unprecedented images of outer space. The price tag was $1.5 billion, so it really needed to perform to justify the expense.4 Unfortunately, at first it was a billion-dollar disaster. All the images that came back to earth were blurry and useless. The telescope was out of focus. The lens had been calibrated incorrectly. It was a tiny problem, a flaw in a lens only one-fiftieth the thickness of a sheet of paper, yet it caused the soaring spyglass to be nearsighted. Hubble needed glasses. It was the butt of a thousand jokes. It was impossible to take out the damaged lens and far too expensive to bring Hubble home for repairs, so scientists and engineers devised a brilliant solution. They would effectively put a giant contact lens on the telescope. They built an additional optical component with the exact same error—but inverted—and added it to the telescope. Bingo! All of a sudden Hubble could see like a supersonic eagle. It had twenty-twenty vision on steroids. Never in the history of the world have we seen more glorious pictures or had such knowledge of the universe as what Hubble has beamed back to our dark planet.

M. Bounds that perfectly sums up the power we can have over the temptation of bread and circuses: Heaven ought to draw and engage us. Heaven ought to so fill our hearts and hands, our manner, and our conversation, our character and our features, that all would see that we are foreigners, strangers to this world. . . . The very atmosphere of the world should be chilling to us and noxious, its suns eclipsed and its companionship dull and insipid. Heaven is our native land and home to us, and death to us is not the dying hour, but the birth hour.7

In the 1990s a breeding experiment between Asiatic and African lions in India went horribly wrong. Scientists tried to mix the two together, but it backfired. The hybrid lions’ back legs were too weak to support them. Some were so feeble they couldn’t even eat meat off the bone and had to be served boneless meat. There were originally about eighty of these hybrids, a figure that was down to twenty-one when I read about it.8 They are kept in a small enclosure, nicknamed the “old age home” for lions. Those who take care of them are basically just waiting for them to die. The photos of these pitiful creatures were heartbreaking. One reporter noted that the lions “are extremely weak. They can barely stand up or walk. Their only activity is a small but painful walk to eat their meals. However, if challenged, they can still muster a spine-chilling roar.”

Too many Christians are tricked out of their power through their purity being diluted and their perspective being grounded.

I am fascinated by the way lions hunt. I’ve read that it’s the lionesses that actually do the “lion’s share” of the work. The males are obviously incredibly intimidating, with their manes and their ferocious roars, but it’s the chicks you really have to watch out for. The fact that lionesses do not have a big, recognizable mane actually helps them sneak up on whatever they are hunting. They lie in wait, hidden in the tall grass, motionless like statues. I listened to a sermon by Pastor Brian Houston in which he said that the males do play an important, albeit small, role. While the females stalk their prey from behind, the king of the jungle will come from the front and let loose one of those roars that gives him his spot at the top of the food chain. This sound is so powerful it can be heard for up to five miles away. Hearing that terrifying noise causes the gazelle or antelope to run as far as they can away from whatever made that sound. What they don’t know is that as scary as it sounded, the one who did the roaring is more bark than bite. So away they go—directly into the path of the real threat: the waiting lioness. In other words, the prey’s instincts are wrong. Going with their guts causes them to make the last mistake of their short, little lives. It’s counterintuitive, but the right choice would be to override their emotions and run toward the roar. It’s shocking how often that is true. When you run from things that scare you, you move toward danger, not away from...

in ways small and large, we are all going to have to confront our fears or abandon our destinies. The only path to the haul of fish you are meant to catch and the lives you are meant to reach is to launch out into the deep and sail through things that are scary. Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor. God calls us to go to places that frighten us so that we will fully trust him. 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.

It’s incredible that David was willing to fight Goliath at all. The fact that he sprinted toward what seemed like certain death is astounding. He killed the giant in the end, but first he had to run toward the very thing that terrified him the most.

You can’t ignore fear, but you don’t have to let it control you.

True bravery isn’t feeling no fear—it’s being afraid and moving forward anyway.

I know this for sure: Turning your back on the roar will feel good in the moment. You will feel a euphoric giddiness once you have put some distance between yourself and the lunacy you were considering. Cooler heads prevailed, you will think as you wipe the dust off your hands and prepare to return to business as usual. But hiding in the thicket, far from the sound of the wild calling you are meant to pursue, is a far more sinister opponent you didn’t even know was there: death. The death of the dreams God planted deep down inside you. The death of the life you were born to live. Like a slow leak in your tire that saps your ability to drive your car, you will have robbed yourself of the opportunity to stare down something that scared you. Live this way long enough, and the muscles of your faith will eventually atrophy.

To quote the immortal William Wallace from the movie Braveheart, Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you’ll live . . . at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin’ to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell ou...

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If you want to catch fish you have to launch out where the fish live.

Often what keeps us in the shallows is our fear of failure. Know this: not only is failure not a bad thing—it is a necessary thing. The only way to get to victory is to be willing to make mistakes on the way there. True overnight successes are rare. Far more often, you must keep showing up, day in and day out, until the hard, unglamorous work adds up and pays off. It’s easy to misunderstand what you are seeing when you look at people taking a victory lap or receiving attention or promotion. Their celebration is only the tip of the iceberg. Invisible to your eye is what’s underwater—the hell they went through on the road to success.

I recently read a powerful story about Kristen Anderson-Lopez. She, along with her husband, Robert, wrote the song “Let It Go” from Disney’s Frozen. Like many of you, my family and I have not only seen this film a hundred times, but we own the soundtrack as well. (And no, I would not like to build a snowman.) “Let It Go” is not just a great song—it is literally the best. It won an Oscar for the best song in a motion picture in 2013. It’s so good that it changed the course of the movie: Apparently Elsa, the character in the movie who freezes everything, was originally going to stay bad. The slot where “Let It Go” fits into the movie was going to have a liberated and evil Elsa singing a song that was dubbed in the story outline as “Elsa’s Badass Song.” But when the directors heard “Let It Go” they were so moved that they rewrote everything so Elsa could be redeemed. Kristen also wrote seventeen songs that weren’t included in the movie. Seventeen times her songs weren’t right. Seventeen times she heard “no.” Most of us would consider ourselves colossal failures if we were shut down five or six times. It would be difficult to keep pressing full steam ahead after being rejected a dozen times. But she continued writing and creating and inventing and putting herself out there seventeen times. Let that sink in. Songs #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 weren’t good enough for the movie. Attempt number 18 was a different story. This time the movie, as it ...

to envy someone’s success is to completely misunderstand the nature of it. To covet the limelight and the accolades is to focus on the wrong thing. Yes, there are those who are given every advantage and people who are raised with silver spoons in their mouths, but far more often the recipe for success is simple and unpleasant. You persevere through difficulty, bad ideas, bad days, and bitterness again and again and again, until something clicks. I...

God isn’t scared of what you’re scared of.

Here’s a little manifesto I wrote regarding Christmas and the Lusko family. I encourage you to borrow the idea next time you are scared. We will celebrate the birth of the One who came to destroy death and bring light and immortality to light through the gospel. We will sing until our voices won’t let us. We will preach and celebrate seeing people come to know Jesus, just as we did days after Lenya died in my arms. We will party if we can muster the courage, cry when we miss her, and collapse if we have to. Even though he slays us, we will bless his name. We always have a choice, and we choose to rejoice.

Some superwise person once observed that most people die at twenty-five and aren’t buried until they’re seventy-five. Don’t let that happen to you. Don’t let your soul stop growing, and don’t give in even if your stomach is growling. Your greatest days are still to come. I dare you to believe that the day will come where what you are most scared of right now will be included in your highlight reel as a triumphant victory.

Deadline is a word we use to describe the time when a project or an application is due. You might be surprised to know that the origin of that word actually has something to do with real dying. In the early 1900s, it was a physical line painted on the ground around the inside of a prison, measured out twenty feet from the walls. If prisoners crossed this line, they would be shot on the spot.1 It was literally a line of death.

I have incorporated a Latin phrase into a tattoo of a ship on the inside of my right arm. It says Plus Ultra, which means “more beyond.” In the days before the new world was discovered, the official motto of Spain was Ne Plus Ultra, or “Nothing more beyond.” The Spaniards believed that the Strait of Gibraltar was the end of the earth and that they had already explored as far as you can go. Once Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the Ne disappeared, and to this day on the Spanish coin is the humble acknowledgment that there is in fact more beyond.4

is possible to go into eternity with a saved soul and a wasted life.

The missionary Amy Carmichael said, “We will have all of eternity to celebrate the victories, and only a few hours before sunset in which to win them.”

Warren Weirsbe, the author of the profound book On Being a Servant of God, once said, “It’s not ability God is looking for but availability.”

Too often we are full of ourselves; God can use us only when we offer him our emptiness.

To quote the words of Maximus from Gladiator—quite possibly the best movie ever made—“What we do in life echoes in eternity.”7

On the night she went to heaven, I did for Lenya what a daddy should never have to do. I reached out and closed my little girl’s eyes. What I never expected was that God would use her to open mine.