Running to the Roar

Okay, Dave, so you and your mom had an interesting ritual every Sunday.

Tell us about it. We would go to church, we'd drive to the cemetery, we'd look at my brother's grave. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. Every Sunday. As much as I can remember. Every Sunday. How old were you the first time?

You know, 10, 11. He was, I was seven when he died. And then my mom and dad were divorced. And yeah, I mean, I can see myself standing right there, right now, looking down at his grave and it was a weird feeling because you're like, he's not there. My mom's crying.

I'm sort of in denial. But, you know, feeling pain as a young, young boy, I didn't understand it. And I just thought God had avoided or left our family.

And he took away your best friend. Yeah, definitely. And so today we get to talk to a couple parents who have lost a daughter, wrote a book called Through the Eyes of a Lion Levi and Jenny Lusko. Welcome back, you guys.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having us. We're glad to have you on this journey with you. Your book's been a powerful resource. You're pastors of Fresh Life Church out in Montana and authors of all kinds of books.

We're not going to get into all the other books right now. We could have you back and talk about all kinds of stuff. Let's talk a little bit. You know, we spent the last couple of times talking about your journey to be pastor, start Fresh Life, and then the death of your daughter when she was five years old.

But talk about where God is in those moments. Because, you know, as you just heard a little bit of my story, you know, I'm seven years old, I lose my little brother. And then actually my parents got divorced and then I lost my brother just all in about a six month period.

Oh man. Got leukemia and within six, eight weeks was just gone. And we had just moved. My mom is now a single mom. And, uh, you know, I'm a little boy and I pretty much turn away from God thinking, you know, if that's who God is, mom and dad divorce, brother dies, he must not care.

He must not be here. Obviously years later, I have a totally different perspective on that, but that's where I was at the moment. And I, you know, I watched my mom struggle for years, you know, but at the same time she never lost her faith. She really held onto a strong faith in God. I think she got stronger actually in the midst of it because she was desperate for God. She needed him.

Yeah. And yet, you know, for me as a brother, but for my mom and my dad as parents, oh man, you're supposed to die before your kids. You know, it's just sort of the way it's supposed to go. And that didn't happen. You've been there.

You are there. So talk about, uh, you know, your perspective or help people understand God didn't leave God's right there, but it's dark and it's a devastating loss. How do you have a theology of suffering and growing in suffering when bad things like this happen? Yeah, we've always had a very big, robust God in our theology, you know, not a small God who's, you know, sitting up there in heaven, ringing his hands, worried about what's happening in Iran or, you know, stressed out about global warming. I mean, I think God cares about our universe. God cares about our world. He obviously entered into it in the person of Jesus to show and prove forever that he cares. I believe God's going to redeem and renew all things, including the world. So that means then that world matters.

The world matters. We should care for and conserve and care for animals and all those sorts of things, but a big God and a big God who is sovereign and knows the end from the beginning and speaks and stars are created and, you know, is triumphant and is resurrected. And so he's defeated death. And so our understanding of life is informed by God and not vice versa. So, you know, we don't look at life and pain and challenge and then determine our theology. We start with who God is.

And then as A.W. Tozer says, you know, what a man thinks of when he thinks of God as the most important thing about him. So that big God, then we then look through this through that lens to this life.

And I think it's really important because it will allow you to believe your beliefs and doubt your doubts. Otherwise, God is constantly on trial. And every day he's having to do the song and dance to prove to you he's still a good God. Oh, this is why you should still follow me. You know that to us when Christ rose after having paid for our sins in the cross and then ascended into heaven and sent his spirit into the world to be given to his followers as the down payment of eternal glory, as a down payment of a brand new body, of a life without sin. As far as I'm concerned, the trial ended. He's God.

He's king. And like Peter said to him in John 6, you alone have eternal life. Who else are we going to go to?

Who else offers what you have? And so for us, I think that doesn't make it easy to hurt. It doesn't make it easy to suffer. We stand at our daughter's grave like you did growing up.

And, you know, I'm touched as I hear your story because I think about my daughter who is seven, you know, when she lost her best friend and our other kids. But it doesn't make it the bad stuff go away. But what it does do is it changes the conclusions you come to. You see the same data, you see the same reality, but you just know that's not the end of the story. You know that there's also glory. There's, you know, like Paul said, this great weight of suffering, it becomes like a small and insignificant thing when I compare it to the weight of glory.

And so I think that's kind of what's factored into us looking at these things a little bit differently than maybe we would have if there wasn't a big God in our story. Talk about your girls. The thing that Dave didn't have is he didn't have a mom. She was grieving so much and his dad was gone that no one talked to him about it. Talk about how you've addressed this to your girls.

You know, how did you approach this? And you're probably still talking about it at times. Yeah, probably even more so now than ever. I mean, we've been talking with Olivia now, she's 15, but she says that she doesn't remember a lot from that time. Like she has little moments and glimpses and far off like memories. One thing I'm so grateful for is like, I didn't grow up in a house that even talked about heaven very much, but heaven in our home is just the place where Lenya is. It's like Disneyland.

It's like Hawaii. It's like, it's real place and my sister's there. So all of our kids, even Lennox, who never got to know her, meet her, there are moments where he says, I miss Lenya. And that is so sweet because we get to talk about, well, I wonder what Lenya is doing in heaven right now, or I wish we could FaceTime her or like, it's just so much part of who we are as a family and our verbiage and how we talk, but it's hard anything. And it's hard for each of them in different ways because Livia did lose her best friend. And even now she has friends who have really close sisters and she's 15 and Daisy's 10.

So there's a little bit of a gap in between them. And so she sees when she sees her friends who are like two years apart being best friends, like now she's grieving in different ways because she realizes I'm missing that with Lenya. Whereas for Daisy and Clover, they were two and one. So they knew Lenya, but they don't remember her. And so they've been doing a lot of grieving on the other side now where as they've grown up, they realize, I didn't know Lenya, tell me about her. Clover will just sit in my lap and start crying and saying, I wish I'd known Lenya. So it's pretty much a constant conversation of heaven and Lenya.

And I'm so thankful we have so many videos and so many pictures. So even there, there will be nights where we'll just watch, we call it Lenya TV. And so the kids get to see Lenya playing and singing. And we went through as a church Psalm 23 and before Lenya went to heaven. And so Livy and Lenya both memorized Psalm 23 and in her little video that we had play at her celebration of life, she's literally saying as a three-year-old Psalm 23 and Psalm 23 is very huge in our home too. And I say it to Lennox all the time when I put him to bed and just that idea of though I walk through the valley, well, first of all, the Lord is my shepherd and that changes everything. If you believe that the Lord is your shepherd, then you know that he's taking care of you and he's going to feed you and he's going to provide for you and he's going to lead you and he cares for you and he loves you. But then when later on, when it says, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. And so that's part of our journey as with God being our shepherds, we're going to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but it's the shadow of death. And so we know that he's with us and that we don't have to be afraid. And so all these things, and even as we lift up God's word as, as our comfort and as our, as the light, as we take steps of faith and the word is a lamp to our feet and our light to our path, like that has changed everything for us too. Even as we're teaching the girls, the kids, Lennox, the word is like, that changes everything.

It gives us hope and strength and power to face it all. Yeah. You know, one of the powerful concepts in the book that I've stolen Levi as a preacher and plagiarized and taught your, your concept. You always gave him credit. I always do. I always said, I just come straight out. Like the first time, then the next time you say, someone once said, and then the third time you say, as I always say, but I want to hear you talk about, I've read what you wrote about the, I call it run to the roar, but that whole concept explain that because that change and you just talked about you do it in your home.

So explain what that means. I don't know if I'm using the right phrase run to the second to last chapter. The idea is the way lions hunt, they scare prey into a trap. Male lions don't actually do much for hunting. Most all the lionesses it's like in real life, the women do all the significant things and the male lion will roar and scare the gazelle away from him. And the gazelle of course wants to get away from the roar. So he goes the opposite direction, but then the lionesses are hunting in the grass below. And so when he runs, he's actually running towards danger, not away from it.

So it would be counterintuitive, but the best thing to do would be to run towards the roar, to run towards his fear and not into a trap. And the point I make in the book is that when we let our fears control us and we do what we were, we run away from the scary things, we're actually moving towards danger and not away from it. So the point is in grief, sometimes you tend to, for us, I know it would have been very tempting to box up all her stuff, never go there, never talk about it, just put it out of sight and just never really bring it up. But we kind of said, hey, we're just not going to live with all these mementos that are going to be scary for us and things that are going to trigger, we're going to go through it, we're going to feel it.

I understand people who maybe would easily turn to drugs or alcohol to numb the pain of grief, it would be very tempting to go get a prescription and just not feel any of this. But we just had a conviction that, hey, listen, we're going to feel this, we're going to feel it all, we're going to just plunge into this and if it kills us, then fine, but at least we're not going to have to live a life of fear. And what we found was that by triggering all the minefields, there eventually weren't too many more minefields to blow up. And we did it together, we ran through it together, we had good counsel, people from our church and our community. And if something was scary to us, we just ran headlong into it.

I mean, obviously there's still things, surprising griefs that pop up, but they're more few and far between. What I say in the book is that I felt God calling me not to write a manual for grieving, but a manifesto for a different kind of living. And I guess Eyes of a Lion was the grief book that I couldn't find on the shelf and so I wrote it. It was the book I wanted to read to tell me not just, here's how you're going to get through it and offer me Kleenex, but to say, hey, like you can kick over some apple carts and watch God do something great in the midst of your greatest fears. Well, one of the examples that you say in the book was when Lenya's clothes were brought to you from the hospital and you had, at first you had a tendency like, oh, let's not look at those.

What happened? Yeah, well, it was kind of one of the, like Levi mentioned, one of those landmines where it was like, okay, this is going to hurt and this is going to be hard. Do we even want to go there? And I think that kind of became a yes, we're going to go there because we're going to allow ourselves to feel it. We're going to let the grief just kind of punch us in the chest. We're going to let it knock the air out of us and then we're going to get up and we're going to keep walking. And so that was so horrible because, I mean, we just received all the things that the clothes she was wearing that night, the pants that were cut off of her, the socks that she wore that weren't even hers.

They were her one-year-old sisters because she loves squeezing into her clothes. Like it was, we were weeping. We opened it up, we were weeping, but we let it hit us.

We let it do its damage and the heartache and the ache and everything. And then we didn't keep it. I mean, I think we kept the socks for Clover because they were rightfully hers. And then we threw away the pants that were ripped.

Like we just, we went through it and then we saved the things we needed to, and then we moved on. And even, I mean, she was fives and she was always changing her clothes. So like months after I would be cleaning out the closet and find her pants and her shirt because she had changed into her snow white dress. Like in the pantry or something.

Right. So it was almost like little sweet treasures. Cause it was like, oh, signs of Lenya, but it would cause me to just take a moment and weep.

And then I would put it in the wash and so it'd be ready for Daisy to wear. Like it was just like, we felt it, we felt everything and it hurt so much, but then we were able to take the next step. I don't know.

It's not really, it wasn't really a formula as much now looking back, it was like, oh yeah, that makes sense because now we feel so The cool thing is hearing from people who are going through unrelated griefs and telling us how it became an Anthem for them in chemotherapy or whatever, like that it run toward the word became it's become something that has surprised us in how God's used it. Yeah. It is so healthy because I'm sitting here thinking my family did the opposite. It was too hard.

We never talked about Craig. Um, just didn't bring it up cause you know, it was painful. So I don't remember a conversation and then, you know, never even talked about the divorce, you know, with my mom and dad. Again, I'm a little boy and going through this trauma, but you know, But it's also that alcohol is prevalent. And so they went into just covered it all up.

They denied it. And I'll never forget when Ann and I are in our first year of marriage, my dad comes to visit us in Nebraska as the chaplain for the Nebraska Cornhusker. So we're out there starting our ministry first year married. Dad has dinner with us and you know, my dad was an airline pilot.

I saw him maybe two or three times a year. You know, we didn't have a very close relationship. So he, we sit down after dinner, I'll never forget this. And he sits down and Andrew beside me on the couch and she goes, Hey, so Dave, that's my dad's name, Dave, tell me your perspective on the divorce.

I want to hear your side. But I'm literally like grabbing her. Like we don't talk about this.

This is not allowed in our family. I said, I've known Dave's mom. I've known Janiece for years. I've heard her story, but I'm sure there's a side to your story.

I'd love to know who you are and what happened. He couldn't stop talking. He said, he had permission. He looked at us like I'm allowed to talk.

He said, you're the first person that has ever asked for my side. And it was so interesting because it was the first time Dave really got to know your dad. He probably didn't have the tools to handle the things. Cause he was probably not giving them by his parents either.

So how amazing gave it to him. Well, the other thing I thought had to be so difficult was when the hospital called you and asked if you would be willing to have Lenya's organs donated. It was hard, obviously.

You know, they were all hard, hard moments, but it also came like 10 minutes after I mean, we had just got home and the phone rang. Yeah. Cause I mean, they, she's still hooked up to the machines and all that.

And there's a window where they can, they can harvest and all that. And so, you know, they, they called us and when I saw North Valley hospital on the caller ID, I thought she must've sat up. That was my first thought. And so to be given that surge of hope and then have it dashed when the person, I mean, and all the hospital people were doing such a great job, but they said, you know, I'm so sorry, there's no easy way to say this, but can we, you know, harvest for organ donation and you know, it was really hard to hear that. And it buckled my knees, you know, but we both felt like this is a way that she can be used to help somebody else out, give someone else hope. And obviously as the metaphor of the book suggests her eyes were able to be used for someone else. And Linya is actually a name in Russian that means lion. So her nickname was Linya lion.

And so it became super poetic. Her corneas went to two blind people and we got a word later that they got to see through her eyes. And so there's two people somewhere in the world today that can see through my daughter, our daughter's eyes, which is amazing. We've heard story after story of people who've named, there are a lot of little Linas around in the world. And even just this past week, I received two letters of families who knew our story and had a baby and named them Linya. And it's really, really precious and so beautiful. But even through the eyes of a lion, a Linya lion, like knowing that there's a little generation of these little Linya lions that are being sent out into the world, which is just so, so precious. You said that you're hearing from all these people that are using this, even a chemo patient, is they're saying that they're running toward the roar. How do we do that?

What's that look like? Jenny just said it a moment ago, and I think it's an anthem. We do the hard things. Sadly, I think it's easy to run away from friction and adversity.

And in so doing, we often short circuit our own development because we neglect the reality that most of the best things in life are introduced through seasons of difficulty. And when we run away from that, when we take the short circuit, when we take the easy way out, whether that's alcohol or quitting your church or moving off, whatever, there's so many things in life that are the chances to get offended. And Jesus said, blessed are those who are not offended on behalf of man. I think one of the greatest, easiest ways to get offended is to get mad at God when something's hard. But God might just be handing you the opportunity of a lifetime.

How easy would it have been for Joseph to get offended when his fiance was pregnant, but God was giving him the opportunity. And so many people, David gets anointed as king, and then immediately Saul starts throwing spears at him. And the question is, are you going to throw the spears back? Are you going to keep playing your harp? And I think a lot of us miss chances to develop and to grow and to be used by God in significant ways because we don't run toward the roar.

We give up, we throw in the towel the moment anything's challenging. Is that part of another theme you have in the book is pain is a microphone. Is that where you're trying to get at?

Explain that a little bit. The pain is a microphone comes from the idea that when God called Paul, who was Saul, who hated the church and tore it down with his bare hands, when God sent Ananias to go pray for him, he said, go tell him that he's going to preach to kings and to Gentiles and the nation of Israel and see how many things he must suffer for my namesake. Now those weren't two separate things. If you look at the book of Acts, Paul did do every single thing. Paul preached to kings, Gentiles and the nation of Israel, but along the way, he suffered many things, shipwrecks, donings, beatings, betrayals, abandonments, blah, blah, blah. But if you took away the misery, you also would take away the ministry.

It was when he got bit by a snake, shipwrecked, beaten, light about that he got to do all the things he did from chains into jail cell with stripes on his back. So what I'm trying to say is all of us would love to have a life without pain, but that would be a life without power because God brings power into our life, oftentimes smuggled inside of pain, like the proverbial fork or file in a cake. And so pain is a microphone and the more it hurts, the louder you become. And so when God allows you to be tried by many trials, just know this, that suffering is not an obstacle to you being used by God.

It's an opportunity to be used like never before. Yes. I'm thinking about when Dave and I went to seminary, one of our classes was we're taking classes on how to help counsel people. And so whenever you do that, what do you do? You bring up all your old junk. It became a counseling class for the Wilsons. Yes. Therapy.

Exactly. And I have sexual abuse in my past and I had told Dave about it and I thought, you know, it's in the past, it's all done. Jesus, you know, has healed me and all that. So, you know, I go to that class and I have never dealt with any of the emotion, any of the trauma, any of the pain. And so I start going through this grieving process and this anger. I'm sobbing every night.

It's like I took this, I had this wound and I took the bandage off and I was just bleeding out. And my sister came to visit me in California when we were going to school out there. And I had never told her, I had never told anyone in my family. And I told my sister, I'm going through this. She's my best friend. She led me to Jesus. And I said, I'm going through this abuse stuff. And she goes, what? I said, I know I've never told you you're my best friend, but I was sexually abused.

And she's like, so was I. And so we both go through this healing process where it's exactly that. I would think that, oh, I've, I've healed. I'm done.

I'm good. I'm not grieving anymore. But then something would happen that would just trigger that feeling. It's almost like another bandaid came off and there was another wound exposed. And so I'm like, Lord, really?

I have to do this more and more. And yet I think what happened is instead of running away, as you said, from the pain, I started taking it before Jesus and saying, Lord, here's where I am. This hurts.

I thought this was over, but I see that there's more. And in the process, he's, he's healing my soul. He's bringing me back to life. And my sister and I both later got together cause we had both started really dealing with it and letting God heal it. And I started talking about it. I started sharing what God was doing in the healing process. And what happens, it allows so many people to share their own story of pain and abuse. And my sister and I got together and I said, you know, I would go through it again in order to help all these women who've been hiding and then living in shame.

And that's exactly what you're saying. Like, Oh, let God into it. Let him heal you and let others share your pain and let them into it because God is all about taking our suffering just as he did. And we can bring glory to God in it because as we're on this earth, it's not easy. We're all going to suffer. But if we can suffer and point each other back to Jesus, it's amazing what he can do.

That's it. No one gets to not suffer. So, you know, like the Bible says, the rain falls on the righteous and the wicked. It's like, believe in Jesus, you suffer, don't believe in Jesus, you suffer. But when you believe in Jesus and suffer, you get to suffer and hope. I'd rather do that. You know, I'm not a smart man, but I'd rather do that. Me too.

Yeah. And I would have never thought growing up in a broken home, divorced parents. And then when Anne and I got married and in year 10, she told me I'm done and God showed up.

It's a whole nother story. We wrote a book about it, but I would have never thought those experiences in my life would point me to God's purpose for us. The pain in our life pointed us to his purpose and the people that need the hope from that story. Just as you've been connected to the people you probably never met. I would have never connected those dots.

It's like this pain is sort of isolated. Nope. God's like, I'm in it. I met you in it and now I want to use it to show you why you're on this planet. That darkness is going to bring light to other people. Your pain can become your platform.

Yeah. So thank you for not only writing the book, but letting people in. Because as you know, you're literally saving and helping millions. And I would love it if you guys would pray for those that are just suffering. They're in it, you know, they're really struggling. Will you pray for them?

Absolutely. Thanks for having us on you guys. Jesus, we love you. We're grateful to stand on the cornerstone that our faith is built on.

And that's Jesus. And we thank you that you're an anchor for us, both sure and steadfast. And I pray for every listener, every person who's suffering, hurting, that your spirit even now would touch their hearts, convince them of your grace. We know it's your loving kindness leads us to repentance. And we pray for people to even just right where they are, to sense you speaking to them through their headphones or through the speakers in their car. And just the reality that they're not alone.

They're seen, they're loved by you. And that you have a plan to work everything that's hard and challenging and painful into something that's going to bring you glory and bring us joy. And so we're confident in that. We're grateful to be a part of this thing called the church. People who have been called out of the world to know you, to be marked by your name.

We're not marked by the brand on our purse or our shoes or our jeans. We're marked by the name of Jesus that we get to carry. And when we leave this world, we're going to open our eyes in eternity and see you and know you even as we're known. We'll have answers to all the questions that puzzle us now. But between now and then, in the already, but not yet, we lean into that tension and we just say that, Jesus, you are enough for us. And so we love you and thank you for this time in Jesus' name. Amen. Someone has said, we don't know what the future holds, but we know the one who holds the future.

And that is where we find our rest and our comfort. Dave and Ann Wilson talking today with Levi and Jenny Lusko. Levi has written the story we've heard about today in a book called Through the Eyes of a Lion, Facing Impossible Pain, Finding Incredible Power. We've got that book available in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can order it from us online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get your copy.

Again, the title of the book is Through the Eyes of a Lion, Facing Impossible Pain, Finding Incredible Power by Levi Lusko. Go to familylifetoday.com to order your copy or call 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Now many of you know that during the month of May, we had a matching gift challenge that was made available to us here at Family Life. And David Robbins, who's the president of Family Life, is here with us to talk about that. David, the gifts that we received as a ministry from our listeners during the month of May, these are going to make a huge difference for us as a ministry going forward.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, I am so encouraged by the ability to minister to more families. I heard from Susan in an email this month and she said, I am struggling to stay afloat in the most challenging waters in my life.

I'm in a 34-year marriage and it's been an unhealthy marriage with all that's going on in the world. However, there are glimmers of hope for the first time in forever. Thanks for being a lifeline of hope. And I just want to say your kind and generous contributions in May that were matched enables Family Life to keep bringing the lifeline of hope found in the gospel and in the timeless truths of God's word to a growing number of families. And I really am sincerely so grateful.

As are we all. Thank you, David, for that. And I want to thank our listeners for being with us today. Tomorrow, Dave and Ann Wilson are going to talk about how important it is for us to measure our words, our communication with one another in marriage. Our words can either build up or tear down. And we'll hear more about that tomorrow. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.