Rebekah Lyons: From Panic to Peace

((music playing)) It was so gripping and so scary that I just kept retreating from all the places I was so afraid of that I just became kind of a hollow shell of myself. And one night I woke out of a dream in my bed. And I just remember experiencing it in my bed and I thought even my own home, my bedroom, my my safe place is now not off limits for this attack.

Rebecca Lions knows well that life can be scary, but she has learned that God is bigger than all her fears. This is GPS, God, People's Stories. It's an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. I'm Jim Kirkland. Rebecca has trusted God through panic attacks, cross-country moves, and raising children with Down syndrome.

Through it all, she has embraced a biblical principle Billy Graham often spoke of. losing our life so we can find it again. Is Christ really Lord of your life? Have you submitted your will to him, your future, your vocation? Do you have this obsession? You'll hear Billy Graham talk more about that holy obsession a little later in the episode.

And you can learn more anytime at our website, the addressind peacewithgod.net. That'sind peacewithgod.net. If you didn't have a chance to jot that down, no worries. You can always find the link in our show notes. GPS God people stories. Rebecca Lions was born into a Christian home in St.

Petersburg, Florida. She had an adopted older brother and two younger sisters. I grew up surrounded by the church um a little Baptist church in Florida. I remember praying, you know, that I wanted Christ to come into my heart when I was five. Rebecca Lion says even as a 5-year-old, she understood that Jesus died for her sins and she wanted to have a relationship with him.

That didn't change as Rebecca grew up. Her faith deepened and when it was time for her to go to college, she chose a Christian school, Liberty University in Virginia. There she experienced God's love in a new way. Quite frankly, what Liberty taught me was a broader view of the church, a broader view of all the denominational intersections in one school and the expressions of worship, the expressions of the spirit, the expressions of faith, power.

It was beautiful. I remember many times just crying during different chapel services or concerts or whoever where God would just I would just encounter God in a way that was different and unique than what I had experienced growing up. Liberty University is also where Rebecca met her future husband Gabe.

During a routine OBGYn appointment toward the end of her first pregnancy, Rebecca and Gabe learned their unborn son was in serious danger. They said, "He's only 4 and a2 pounds. you have no fluid. You're having this baby today. So, we knew something was like wrong and it was really just about his birth weight at 40 weeks.

So, we're like, "Okay, we got to deal with that." And then once he came out, they took him straight to the NICU and I didn't ever get to hold him. And I woke that night, about 6 hours later at 1:00 in the morning, and the doctor came in and said, "We see signs of Down syndrome in your baby."

The news about baby Cade was hard to process. Even more so because Rebecca was still drugged from her emergency C-section. It was like a very traumatic like, oh, everything just changed in the last 24 hours. He was deemed failure to thrive and we were like fighting for his life and he wound up being in the Nik for a while and then it just like the world just turned upside down.

The next day, Rebecca got to reach through an incubator to touch her tiny son. And about 5 days later, the doctor confirmed Cade's diagnosis. He had Down syndrome. Week one of motherhood for me and my husband being young, I was 26, just learned so much in that week.

It was hard and beautiful. And I just cried a lot and prayed a lot. And that first year of his life, I think, changed everything for us as adults. It changed our trajectory. It changed what we thought was valuable. Things we would overlook became front and center. Things we thought were important went to the back burner.

And so God used Kade, our first son, Cade Christian Lions, to just reshape our entire lives. One of the ways God reshaped Rebecca's life was through a change in her career. She felt that God was calling her to leave her job at a local church so she could give her full attention to Cade.

I was just home full-time with a special needs son and then two more babies not long after for a decade and I was very hidden in many ways like invisible and alone in those seasons yet that was what God had for me. It was a time of spiritual growth for Rebecca.

I remember the kids were all little and we were kind of going through our emotions where we lived in North Atlanta and I just remember driving home one day and just saying, "God, just burn off anything that would keep me from being passionate towards you." I remember praying like, "You have the right at any moment to just interrupt my life and just kind of shake it up and disrupt it and keep me from complacency."

That was like a real need. like I don't want this to grow stale. God answered Rebecca's prayer in 2010. He called Rebecca, Gabe, and the kids to New York City. And it was not an easy transition for Rebecca. When we moved to New York, I didn't want to go.

I was very reluctant to go because it definitely felt like we were selling everything. We did sell everything we had. We'd been in Atlanta 13 years and it did require leaving home, leaving our security, leaving community, leaving even like a Christian community, our church, everything. And yet, we couldn't shake it.

Like it felt like an invitation. Moving to New York allowed Rebecca and Gabe to work again on a nonprofit they started after Cade was born. My husband and I started a nonprofit called Think Media and that's how to equip Christians on the front lines of culture and arts and media and government and policy and education, social sector.

We found about 20 years ago, there were so many people on the front lines that love Jesus but were so isolated and alone in their industries and we thought that we could help just connect them and that's what took us to New York City cuz so many of them were coming through the city.

But just 4 months into Rebecca's time in New York, her life drastically changed again. She experienced her first panic attack. I was actually coming back home into LaGuardia from Atlanta around midnight and hit horrible turbulence and I had this terror that rolled through me. And this is before I'd heard people talk about panic attacks.

And it definitely felt like I was dying. It felt like I was having a heart attack. It wasn't fear that the plane was going to crash that triggered Rebecca's panic attack. It was a fear that she wouldn't be able to get off the plane when it landed, that she'd be stuck in the very back of the plane.

My panic disorder was rooted in claustrophobia, which is why once we landed and I made it through it, I started having the same experience on an elevator or on a subway that was crowded underground or any crowds. Well, New York has 8 million people in the span of 11 miles.

It's impossible to avoid all kinds of claustrophobia. Still, Rebecca tried. For the next year and a half, she began taking the stairs instead of elevators or walking through Central Park instead of riding the subway beneath it. It was so gripping and so scary that I just kept retreating from all the places I was so afraid of that I just became kind of a hollow shell of myself.

One night I woke out of a dream in my bed and I just remember experiencing it in my bed and I thought even my own home, my bedroom, my safe place is now not off limits for this attack. Because what I know now is when you avoid fear, it grows.

And every place that you avoid, I wasn't afraid of the elevator or the subway or the airplane. I was afraid of me. I was afraid of the terror that rolled through me and how it made me feel. And I knew by then that I wasn't going to die.

I just didn't have any way to regulate my brain. I didn't have enough like clinical understanding. I didn't take medication at the time at all. I just was just crying out to God a lot. One of those prayers, one she prayed while in bed, stands out in Rebecca's memory.

I just said, "Rescue me. Deliver me. I cannot do this without you." And in that moment, my body broke on the bed and all was still. And it was the first time in, you know, 15, 18 months that I didn't have to remove myself from the situation for the panic to stop.

And I now understand that I just encountered like the weight of God's glory. I experienced his supernatural peace. It was still so still that I had not it was like a shalom space and it was done. It was crazy. It was done. Rebecca didn't have another panic attack for seven years.

Whenever she felt signs of one coming on, she repeatedly whispered the name, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." I would just keep saying his name and I would try to breathe and regulate through those things. And then I started meeting with people in the city just like me, you know, that were struggling with anxiety or depression and try and encourage them and love them well.

Those conversations led Rebecca to write her first book. It was about mental health and faith. At 39 years old, she never expected to become an author. That really was never a plan. It just came out of, you know, a season of panic disorder, a little bit of anxiety and depression in New York City and experiencing God's rescue in that place.

Although Rebecca and her family wouldn't stay in that place for long, in 2014, they packed their bags and moved to Franklin, Tennessee. We moved because our son Cade started middle school in the city and we needed better resources for special needs for his upper school and into adulting.

So we wanted all three of our kids to kind of be in more of a stable environment because in New York we were always church planting with other lead pastors and we were lay leaders and our kids didn't always have friends their age that knew God. So we just were like we had that foundation.

We want to give them something consistent until they graduate. When the Lions moved to Tennessee, there were five of them, Rebecca and Gabe, and their three kids, two sons and one daughter. That was about to change. Our church was always talking about foster care and adoption, and I just couldn't shake it.

Rebecca knew her youngest two kids were going to be leaving home and starting their own lives and families. And while she wanted them to thrive, she didn't like the thought of Kate being by himself. just Cade alone is hard, you know, for him. And so, we just always felt like we understand Down syndrome.

We we've loved it. It's obviously challenging in certain seasons and for different reasons cuz every kid with Down syndrome is not perfect. And so, we just I just told the Lord one day, if you want this to happen, just put her right here and I'll name her Joy coming out of my season of sadness or anxiety.

And Psalm 21:26 was kind of my psalm there. like those who sew in tears bearing a seed will reap a harvest with songs of joy carrying the sheets with them. Three years later, an adoption worker sent Rebecca the photo of a little girl in China who had Down syndrome.

I was like, "She's beautiful. You know what's her name?" And she said, "Ca. C H A R A." And I said, "Oh, you mean the Greek word for joy." So, it was like the Lord actually teed it up. I did not make any of it happen. It was in December of 2018 when the Lions brought Joy home.

God, I believe, gave us Cade because he knew 13 years later there would be a joy and we'd say yes. And so we brought her home from China when she was 5 and a half from being in an orphanage. And she's now almost 12. Since Joey's adoption, Rebecca has shared with people ways to create life rhythms to overcome stress and anxiety.

She wrote a New York Times best-selling book called Rhythms of Renewal. It was inspired by the rhythms she created after the night God rescued her from a panic attack in bed. I call that my Psalm 18 moment. Like he says, "In my distress, I cried out on high and from your temple you heard me and you rescued me because you delighted in me and with my God I can attack a barrier and leap a wall."

All those things. But he doesn't just pull us out of a pit, right? Like that psalm is about how he pulled him out of the shield like the the pit of despair and set his feet on a high ground outside of the pit. Yeah, he will do that.

But we still have to take agency to step forward once that's done. Sometimes we talk about the healing or the deliverance. Thank God for that. Praise God for that. But that doesn't rebuild a life. you still have to then make decisions to become a disciple of Jesus to walk with him in step with his spirit.

And I just came to understand that I needed these rhythms of renewal, these rhythms of rescue. It's the spiritual disciplines of resting and restoring and connecting and creating. In addition to Rebecca's book, Rhythms of Renewal, she and Gabe also started a podcast and a ministry for marriages and families.

She doesn't know what God has in store for her and her family next, but she stays ready to respond to it by keeping her heart fully surrendered to the Lord. I'm not pushing doors open, but if you are opening a door and you're asking me to go through it and it's scary, I might be resistant initially out of fear, but ultimately my answer is yes because I love you.

And so in our 20s looked like Kade. In our 30s it looked like moving to Manhattan and selling everything we had. In our 40s, it looked like saying yes to adopting a little girl from China with Down syndrome. So, I don't know what's going to look like in our 50s.

I'm trying to not predict that. But, I do think we all need that in life. We need something that's going to just push us to the kind of the brink of ourselves or whatever life we've created, losing our life so we can find it again. ((music playing)) If you're thinking about surrendering your life to Jesus Christ the way Rebecca Lions has, but you still have questions, we can help you with those.

Visit us at findinep peacewithgod.net. That's find peacewithgod.net. or to talk with someone, call the Billy Graham 247 prayer line. The number is 855255 pray. Someone is there right now ready to talk and pray with you. 855255 pray. If you ever struggle with anxiety or just not knowing how to confront your fears, you'll get some encouragement and guidance from Rebecca Lions in just a moment.

You're listening to GPS God, people stories, a podcast production of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Is Christ really the Lord of your life? Have you submitted your will to him, your future, your vocation? Do you have this obsession? Billy Graham. To serve Christ will cost you. Whosoever will save his life shall lose it.

But whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel shall save it. And Christ is asking you tonight to renounce your plans and your goals and your ambitions and your motives. And he asks you to put first his plans, his goals as your top priority. He asks that your ambitions and motives become his.

Yes, Lord. I will go where you want me to go. I'll be what you want me to be. Or no, Lord. I'm not going to surrender that much to you. I'll give you 50%, 75%, maybe 80%, but I can't go all the way. The price is too high.

If you answer yes, you're in obedience to him, and it brings a fulfillment and a joy and a peace in this life and the rewards in the life to come. Jesus is ready to give you that fulfillment, that joy, and that peace right now. He begins transforming you from the inside out. the moment you ask him to be your Lord and Savior.

We can tell you more. Call us or visit us online. Our website is find peacewithgod.net. That's find peacewithgod.net. And the number for the Billy Graham 247 prayer line is 855255 pray. 855255 pray. The number and the website, by the way, are both listed in our show notes. Our guest on this episode of GPS God, people stories is Rebecca Lions.

She has trusted God through panic attacks, through moves across the country, and raising kids with Down syndrome. She has this encouragement for anyone who struggles with being anxious or fearful. Jesus reminds us, "The peace I give, the world cannot give. So do not let your heart be troubled or afraid."

And so I've learned in 15 years how to not let my heart be troubled or afraid, right? Like what agreements do I make? What do I consume? What are my habits or my rhythms that create distress versus do I think about the things that are true and lovely and of good report?

Do I renew my mind through the word of God that illuminates that is like the scriptures are sharper than a two-edged sword and they illuminate the motives of the heart. Like, am I in the word enough to have the heart be examined? Do I have counterfeit gods or false idols?

Or am I making something more than it should be? Am I striving to make God known or make myself known? You know, all these things are so hidden. They're so subtle, but the scriptures and the spirit and his word just always converges to bring those things back to the surface.

We so appreciate Rebecca Lions joining us on this episode. She loves sharing how God's rescue plan intersects with people's mental health, family, and vocation. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, do us a favor, please, and subscribe to GPS. We'd also appreciate if you left us a review and be watching for the next episode.

We drop new ones every other Wednesday. I'm Jim Kirkland, and this is GPS, God, People, Stories. It's an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Always good ((music playing)) news. Heat. Heat. N. ((music playing))