For years, Levi Lusko was the guy on stage with answers. A successful pastor, conference speaker and spiritual guide for tens of thousands of believers looking for something solid to hold onto. But not long ago, Lusko found himself lying on the bathroom floor, sobbing, unsure if he even wanted to get up and preach.
“I was in the bathroom crying. I had just launched a book and was supposed to preach, but I was on the ground in tears,” Lusko recalled. “I didn’t know if I wanted to preach or lead the church anymore. I had no desire to do anything.”
That moment wasn’t an isolated emotional crash. It was part of a slow spiral, one that he says began with panic attacks that arrived suddenly and uninvited, waking him up at 2 a.m. with a racing heart and racing thoughts.
“I thought I was having a heart attack. My heart was racing and I woke my wife up to pray for me,” he remembered. “I was pacing around the room at 2 a.m., and suddenly I was scared of my own bedroom. It felt like the bat cave.”
This wasn’t just stress. It was something deeper. It was a system collapse—physically, emotionally and spiritually.
“That went on for about 18 months—fear, panic, then maybe a week of nothing,” he said. “There was no clear explanation, and that uncertainty made it even harder.”
If that sounds bleak, it was. But it was also clarifying. For Lusko, it became a reckoning with years of overdrive—a full-throttle life of travel, preaching, producing and pushing through pain.
“I went to South Africa twice just for the weekend,” Lusko said. “I flew 2 million miles on Delta Airlines. I published eight books. We launched 11 campuses. We raised and gave away millions of dollars to nonprofits. We were going hard.”
Eventually, the crash came. And it forced him to face not just his lifestyle, but the old wounds hiding underneath.
“I knew my parents’ divorce was a big deal, but I never had really dealt with it,” he acknowledged. “Turns out, my mom moving out during Christmas, my senior year of high school, after four years of being physically there but emotionally unavailable to me because she was broken, turns out that had a pretty big impact on me.”
In therapy, he traced old defense mechanisms that had shaped his leadership style and relationships. Patterns of freezing people out before they could hurt him. A need to constantly perform. Even his early exposure to pornography.
“Sitting down in therapy, working through some of those things… seeing how I had become in some way the leader I didn’t want to be,” he said quietly.
And underneath all of it: fear. What happens if he stops achieving? Stops being useful? Stops being wanted?
“Where’s my value if I’m not being asked to speak at a conference? What value do I have if I don’t write a book that someone wants to read or if there’s no one asking to interview me?” he wondered.
It would take time to unravel all that. The spiral didn’t reverse overnight. But gradually, the pressure lifted.
“It didn’t leave like it came. It came quickly… But leaving was like winter receding,” he said. “And all of a sudden, maybe you see a little grass, maybe you see a little flower.”
He started sleeping again. Laughing again. Wanting to engage. And slowly, he started talking about it.
Not with a spotlight, but with people who needed to know they weren’t alone in their own spiral.
“I finally felt free to talk about that season,” Lusko shared. “When I shared it with a friend—a worship leader who had just turned 40—he said, ‘I feel like I’m cracking up.’ That helped me realize a lot of people are going through something similar.”
That realization—that spiraling might be more common than we think—is part of what Lusko wants people to understand. Not to glorify suffering, but to be honest about how much of life happens off script—and how God meets us there.
“Jesus was saying, are you poor in spirit? Are you persecuted? Are you thirsty? Do you hunger for God? Are you broken? Count yourself blessed,” Lusko explained. “Now, the world doesn’t say that… But when we’re hurting is when we reach out for God. It’s when we grow.”
He also learned that rest isn’t something you wait to do when it’s all over. You have to start from rest, not collapse into it.
“Now, I try to enter busy seasons already rested,” he said. “In the past, I would have set an alarm for 5 a.m. just to push through. Now I let myself sleep and start the day with margin.”
Rest doesn’t always mean Palm Springs or a weeklong retreat. It might mean saying no. Sleeping in. Fly fishing. Tennis. A solo trail run in the dark with a headlamp and bear spray. Time alone with God in the wilderness.
“You need to figure out what it takes for you to be at your best,” he said. “And I think you also have to ask the question, how much of trying to stay on that mountain is because some of being on that mountain has crept into your identity?”
This kind of honest reflection wasn’t always modeled in the church. But Lusko thinks that’s starting to change. The more leaders talk openly about what it means to spiral, the more the church can be a place that meets people in the middle of it.
“The moment we address some of these things, we give permission for the whole community to think about it differently,” he added.
And if there’s a bigger message he hopes people hear, it’s this: You don’t have to fear the spiral. Because often, that’s where God shows up.
“There’s glory there. God’s going to be there. He’s going to be with you in it,” he said. “And so you don’t have to be afraid. Even when you’re spiraling, there’s blessing.”
