Susie Larson
18 min read ⭑
“We often try to justify our ugliness, but if we’re willing not to, we can find out the fear behind our frustration and realize it’s a trust issue.”
Susie Larson, speaker and bestselling author of 22 books, knows what it means to walk with Jesus through tough times. Having faced debilitating Lyme disease, past trauma and frustrating food allergies, she’s had to learn to rely on Jesus to find joy. As she pours into others what God has poured into her, she’s impacted millions of people through her books, devotionals, videos, social media and radio show, “Susie Larson Live.”
Let Susie encourage you as she shares a glimpse into new ways she’s learning to trust God and how she prioritizes movement despite having a disease that limits her physical mobility. You’ll also hear about how she protects her peace as a deep empath and why rehearsing God’s love for her guards her mind — and her body — from fear. She shared all this and more exclusively with Rapt, and we’re sharing it with you.
The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
We usually eat at home so we can put people around our table, whether it’s our kids or our friends. My husband makes amazing kebabs. I have massive food allergies — gluten, dairy and soy, for instance — and there are a number of other things I can’t do, so food is a very big deal. I’m not a great cook, which makes food an even better and bigger deal. I get so happy when I get to eat something that tastes good and I’m with the people I love.
That said, some of my go-to restaurants are P.F. Chang’s, Biaggi’s and a few similar places where I can get a safe meal that won’t wreck me. But time around the table is a gift from God, whoever God puts around our table. We are in a digital age, and we’re more connected online, which makes us more disconnected than ever. Working in media as long as I have, I know we are in a ready, shoot, aim culture. I told my husband the other day, “Since COVID, in the last five or six years, people ask you questions, not to get to know you anymore, but to either validate or vilify you.” It’s as if people need to know where you stand so they can put you in a box. But when you’re face to face with someone, when you get someone around the table, you realize they have a story and a heart. They’re battling some things. They have some wounds that need healing.
I can’t say enough about face-to-face time. It has become a lost art. I think the people who value it are not as swayed by the mob mentality, which is so dangerous right now. If you don’t purposely swim upstream, you’ll get caught in the mob mentality and form mindsets that sweep away a whole group of people without ever getting to know their stories.
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QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
For many years, it was cycling for me. I could ride hard and fast, which is a big thing if you know anything about my backstory of battling Lyme disease. I had a pretty horrible relapse about 10 years ago. I still bike, but I’m not able to push like I used to, so I walk about three miles every day. It is spiritual for me because I’m outdoors whenever I can. I’d rather eat outdoors. I connect with God outside. When I walk, I put my little belt pack on. It doesn’t look like an ’80s fanny pack — I’m not that nerdy — but it’s a sports pack to put your phone in. I put on some worship music, walk briskly and pray.
I’m a former fitness instructor, so movement is a very big deal to me. I do strength work a few times a week, and even that is an incredible gift. Being able to move is a gift from God. That is what health and fitness are about — your ability. Can you move? Can you lift things? Having come back from a lot health-wise and having worked in the fitness industry, I have a deep passion for it. We can show up in life, we can move, we can lift things, we can walk. All of those things connect me with God. I love to dance. When no one’s watching, I’ll put on music and just dance around my house, and that makes me so happy. I grew up in a large family, and my parents were great dancers with seven kids. Every Friday, they would push back the furniture in our living room and pair up the brothers and sisters. They often put on the oldies, and they even taught us the jitterbug. My dad was the mayor of our city, so without fail, the policeman would drive up to deliver the council minutes, and he’d look in the window and see our brothers flipping us all over and twirling us around. To this day, whenever we go to a wedding, we burn up the floor — we can dance.
I know some Christians are very opposed to dancing, but it’s biblical. David danced. You can make anything evil, right? You can make movies, you can make money, you can make anything evil, but dancing in and of itself, to me, is a gift from God. I’m so happy when I’m dancing.
Your experience with Lyme disease must make you doubly grateful for being able to move.
I could cry, honestly, when I think about being able to move. There were times when I could only take one shower a week because it took too much out of me. What I’m able to do at this age and stage of life is a miracle, really.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you confront its power?
I’m a deep empath. I feel things deeply and have to be very careful with how I process, because I want to know what’s going on in the world. I want to stay in tune with what’s happening in the persecuted church. I care about human trafficking. I care about chronically ill people. But I think if you’re very sensitive in spirit like me, you have to guard your inputs. I’m not going to put my head in the sand. I’m not going to live in toxic positivity as if nobody were suffering. I’ve suffered too much to ignore people’s suffering, but I have to balance it out with how much bandwidth I have to maintain a redemptive perspective. For most people, their greatest strength is their greatest weakness. For me, that is my empathy.
Also, I’m very driven, disciplined and focused, but I still have health limitations. I have bad days when I wake up and can feel the inflammation in my brain. My face is numb. My brain’s not firing as it should. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to feel like my body’s betraying me. I have a strong will and a body that’s not always as strong, so I have to mentally align with where I am and be OK with my limits. Yet I serve a God who has no limits.
Those are probably my two biggest struggles.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
I recently wrote a book about trust called “More Than You Can Imagine: What God Does When You Trust Him.” The other day, I did a livestream and told my viewers that even though I’m working on entirely new projects right now, God is confronting me in areas of trust again — areas I hadn’t even thought about before. He’s asking me, “Will you trust me? Will you? Will you trust me?”
This is a common struggle for people because we all have blind spots. We all love our formulas. We love our plans. We love our A plus B equals C, and trusting God simply doesn’t work that way. The title of “More Than You Can Imagine” comes from Ephesians 3:20, which says, “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think [or more than you can imagine], according to the power at work within us” (ESV, emphasis added). Look at how that reverberates — “far more abundantly.” It just keeps getting bigger, above and beyond all you could ever dare to ask or imagine, but the clincher is “according to the power at work within us.” How much access will you give him to your story? As I’ve been doing all these interviews, I’ve been asking the Lord to show me other blind spots where I’m not trusting him. He’s showing me, and it’s in his love that he is. I’ve been feeling confronted by it, and I don’t want to hold anything back. I don’t want to have compartments that I limit him to. That is what’s really wrecking me.
I’ll give you an example. Because of my health, I take a lot of supplements, and I have to guard my bedtime. I probably am healthier than most people my age when I abide by my boundaries. I can’t drink coffee — even as early as 10 a.m. — and I can’t go to bed late. I can’t be in a building with mold. (Mold is another kryptonite. I could be a mold inspector. I know in 10 minutes whether there’s mold in the building because my head goes numb. Even my middle son and his wife, who are buying a house, have lovingly said, “Mom, can we toss you in there for a little bit? Tell us if your head goes numb.”) There’s a lot that I have to do to function well, but in that space, I can run hard and fast. All that to say, we were at the airport flying out for an interview, and we had exactly 30 minutes to eat before our next flight. I wouldn’t have time to eat after the next flight because we would arrive right at bedtime. But I couldn’t eat most of the airport snacks because they had gluten, so we ordered our food at an airport restaurant. I was watching the clock the whole time. Our food came up, and it was sitting in the warming tray, but the server’s back was to it. She talked with her friends for 15 minutes, and we had 30 minutes exactly to eat, finish, pay the bill and get to our gate. I was getting impatient. I’m a Christ follower. I want to be a good girl, but I was getting annoyed. I say in the book that you’re your best version of yourself when you’re walking in the Spirit and your worst version, your most edited version, when you’re in the flesh. That’s when you’re impatient and assigning motives to people. I was also scared because I get light-headed and weak, things go numb, and then I wouldn’t be able to eat. God whispered to me, “Have I ever failed you?” No, you haven’t. I realized my yuckiness was another area of trust. God never humiliates you. He humbles you. He never condemns you. He invites you.
He showed me I was assigning motives to the server. For example, if she had been bawling in the arms of her friend, I would have thought, Oh, what if she has a wretched life? What if she needed a belly laugh? We live in a culture that assumes the worst. But the truth is, people are starving in other countries. Can I make it a day without food? I’ll probably be OK. We often try to justify our ugliness, but if we’re willing not to, we can find out the fear behind our frustration and realize it’s a trust issue. That’s what I mean when I say God’s dealing with me.
You mentioned fear. Trust would be really easy were it not for fear. So how do you find the courage to be trustful?
I heard someone say recently that fear and faith cannot coexist, and I have to disagree with that, because I’ve done a lot of things in faith while I felt fear. I don’t think fear is the opposite of faith. I think love is because there’s no fear in love. Perfect love casts out fear (see 1 John 4:18). The enemy’s favorite weapon is fear because it gets you into self-preservation, it gets you into self-promotion, and it gets you into preempted outcomes. Wars have been started, relationships have ended, families have blown up — all because of fear. We take matters into our own hands. But when you’re walking in love, perfect love casts out fear.
I wondered about that passage a long time ago. I used to think that it meant that I should love perfectly so that I don’t have fear, but the word “perfect love” means “matured love.” It means that your whole life is built and grounded on the love of God, where it just fills and undergirds everything that you are. My husband always says, “If you want to deal with your weeds, have healthy grass. The healthiest grass has no space for weeds.” In the same way, when you’re mature in love to the point where love filters everything about your life, and you look at everything through the lens of God’s love and provision for you, then it obliterates the fear.
The passage also says, “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us” (1 John 4:16, ESV). That word “know” means we experientially encounter God’s love for us on a regular basis. Again, Ephesians says to know this love is to be filled with the fullness of God (see Eph. 3:19). I don’t believe we default to love or faith or hope or even kindness or compassion. We default to fear, worry, insecurity and self-preservation, so I say we have to apply ourselves. We have to build a case for the goodness of God and the love of God. The whole point of the book is that you have to apply yourself. You have to build a case when you’re in a storm, out of a storm and going into your next storm. It’s got to be something you’re rehearsing. The enemy’s always building a case against you and against God in your mind. You can’t just phone it in, especially nowadays, when the love of most is growing cold. Why is it growing cold? Because of fear. So if we want to live differently, we’ve got to make a case for the love of God.
My relapse affected my brain in a pretty significant way, and it was horrific. It was so terrifying. The seven years I spent in relapse were so painful for me that I needed to see a counselor. I had trauma from it, which was terrifying — the neurosymptoms and the cognitive loss. My functional medicine doctor and my traditional medical doctor, both of whom are Christians, said, “Susie, your inflammation markers are off the charts. We’re going to help you with that. You have to do something about the fear. Do you know that anytime you’re in fear, it creates a physiological response?” It’s true. Let’s say you have a bad knee. If you let fear in, it creates a cascade of inflammation in your body, and your knee might hurt. You might wonder, Why did my back hurt all of a sudden? It’s because fear causes inflammation in your body. I thought, Oh my word. I’ve got to deal with this because I want my body to settle down.
I had a brain scientist on my show who said, “Susie, I’m going to give an assignment to your listeners. I want you to spend 15 minutes a day for the next 30 days and make a case for the love of God — not the love you have for him but the love he has for you. Meditate on the love God has for you. Rehearse it, maybe through worship playlists. Meditating is rehearsing, even regurgitating. It means you’re reflecting. If you do that 15 minutes a day for 30 days, it would change your labs, and your inflammation would go down. It would change your brain scan, not to mention what it would do for your faith perspective.” I can’t say enough how important it is to deal with your fear by knowing the love of God.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
As I said earlier, we are the best version of ourselves when we’re in the Spirit. I think one of the ways you know you’re in the Spirit is that the fruit is spilling out of you. When you trust God, life gets better for everybody around you, not just you. My husband is a senior project manager for commercial construction. He oversees the building of stadiums and hospitals, and then on the weekends, he goes to women’s events. I mean, that’s a man’s man. Let me just tell you, he knows who he is. He does this alpha male industry, and then he goes to women’s events and runs the book table. We talk a lot about what it looks like in his industry vs. mine. It’s relaxing into the love of God, where you’re so comfortable in your skin that you have nothing to prove and all of eternity to live for. People know when they see someone who’s comfortable in their skin because they live loved, compared to someone who has something to prove, who’s trying to earn their way, who’s trying to posture so the right people accept them. Nothing to me is more beautiful than someone who lives loved so well that it draws other people to them. The Scripture says, “Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD” (Ps. 40:3, ESV).
I think the highest calling of our day is to live loved because we cannot impart what we don’t possess. We ought to love people. If you really don’t believe God is singing over you, what do you have to give to anybody else? That’s why we need to immerse ourselves in the love of God. There are so many aspects to his love. He sends new mercies to your door every morning before you even have a chance to blow it. He’s so intent on getting you safely home that he’s given you an ocean of mercy that you can’t even use up with all the sin you’re probably going to commit. That doesn’t mean your sin doesn’t matter. It means his love is greater, and he’s going to get you safely home. That should leave us in awe of who he is. I have to immerse myself in God’s love because of some of the symptoms I deal with in my body. I’m immersing myself and making a case for the love and the goodness of God. I live in perpetual awe because I’ve been transformed by the renewing of my mind — thinking on what’s right and true and good and lovely. To me, his love is greater than the fear and the hate that’s out there. I can’t control those people, but I can walk in his love. Whoever I meet, I can see them as image bearers and speak life into them and call courage out of them. What would happen if we as God’s people grasped that?
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
I have a rhythm of getting up in the morning, and right away, I put on a worship playlist and, when the weather permits, I sit outside on our deck and look out at the scene. It is so beautiful. I light a candle because the Scripture talks about fanning a flame. I’ve got the Bible open, I’ve got my journal ready and I start by worshiping. You enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise, so I start with gratitude and thanksgiving. Someone once said, “If you woke up tomorrow with only the things you thanked God for, what would you have?” I’ve thought a lot about that. When you tell your kids to say thank you to someone, they usually don’t mean it. Compare that to someone who comes to you with a gift and says, “I love this. I love this so much. Thank you.” I’ve been looking in the Old Testament at some of the ways the Israelites broke God’s heart. One of them was through complaining and a lack of gratitude, so I would submit to you that there are places where you can count your blessings and name them in a way that does not move God’s heart and does not change you vs. tethering every good gift in your life to a God who’s been good to you and will be good again. It’s the practice of stopping and saying, “Lord, I’m so sincerely grateful for my husband. I love that he’s patient. I love that he’s kind. I really love my kids and grandkids. God, I’m so grateful for my fluffy pillow.” I share whatever’s on my heart. I take the time. Even in the story of the 10 lepers, Jesus points out that only one returned to give thanks. I think gratitude matters to God. Gratitude is sincere; it requires space to thank God for who he is.
Some may not agree with this, but I’ve found listening prayer so powerful as well. I’ll pull out my journal and listen, and I’ll write down in first person what the Lord is speaking to me. I know I’m not writing the Bible. I know the Scriptures have been written, but Jesus says his sheep hear his voice and know him (see John 10). Scripture says the heavens pour forth speech daily and that he confides in those who fear him. Well, if he’s not speaking, then does that make sense? Listening prayer is a great, great practice for me.
Bible reading plans usually don’t work for me. I like to sink deep into Scripture and unpack it. I will sit with a short passage for two weeks and marinate on it, write it out, see it in different translations and ask God questions about it. It’s just how I am. I’ve wondered at times if that’s OK, but the Word is getting into me. The Word’s alive in me, so it works for me. It’s not always prescriptive, but those are the things that are really great for me.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
When I was a young adult, anything Francis Frangipane wrote deeply impacted me. One of the titles I read was “Holiness, Truth and the Presence of God.” The way he wrote with amazing clarity about Christlikeness very much shaped me and my thinking.
“The Ragamuffin Gospel” by Brennan Manning also wrecked me all those years ago. I read it a bunch of times. So did “Tramp for the Lord” by Corrie ten Boom. I try to read that on a regular basis. She’s one of my faith heroes. Over the last 10 years, Kev and I have gone through Mark Batterson’s little “Draw the Circle.” That one always kicked us in the butt, always compelled us to greater faith. I really love that. I love Mark. I have him on my show whenever I can.
This may be an eclectic mix of resources, but I love all of them.
Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. Does technology ever help you this way? Has an app ever boosted your spiritual growth? If so, how?
I love the Abide app. It’s like a spa moment with Jesus. I have a studio downstairs where I record my show, but sometimes, if I’m having tech issues there, I have a platform here to do it. But no matter what, whether I’m doing the show here or there, I lie on the floor with my little puppy, put on the Abide app for 15 minutes and pray and rest in God. It’s got instrumental music. It says, “Take a deep breath,” and then it unpacks a passage of Scripture.
Then there’s one called the Declare Bible app. I read that every morning. It’s a biblical declaration with a devotion.
We also like Lectio 365. We go through phases, but we’ll often put that on right before we go to sleep. It is so good to have some of these go-tos, because the digital space is taken up by so much garbage. The Abide app is like a spa moment for my soul. I love it.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
Right now, I’m working on my first Bible study, a workbook curriculum that will go with videos. I love the study of Scripture, so all of my books have study questions, too. Over the years, I’ve filmed probably four or five DVDs and online videos to go with those books, so people have used my books as Bible studies. But this is my first official curriculum Bible study. I’m deep in the Word and studying all the things that we place ahead of God, even good things that we make more important than him. I’m diving deep into the idea of making him our one and only.
Earlier in her interview, Susie touched on the power of knowing that you are radically, unconditionally loved by God.
Her words beg the question: What would such a life look like? Take a moment to think about this on a personal level. What old habits might disappear from your life, and what new ones might spring up? How would it change the way you think about people, talk to them and about them, and spend your time? How might it impact your closest relationships? How would it change your communication with God?
As you reflect on these questions, let the Holy Spirit be your guide. He’s here, listening and ready to take you deeper in relationship with him.
Susie Larson is a bestselling author, national speaker and host of the popular radio show Susie Larson Live. Whether behind a desk or a mic, Susie lives out her passion to see people everywhere awakened to the depth of God’s love, the value of their souls and the height of their calling in Christ Jesus. She is the author of over 20 books and devotionals and writes Daily Blessings. Susie and her husband, Kevin, have been married since 1985 and have three sons, three daughters-in-law and a growing crew of grandchildren. They enjoy biking, family time and relaxing by the lake near their home in Minneapolis, Minnesota.