Blessing in Brokenness

This story appears in FCA Magazine’s January/February 2016 issue. Subscribe today!


Dana Lyon walks through the progression.

“You can call it comical, you can call it irony, or you can call it God,” she says about being a strength coach at the Air Force Academy.

It’s as much a job on campus as it is a metaphor for her personal walk with Christ. Physical development is Lyon’s science these days. Athletes come to her and ask to be broken, to tear their muscles so the fibers can be rebuilt stronger.

Well beyond the physical, Lyon has a heart-wrenching, soul-level understanding of what “broken,” “torn” and “stronger” really mean.

A survivor of athletic agony and personal tragedy that would shatter most lives and break most faiths, Lyon continues to find new strength. The power of vulnerability—with God, in community, even alone—guides a daily life much different than the one she imagined just a few years ago.

“It’s been a humbling road, for sure, especially the last two years,” says Lyon, 31. “Just to be able to open up about what God’s done in my life, how it’s been incredibly wrecking but also the most beautiful presence and relationship with the Lord.”

• • •

Dana Pounds arrived in Colorado Springs as a powerful yet petite brunette from Lexington, Ky. She had no idea she was too short to play college basketball (her words), but a lack of height wasn’t her only issue. A poor attitude (again, her words) helped cut short her hoops career.

But Dana, who had won four high school state championships (two in discus, two in shot put), soon meandered over to the track and met throws coach Scott Irving. She dedicated herself fulltime to the javelin. Her grit coupled with her concentrated explosiveness and athleticism produced a steep trajectory of success.

She was—and still is—the school’s only two-time NCAA champion (2005 and ’06), a 5-foot-2 female David slaying track and field’s Goliaths.

 

She followed with a U.S. championship in 2007, making a trip to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 seem like a formality. As Dana worked out with Irving ahead of the U.S. Olympic trials, she started hanging out more and more with a shot putter named Dave Lissy.

Dave had grown up in tiny Sandpoint, Idaho, but he was anything but tiny. His hulking 6-foot-4, 240-pound frame alone commanded attention. Similar to Dana, he had come to the Air Force to play a different sport—but football gave way to track and field. He developed into the Mountain West Conference shot put champion during the 2008 indoor season.

That spring break, the Air Force track and field team headed for warmer weather in Tucson, Arizona. Dana was a de facto graduate assistant coach for the javelin throwers; Dave was captain of the heavy throwers (shot put and discus). He earned his leadership status through work ethic and a unique ability to have fun while still holding teammates accountable.

“That was something that was just really attractive personality-wise to me,” Dana says.

Practices and conditioning dominated the days. Team-bonding hikes and other outings came afterward, giving Dave the perfect “excuse to be able to talk to me about something other than throwing,” Dana said, laughing.

Dave was raised Mormon, but Dana observed his spiritual curiosity as he began attending the Academy’s FCA meetings, which had swelled to more than 100 cadets during Dana’s time as a student leader. Dave also showed up at local Christian churches on the weekends.

Step by step, “he just latched onto the Gospel of grace,” Dana says.

• • •

Dana and Dave hadn’t been dating long when the summer of 2008 began, filled with expectation. Dana was dominant with the javelin, and her Olympic team chances were frequently labeled as “probable” or “likely.”

A peculiar set of events, however, flipped the script. Dana’s first throw in qualifying earned her a spot in the finals, so she couldn’t—as planned—go all out with two more throws trying to reach the Olympic ‘A’ standard of 198 feet, 6 inches. In the finals, she finished second by just two feet but was told she wouldn’t make the U.S. team.

“It was pretty clear to see in her agony the only person able to comfort and console her was Dave, so we knew something kind of special was going on,” says Rick Pounds, Dana’s father. “I knew not only would he protect her physically, but he would protect her heart.”

Dana still had a couple more opportunities to reach the Olympic distance. A throw of 199-2 in Seattle later that summer would have sent her to Beijing, but her follow-through made two fingers barely touch down on the foul line, negating the throw.

Her Olympic dream was over. Dave was in Seattle too, and planned to be with Dana wherever life would take them. By September, they were engaged.

“It was just a friendship,” Dana says. “We made each other better. We made each other laugh. We challenged each other. We were going along the same path spiritually, relationally, vocationally, and we’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, has this really come to be something that might last?'"

• • •

They became Dave and Dana Lyon on April 19, 2009. (Dave changed his last name from Lissy to Lyon a year earlier to honor his stepfather, Bob Lyon, who had married his mother, Jeannie, and was integral in raising Dave.) Dana was stationed in Utah with Dave four hours away in Idaho, so a 16-month span of long-distance dating and marriage wasn’t easy. But every week, one would drive to see the other.

Eventually, they were transferred to Colorado Springs in January 2010, and Dana rejoined the World Class Athlete Program to make a run at the London Olympics two years later.

The Lyons were together, and life in Colorado was full.

“The way he loved me and served me how Christ loved and served the church, it was easy for me to then submit to someone I trusted and who surrendered to the Lord,” Dana says. “Every day we tried to outserve each other and love each other, more today than we did yesterday.”

They loved hard, worked hard and played hard, regularly loading up their trailer with ATVs to go camping, hiking or competing in intense obstacle races. Their five-bedroom house was rarely quiet, as any number of Air Force cadets came to wash clothes, study, sleep, eat—just feel, well, at home.

“I don’t know if they saw it as a ministry,” Rick Pounds says, “but these kids just adored being around Dana and Dave.”

Dana continued to train for London, battling a knee injury and then a thyroid condition just before the U.S. trials. Still, Irving marveled at her performance. A favorite four years earlier who had been all but written off in 2012, she finished sixth. She didn’t make the team, but Irving remembers an athlete at peace. In between throws, he would look over and see Dana reading the Bible.

“It’s crazy to think that was the be-all, end-all thing I used to chase after,” Dana says. “To find God in the midst of that is incredibly humbling and humorous to me. What He’s trying to teach you is incredible relational depth—the things you learn in the mountaintops and the valleys, He’s the same God.”

That was put to the test a few months later.

• • •

Dave, whose dogtags bore Joshua 1:9, tried several times to volunteer for deployment to Afghanistan before being selected in 2012. He left for training that fall and in early 2013 joined a Special Operations Task Force.

“David had no doubt about their mission,” Irving says. “He was serving his country and his God, and he was absolutely certain of that conviction.”

Dana too was sent to Afghanistan in fall 2013, so husband and wife spent Christmas together at Camp Phoenix near Kabul. They finished work early, worked out, ate and laughed a lot—just the next "best day of my life,” Dana likes to say.

The following afternoon, Dec. 26, Dana took an 18-minute flight from Camp Phoenix back to Bagram AFB. Dave was scheduled to fly to his base, Camp Morehead, that night, but didn’t. When temperatures drop at night, the Afghans burn whatever they can find for heat, which often makes the sky difficult to navigate.

Instead, Dave was slated to leave at 11 a.m. on Dec. 27, and he and Dana spoke at about 10:45. But again, Dave’s helicopter didn’t take off. With Dana gone and Dave done with his work at Camp Phoenix, he tried to figure out another way back to his duty station.

“I don’t know why they didn’t fly,” Dana says. “There are certain questions that I didn’t really ask because it doesn’t really matter what the answer is—it wouldn't change the outcome.”

Dave knew Dana didn’t like him riding in convoys. This particular route snaked through the city and was supposed to take 45 minutes—nearly six times as long as the flight back to Camp Morehead.

The convoy left a little after 1 p.m. and was only a couple hundred yards outside the Camp Phoenix gate when it was struck by a suicide car bomb. Three Coalition Forces soldiers—Capt. David I. Lyon, 28, and two Slovaks—were killed.

• • •

Dana had been in a meeting. When she didn’t hear from Dave, she immediately tried to call, text, Skype. She feared the worst but hadn’t been told anything officially.

She reached for her iPad and found “Strong God” by Desperation Band. She listened, over and over again for more than four hours. The second verse begins:

With us in the wilderness
Faithful to provide
Every breath and every step
We see …
This is God,
In His holy place
This is God,
Clothed in love and strength

“I didn’t want anything happy and upbeat,” she says. “That song is somber, and at the same time it’s kind of like an anthem. It just resonates within your spirit. I put it on repeat because I knew it was going to keep me there and hold me fast despite the news I thought I was about to receive.”

Once the news was delivered, life swirled. What felt like moments later, she was being asked about funeral arrangements and other details. Dana, widowed at 29, called home.

“She did not say this with her mouth, but what I heard her saying through the phone was, ‘Daddy, fix this for me,’” Rick Pounds says. “Daddies fix things, or try to fix things. I was devastated, because I couldn’t fix this ... So I just had to listen, wait for 24 to 48 hours when I could just hug her.”

Before that could happen, Dana had to fly with Dave’s flag-draped casket to Germany, then Delaware, and then finally back to Colorado.

• • •

Jen Brumm knew Dana and Dave from New Life Church in Colorado Springs, but not well. Once Brumm heard Dave had been killed, she heard God tell her to pray for Dana, and she was one of the scores of faces at the airport offering a soft landing spot.

Mel Waters, associate pastor of pastoral care at New Life, had already told Dana she could have access to whatever she needed at the church. Brumm, Waters and others bore many of the logistics for the funeral, allowing Dana to focus on the more intimate details. The words, the photos, the songs “were all intentional based on moments Dave and I had shared and were pivotal to our walk, our faith and our marriage.”

Brumm, a graphic and interior designer, helped personalize the sanctuary with pictures and memories of Dave and Dana's life together for the funeral, and a few weeks later helped Dana put together a special room in her home dedicated to Dave.

“None of us had ever walked that closely through grief before,” says Brumm, who was involved with FCA in high school. “It’s not like we had any experience. God gave us what we needed at the time. … A lot of what I did was just sit with her and listen.”

The group saved seats for Dana at New Life on Sunday mornings and shared dinner tables and extra bedrooms when she needed to get out of the house she bought with Dave. They’d even dog-sit Colt .45, a boxer Dana and Dave got on Dec. 27, 2010, exactly three years before Dave was killed.

Sometimes Dana could be found under a blanket in the Brumms’ family room, curled up next to then 13-year-old Emma.

“She’d say that if Dave couldn’t hug her, she didn’t want anyone to hug her,” Brumm says. “But Emma could at least be near her. She was a safe person. It wasn’t Dave, but it was a gift from God.”

The road back has spanned two years and thousands of miles. Dave was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal, Purple Heart and Air Force Combat Action Medal. In May 2014, the Air Force named a pre-positioning ship after him.

Still, Dana’s road hasn’t reached the end.

“I go into counseling saying, ‘How do you move on?’” Dana says. “And it’s not that you move on. You move forward through grief. So how do I move forward? How do I grow? What am I supposed to get out of this challenge?

“How often do we as believers come to God and say, ‘Break me, so you can use me, so I can really bless and love others and build them up?’”

• • •

Dana and Dave once dreamed of coaching together. Dave would be the football coach, maybe back home in Idaho. Dana would handle strength and conditioning, as well as girls basketball.

By fall 2014, Dana was indeed coaching—back at Air Force as a physical education instructor and strength coach.

“As much as I love coaching,” she says, “Dave would have been so much better.”

Her rank of Captain and background as an Air Force athlete gives her immediate respect and authority with the cadets, but it goes so much deeper when Dana really gets to share her heart.

“She’s intense, but also very caring and deep,” says Andrew Powell, who attended the Academy with Dana and now works as FCA’s Multi-Area Director in Southern Colorado. “You meet some athletes and they’re very intense about their sport, but it’s surface-level. For her, sports happen on a much deeper level.”

When the women’s soccer team spies Dana heading toward the field, they stop what they’re doing and run to hug her. Lizzy Denton, a sophomore soccer player, sought out Dana when she was having a tough time last fall. Denton knew Dana’s story and asked if life ever gets easier.

“She said the hardest times in our lives are when we’re closest to God,” says Denton, who grew up in Sugar Land, Texas, and led FCA at Clements High School. “She said even though we’re going through the darkness, never settle for a mediocre life. It’s in the darkness that we’re shaped, and we evolve into the people God created us to be.”

Dana is consistently growing, but Dave will never leave her thoughts.

“I’ll be honest, when you lose your husband you’re like, ‘What am I here for now? What is my identity? I’m not a wife anymore,’” she says. “I don’t want to say, ‘Hey, I’m a widow.’ It’s awful. I hate being defined by that.

“I love being a coach right now, because I feel like I am making a difference. And it’s humbling that God uses brokenness to grow others for sport and hopefully, ideally, for eternity. It’s so encouraging to my heart.”

-FCA-

More on Dana Lyon: Watch Dana's video on her story of loss from New Life Church. Read and watch the story on Navy ship name christening in honor of Captain David Lyon. Additional content from our interview with Dana: On her involvement with student leadership within FCA while a cadet at the Air Force Academy: “A huge part of my story, my testimony is FCA at the Academy, the blessing of being around other believers, seeking out encouragement.” On coaching, and maximizing potential: “And now as a coach at the Air Force Academy, that is literally my goal in life: to make others better. To see their potential. To recognize that they’ve either come from great things or awful things, and that they are extraordinary, that they’re great.” On Joshua 1:9: “That was Dave’s verse. He was wearing a shield on his chest, on his dogtags when he was killed. That was on there – Joshua 1:9, be strong and courageous, and go where you’re called. When I think of strong and courageous, I think of a lion, and here we go, he changed his name from Lissy to Lyon.” On deepening her faith through sport: “More than anything, through sport, I really started to build a relationship with the Lord. It was just a joy to be able to compete, and it’s funny that God gives us an opportunity athletically, to chase after some dreams and fun and fleeting victory and success. But at the end of the day, the strength and power comes from the Lord. Things that are taught through sport, and that’s why we love FCA, programs like FCA that help capitalize on the different things we learn through sport and the trials we face and overcome. At the end of the day, God’s the one who gives us the ability, and He’s the one who should be getting the glory for it. And to build a relationship with Him through sport.” Did you know …? Dana’s older brother, Eric, was taking a tennis class with Scott Irving. Dana visited Colorado Springs before she enrolled at the Air Force Academy, and saw Eric in that class. After basketball didn’t pan out at the Academy for Dana, it was Eric – an accomplished swimmer, by the way, and eventually a pilot in the Air Force – who suggested Dana get in touch with Irving about joining the track and field team. Irving coached Dana through the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials.

 

–This article appears in the January/February 2016 issue of FCA Magazine. To view the issue digitally, click here: January/February 2016 FCA Mag Digital 

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Photos courtesy of Dana Lyon