Tragedy to Tribute: Regent Alumnus Turns Grief Into National Purpose

It was December 30, 2005. The white van parked in the driveway should not have been there.

George Lutz noticed it the moment he returned from his morning walk. It was a rare occurrence to get visitors or deliveries “out in the country,” let alone in a vehicle so nondescript. So, he cut through the back of the house, where he found his mother with the front door open to greet visitors. It was right after Christmas, so the family was still around and the holiday spirit still fresh. But something was not right.

Two uniformed officers awaited them.

“I was kind of in shock,” George recalls. “My mind’s going: okay, was it Tony? Why would somebody be here? Maybe he was hurt.”

George found out quickly.

“They’ve got these five very simple words to share,” he says with an exhale. “We regret to inform you …”

On December 29, 2005, George’s son George “Tony” Lutz II — his first son and second child — had been killed by a sniper while deployed in Fallujah, Iraq. He was 25 years old. In the blink of an eye, George found himself confronting the unfathomable loss of a child. Yet, unbeknownst in that moment of terrible tragedy, God had placed within George’s heart a seed of great purpose — one of faith, honor, and remembrance.

The Long Road to Regent

Nearly 30 years earlier, in 1976, George graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in agriculture — he was a city kid who had fallen in love with animals and thought veterinary medicine might be his calling. After graduating, he managed a farm, got married, started a family, and somewhere in between, picked up a camera to practice photography.

A job with a farm supply company brought him to Suffolk in the late 1970s. It was then that he heard about a university nearby that had just launched its first class in 1978. CBN University, later renamed Regent University, founded by Dr. M.G. “Pat” Robertson, was small and green and offered a communications degree. George saw an opening anyway. “I thought, ‘Hey, I could go back and get my master’s in communications — in photography,’” he says. “So I applied.”

He was accepted into the second-ever class in 1979, starting with night classes before later transitioning to full-time and graduating in 1984. When photography classes were not available at night, he took film classes. “My film background enabled me to understand the steps of a production … to get something from initiation to completion,” he reflects. “And my photography background enabled me to grow into having a pretty artistic eye — balance, symmetry, color, structure.”

After graduating, he stayed on at CBN for 11 years, working in television, commercials, and publishing — contributing to Dr. Robertson’s presidential and literacy campaigns. From there, he went on to serve as a Marketing Manager for a restaurant franchise with over 100 locations. George spent two decades building, creating, and producing.

He just didn’t yet know what it was all for.

A Father’s Worst Morning

Tony Lutz was 3 years old when his father graduated from CBN University. George has a photograph of the two of them — father in graduation regalia embracing a beloved toddler.

By 2005, Tony was a grown man with a wife, a family, and a decision already made. A month after the United States invaded Iraq, he told his father he had enlisted. “He didn’t ask me,” George says. “He told me. Because he was already a man on his own.” George had been blunt in return. “You’re crazy. You could get hurt,” he had said. Yet Tony replied with purpose, “Dad, I have a skill set. I know that I can make a difference. You know I can be of help.” And so, George hugged him, told him he loved him, told him to keep his head down.

One of the last conversations George had with Tony, while his son was deployed, knowingly in danger, was a simple plea to be careful.

“His words back were, ‘God is literally my shield,’” George says. “I say literally because he used that word. I put [my concern] aside because I didn’t want to worry about him. God is your shield, you’re right. What can I do?”

Then came the white van. The five unforgettable words.

“I felt like I was blindsided, in a sense, by God,” George says, his voice fueled with passion, “because God wasn’t his shield, obviously. He wasn’t shielded at all. He was killed. Navigating that is really hard, especially when you don’t see a bigger picture.

“So I wrestled with God. And God spoke to me distinctly — as audibly as probably anybody’s conversations with God. He put His arms around me. And I really felt like God said to me, ‘Listen, I know you’re hurting. But I want to tell you — I lost My Son, too. And My Son and your son are together with Me in paradise.’”

George pauses his retelling, eyes glistening, voice breaking, the pain as visceral now as it was 20 years ago.

“What can you say to that? As a father? It really put me in a different headspace,” he says solemnly. “Because what is our job as parents? Yeah, it’s to raise our kids … But life is a blip. We’re not going to be here that long. So, ultimately, our goal as parents, as Christian parents, is to get our kids to heaven. What God very clearly said to me was, ‘Stop worrying about it. Your job is done.’”

No, the grief did not disappear. George is clear about that. But that moment, that reassurance from God, reoriented his perspective. “I needed to stop thinking about myself and my loss,” he says, “and start thinking about others. Maybe other families don’t have this assurance. Even though I was still in pain, I started to turn my thoughts to other people.”

A Flag for the Fallen

George’s grief was a river without a channel, immense and purposeful, but with nowhere yet to go. He felt a deep desire to reach out to others who had suffered loss, to support strangers in their worst moments and say, “I know exactly what you’re feeling,” but had no way to find them. So he turned to the only outlet he knew for reaching other Gold Star families — the immediate family of U.S. military members who had died in the line of duty. For two years, George attended military funerals. He gave families his number and listened, commiserating in their grief.

“The one thing that families wanted, more than anything, was that their loved one not be forgotten. That’s really everything for a family.” The grief net, George came to understand and explain, extends an average of 34 relationships deep per loss — cousins, extended family, people no program ever reaches — and none of them were being acknowledged.

George kept turning the problem over. What could possibly reach all of them: the immediate families, the extended families, every generation of loss stretching back through American history? What gift could one grieving father give that was large enough?

The idea came to him at a funeral, watching lines of veterans hold American flags as families filed past. He saw branch-of-service flags. He saw a POW flag.

“That’s what we need,” George describes. “We need a flag for our fallen. A flag that recognizes the service and sacrifice of these men and women. If we got something like that created and flying, then everybody who saw it — whoever experienced a loss — would know why it was up. That it was flying for them.”

George spent most of 2006 and 2007 building toward the idea. He went to veterans, to citizens, to other families. The idea was unanimously lauded. But George — self-described introvert, the man who always sits in the back row — didn’t want to be the one to build it.

So, he wrote to his congressman and made the case. Yet the initial response was discouraging. Veterans organizations had been polled, and they felt the American flag was sufficient. George disagreed. He wanted something specific, not all-encompassing, he explains. “That’s why we have flags for everything else. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have state flags. We wouldn’t have branch-of-service flags.” But he was deflated, and by November 2007, George had given up.

In February 2008, a pastor at a small storefront church in Elizabeth City — a man who had never met George — called him out from the back row at the end of service. George went forward reluctantly, and the pastor prayed for the tension in George’s heart. “Fasten your seat belt, because God is about to launch you on a journey you weren’t prepared for,” George summarizes. On the drive home, the weight of the words sat heavily upon his heart until George’s wife inquired, “Could he have been talking about the flag?”

George returned home and to his knees. For the second time in almost exactly two years, he heard the unmistakable guidance of the Lord. “God said, ‘If you think it’s important, then you have to do it. And if you decide to do it, I will walk with you every step of the way.’”

Three months later, on Memorial Day 2008, the Honor and Remember Flag was unveiled publicly for the first time. The nonprofit, the website, the design, the manufacturing — all of it assembled in weeks, channeling from his wealth of experience and education in production and communications. “It was like God was literally opening doors,” George says, “and all I was doing was walking through them.”

Regent’s Roots, Robertson’s Blessing

During the process, George sought counsel from someone whose path had intersected his for decades. He requested a private meeting with Dr. Robertson.

“I had worked for Pat for a long time,” George explains — sitting in recording booths during audio tapings, traveling on the campaign plane. “I wanted his advice. I wanted to know that what I was doing was the right thing to do. So I was requesting kind of a one-on-one with him — to get prayed for, to be validated.”

Robertson, a former Marine, understood service and sacrifice. “Probably not to my surprise,” George says, “but certainly to his credit, he was very supportive and encouraged me to move forward and take that path.” Around 2010, Dr. Robertson spoke at the first-ever public Honor and Remember Flag raising held at The Founders Inn and Spa on Regent’s campus. Chancellor Gordon Robertson has since become an annual supporter of George’s Gold Star family banquet, held each December.

The institution where George had first pursued higher education in the name of the Lord now helped him build in pursuit of remembrance. “[Regent] has been my roots,” he affirms. “Things that I’ve been able to create or lead, product development, marketing, and merchandising, all grew out of this very place right here.”

The Unfinished Mission

Over the past 17 years, George has introduced seven bills in Congress, including House Resolution 1363, a bipartisan bill to establish the Honor and Remember Flag as an official national symbol. In that time, 29 states have formally adopted the flag. The legislative road has been the longest of George’s life, yet it is not finished.

As the country prepares for its 250th anniversary, George keeps returning to a single thought. “Everybody’s focused on our birthday. But nobody is focused on why we have a birthday. 250 years of freedom did not come without 250 years of sacrifice.”

That conviction birthed the Declaration of Remembrance — a campaign for one million signatures pledging to honor every life given across those 250 years, designed to push House Resolution 1363 to a vote by Memorial Day 2026. “‘We will never forget’ — that’s easy to say,” George explains. “Show me. How are you showing me that you never forget? There’s nothing you can do except create permanence. And that’s what this flag does.”

“Every parent in America would rather somebody else’s kid died for this country than their own,” he says reverently. “I’d love to have [Tony] back. But somebody else’s kid is dying so that yours doesn’t have to. What’s the least you can do? The very least you can do is be appreciative. Say thank you. And my question is — before this existed, how do you say thank you?”

Find Your Purpose

George’s book, Tragedy to Tribute, chronicles his journey. But what he hopes readers find in it is something beyond the flag, something personal. “It’s really the story of taking tragedy and turning it into opportunity,” he says. “Taking the devastating loss of my son and then God coming back and saying, ‘I’ve got your son. What I have you on now is a journey of healing and completion.’”

For students still on their journeys, his advice is certain: “Find your purpose. I believe that God brought everything in my life — every experience, every person — all together, collectively, for this. When you find that purpose, it’s no longer work. It’s what consumes you, what drives you, and what makes your life worth living to the end.”

George graduated from Regent University 42 years ago. He’s been building toward his purpose ever since, whether he knew it or not — a foundation laid in night classes and empowered by a brand-new university preparing Christian leaders to change the world.

Tony Lutz declared that God was literally his “shield.” George has spent 20 years learning that sometimes the shield doesn’t take the form we expect — that, in the hands of a grieving father with a producer’s mind and a desire to protect the memory of the fallen, it looks like a flag.

For those curious to learn more about Honor and Remember and to support the Declaration of Remembrance, visit honorandremember.org.