A Problem You Can't Solve

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Dr. Lee Warren here with you.

I'm grateful to be here with you today.

Listen, I've been hearing from a lot of folks, especially if you go out to the prayer wall,

wlewarrenmd.com slash prayer, if you have something on your mind or on your heart that

you want to pray about, or if you're looking for somebody else to pray for, the prayer

wall is a great resource for you.

People from all over the world gathering together to pray and lay out their hearts.

And wewarnmd.com slash prayer.

Right now, there is some incredible painful things out there that people are going through.

And all of us have these traumas and tragedies and massive things.

That's why I just wrote a whole book about hope is the first dose.

And about 100 episodes ago, since it's throwback Thursday, I want to give you this episode back

called unsolvable problems.

Sometimes there's a problem, like this letter we got from a woman named Steph

who lost two of her children on the same day last year.

Just unbelievably impossible situation. What do you do when the bottom falls out? What do you do next?

And so I wanna give you this episode, Unsolvable Problems. I feel like it's on my heart this morning

that somebody's gonna need this and maybe since it's 100 episodes ago,

maybe you haven't heard it because there's episodes every day.

It takes new listeners a while to go back in time and find some of these things that can be really helpful.

So once a week or so, I try to give you back one of those classics

from the past that can be really helpful.

And this one is helpful to me when there's a problem in my life that I can't solve, here's a strategy,

here's a plan for what you can do.

We talk a lot about my new book that just came out in July, so you'll hear me tell a little bit about the story

of why I started writing that book and all of that. So don't be confused, right at the start of this episode,

we go back and we're talking about the book getting ready to come out.

And of course it came out in July.

We just found out yesterday that it's number 11 on the best-selling Christian book list of new releases.

So that's pretty exciting that the book is getting out there and people are finding out about it.

And if you haven't read Hope is the First Dose yet, I'll remind you that season nine is sponsored

by Hope is the First Dose.

And I wrote this book because Lisa and I felt like we needed to give you some of the tools

and things that we learned along the way as 10 years being bereaved parents.

And I think it'll help. losing a child.

Losing a spouse going through something impossible. It is one of those unsolvable problems, but.

Because we serve a God who lives outside of time and space because we serve a God who created things like quantum physics and can solve,

Unsolvable problems we can take hope because it's possible to find hope and maybe even peace and happiness again,

Even at the same time that you have an unsolvable and impossible situation. So today I want to give you that back,

unsolvable problems without further ado we'll get into it. They're really my

friend it's only one question. Hey are you ready to change your life? If the

answer is yes there's only one rule. You have to change your mind first and my

friend there's a place where the neuroscience of how your mind works

smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life? Well this is the place. Self Brain Surgery School. I'm,

Dr. Lee Warren and this is where we go deep into how we're wired. Take control of

of our thinking and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time, my friend.

Let's get after it.

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I am super excited to be with you today.

We are 13 days away from book launch for Hope.

Is the first dose.

Big cheer, big hurrah for that. I am so excited about it. I started writing this book in April of 2021,

sitting by the fire with Harvey and Louis, who were seven months old at the time.

And I had this burden on my heart to help you understand how important it is

to be able to find your way back to hope and peace and maybe even happiness again

after these massive things happen in your life, like us losing our son, Mitch.

I had this burden because I realized, in my book, I've seen the end of you.

I told you that I'd been studying people with impossible problems like glioblastoma and head injuries.

And then I told you that we lost our son, Mitch, and I kind of described a little bit

about what that was like, and the fact that we kind of found our faith again

and sort of made it through.

I gave you the what, but it dawned on me that I didn't give you the how,

and I didn't feel like I had been a very good doctor to you.

I didn't offer you a plan. I didn't show you the procedure.

The surgery that it took to get to where we could say

that we had lives again, hopeful, maybe even happy lives again.

I didn't show you that. So this book is not memoir. It starts with vulnerability about our story,

but I give you a reliable, testable, repeatable,

working solution, a treatment plan for how you can put your life back together

when trauma and tragedy and these other massive things happen.

And I'm grateful that a publisher came alongside. Waterbrook, the great team of professionals

that helped us with, I've seen the interview.

I'm grateful that we have incredible publicists and marketing people and editors and agents

and all those folks, because it takes a whole team to bring you a story like this.

And friend, I'm telling you, it's gonna help. Today we're gonna talk about unsolvable problems

and downstream goals and the time when it seems like everything's impossible and maybe even too big,

for Jesus to be sovereign over.

Maybe sometimes we feel like the problem that we're facing is uniquely impossible.

And it leaves us with a big question. Why, God? And we don't know what to do.

And when you find yourself in that position where you don't know what to do,

I'm gonna today give you a story from college from my physical chemistry class,

which is the worst thing I've ever been through academically.

P-chem was harder than anything I did in medical school.

Two semesters of P-chem with Jim Baxter. Shout out, Dr. Baxter,

if you're out there listening somewhere.

One of the smartest people I ever met, by the way.

So physical chemistry gives us this understanding that some problems are unsolvable.

And Jesus' sovereignty teaches us that impossible things are actually possible.

And learning some lessons that I've learned from running, that downstream goals sometimes hamper us and hinder us from actually achieving the main goal.

And I'm going to try to tie all these things together in just a few minutes for you.

And I'm going to leave you with one of the songs on the Hope is the First Dose playlist,

which I'm going to share with you.

And you'll be able to have some of the music that helped me write the book and helps me resonate with the ideas in the book.

And maybe will help you too as you journal and study and think and think and pray through some of the ideas

that I'm gonna give you and hope is the first dose.

We're gonna do all that stuff this morning because it's time to learn to deal

with unsolvable problems, especially the ones that make us ask, why God?

Here's a personal story for you. I was never a runner. Was never a runner.

Lisa convinced me that I could run. Years ago, we started running together and Lisa's a great runner.

She saw my son, our son Mitchell run And she was like, you have the body of a runner,

you have the capacity to run, you have the ability to run. He was like, no, I don't think so.

Well, Mitch ended up being a great cross-country runner.

And so she saw in him that ability and he did it. And when she said to me, you're not super tall,

but you got long legs, I think you got a good stride, you could learn to run.

And so over the years, I actually found that I enjoyed running, which was a great shock to me.

So as a child, I didn't think I enjoyed sort of sports and physical things all that much.

But it turned out that I do love to run.

And then of course, you know, after Mitch died, we kind of got life sort of waylays you.

And then for a while we became inactive and then we moved and then we moved again and we moved again.

We kept moving around in Wyoming. We finally ended up in Nebraska and just did some period

of time after the quarantine and all that had gone by. And I just got really inactive.

And both of us said, hey, we gotta get, we gotta get this squared away.

I think I'm going to be.

And giving talks and doing speeches and speaking in churches around the book launch,

and I've got to get back in shape, and I'm just tired of inactivity.

So we decided to start working out again. Lisa led the way and started a program a few months ago,

this app where you have all these daily tasks that you can do,

and it basically sort of puts you in this mode of having to focus on physical activity,

and sort of discipline in a number of areas.

And so I started following her lead, as always, she leads the way, and I find myself doing

better things because of her encouragement. And so, anyway, I started running again.

And every time I start running, I decide that I need to go faster or farther, I set all

these goals for myself, and every time I go out for a run, it's like I want to go this

distance, I want to try to hit this pace, I want to try to run this far before I stop

for a sip of water, this far before I walk a little bit, and I start having all these

downstream goals from the primary goal. Well the last time we were in San Antonio we went back a few weeks ago for a combined birthday party for three of

our people, two of our daughters and one of our grandsons had birthdays that are

close to one another so we went down and had an amazing time together with our

whole family in one place at one time which is getting harder to do as they

all move and separate and grow up and you know get jobs and do all that stuff.

And so we had this great time together and as we were down there I had a conversation with my brother-in-law Ronnie. Ronnie works for USAA and is

Lisa's sister's husband Jessica's husband and Ronnie said hey I'm gonna try to run a half marathon I've never done that before but in December there's

a half marathon in San Antonio I need somebody to commit to train and run with

me and I said I'm in I want to do that so that gave me a goal right a goal of

of needing to start running more diligently and consistently and training for a distance I've never run.

I did a half marathon on a treadmill one time, which is crazy, don't do that.

Get really weird blisters on your feet.

But I did it just to see if I could do it a few years ago, but I've never actually run a half marathon.

Outside with other people.

So I committed to do that with Ronnie. So that means I have now some skin in the game

as I've made a promise and I've gotta start training.

Well, what I've noticed as I run Because it's always really hard when I'm out of shape and haven't run in a while.

It's hard. The first mile is hard. Your body's telling you you're tired and you can't do it and everything feels heavy.

Then somehow around the end of that first mile, things start feeling a little bit easier.

I've never experienced anything like what they say is a runner's high.

I've never found that.

What I do find is that after about a mile, my body starts relaxing and my breath gets

under control and it starts feeling easier to go the second and third mile.

But then what I start doing now I'm a kind of a type-a hard charger as you might imagine and I start putting these goals on myself okay well I want to run.

The first three miles in this pace. I want to get under this certain number of minutes per mile and

then I want to run out to four and a half or five miles before I take a step or stop for a minute or

take a breath or walk any. I want to make sure I can run the every step of that distance before

I do this and then I have a time goal for the five miles and then I have a time goal for the

six miles and I've gotten up to where I can run 10k again without having to stop. But I've noticed

especially on the treadmill when I do indoors if it's raining or something and I do indoor

training on the treadmill, I find myself setting these second and third and fourth and fifth

and sixth order goals for a run.

And then what happens is if I can't do one of them, if I like miss a mark, I can't quite

push through and get that one thing done, then sometimes I mentally feel like I've failed.

At the run and I'll stop, I'll quit, I'll switch and do something on the floor, do some

weights or something else and I'll end up not accomplishing the entire goal for the

big run that I had like I was going to do six miles and I end up missing this second

or third or fourth or fifth or sixth order goal and it'll discourage me and I'll stop

and I won't make it to even some of the earlier goals in that chain of goals that I had set

because the downstream goal in my mind became more important or became necessary to complete the entire thing.

And I realized the other day as I was running that that's kind of silly.

And it sort of reminded me of this thing that Lisa and I have been talking about, this app that she was using.

And I think there's some great value in setting these big goals, but the problem with that,

with the app and with my realizing that downstream goals were keeping me from accomplishing my

major goal, is that sometimes when we set too many parameters around something, we forget

that the number one thing is to accomplish the first goal.

And if we don't accomplish some of the downstream goals, then we end up shooting ourselves in

the foot and don't get the first one done. So a different way to look at it then would be to say, don't let your downstream goals

inhibit you from achieving your primary goal.

So for example, if my primary goal is to accomplish a half marathon, right, but then I set a time

goal in there, if I want to hit the half of the half at a certain time or I want to make

sure I run nine miles before I stop for a sip of water or whatever it might be.

If I don't accomplish that and I get discouraged, then I might end up not completing the entire thing.

Right?

So, in other words, if I need to complete 13 miles, but I mess up and I don't hit a

time goal and I stop and don't make it through the 13 miles, then I haven't accomplished

the half marathon, which was my real goal, my big goal.

Does this make sense?

I'm telling you that to say this, downstream goals somehow, sometimes get inverted in order

of priority and we forget that the priority is the actual underlying big goal, complete

get the run, finish the thing, achieve the mission.

Cross the finish line.

Why am I telling you that? Well, hope is the first dose that's coming in 13 days.

And in that book, we talk about trauma and tragedy and massive things, these big events

that happen in your life. They don't have to be medical.

They don't have to be somebody died. They don't have to be a diagnosis.

It can be you lost a dream, somebody cheated on you,

the pandemic took out your business, you've failed to achieve a big financial goal

and you're struggling, you're in trouble in some way, it can be an emotional wound.

It can be an emotional trauma. Somebody abused you or somebody abandoned you

or deserted you or trespassed on you in some way that hurt your heart and it's hard to move on.

So what happens then is sometimes we forget the primary goal after trauma and tragedy

and other massive things has to be that we survive.

It has to be. Because sometimes people don't. Sometimes people are so sad that they commit suicide

or they open a bottle or they develop a habit or something happens and they stay stuck.

They never learn how to heal and move forward in their lives again and they get stuck.

And they don't survive. Either physically they literally don't survive

or they just never come alive again.

So the primary goal in trauma, tragedy and other massive things after TMT like that

has to be survive, right?

If you don't survive, it doesn't matter what happens next. So you have to survive, but then at the same time,

you have to learn how to step forward and learn how to live again, and that's the big goal, right?

So obviously surviving and coming alive again two parts of the same issue.

And it should not be acceptable to us to just keep breathing.

We should want to come alive again, right?

So we don't want to set too many downstream goals and put all that pressure on ourselves

right away. It's this acute wound that we have where we say, I've got to survive and then I've got

to learn how to start living again. So how do I do that?

Well, it's just like in learning how to run. That first mile is really hard, that surviving the first mile is difficult.

But once you've done that, once you realize, hey, I've run a mile now three or four days in a row,

it's starting to get a little bit easier.

You'll start seeing that as you deal with your massive things again.

You'll start saying, hey, I've managed to breathe and put my pants on and maybe even brush my teeth

for three or four days in a row.

Now maybe I can start remembering that I can pray, I can seek help, and I can ask God to come alongside me.

Maybe I can start finding some promises to grab onto again. Maybe I can start understanding that my family

still loves me and I've still got a future and I've still got a hope and there's still

opportunity out there for me.

And over time you'll start adding the secondary and tertiary goals to just remembering to breathe again.

You'll automate that breathing process again. You'll start coming alive again every morning when you wake up, like making new synapses

and getting your brain turned on more easily.

And it'll become easier and easier just like that first and second mile become on the treadmill,

because you've not let those downstream goals become so overwhelming you haven't said.

This happens after trauma, it really happens after you lose a child.

It's overwhelming because you think, I can never be, your brain will lie to you,

I can never be happy again, there's no way, I might as well just give up.

I'm never going to be okay again. She left me and nobody will ever love me again.

I'll never be able to win her back.

You're going to start hearing these things that don't turn out to be true all the time.

And if you give in to them, then nothing else that happens in your life will matter

because that first thing is you didn't survive.

You didn't come alive again because you let the overwhelming impossibility it feels like

of all those other things that matter to you coming alive again, finding hope again, going

back to work, creating a new life.

I have a friend, Clarissa Maul, whose husband died and she had four young children and she's

about to get married again.

And it took her a long time to realize that she was still young and she still had a life

to live and she still had a family and she needed a partner in her life and she started

dating again, and God's written a new beautiful story. She'll never stop grieving over losing her husband.

She never will.

But she learned how to come alive again. But that took a whole bunch of smaller steps

to get to that place where she could live again.

She had to survive first.

She had to get her hands around her kids and her family and her life again

and learn how to make a living again first

before all those other things could happen.

So if she had sat in the early days and said, I'm never gonna be okay.

I'm never gonna fall in love again. I'm never gonna be able to find anybody else.

I'm never gonna be able to have a partner. I'm always gonna be alone.

I'm always gonna be a widow.

I'm always gonna be sad. Some of those things are true, right?

They mix in with the pain.

But she learned to first take care of the first goal, which is living, breathing,

seeing, learning how to feel hopeful again, before you can take on those big things

like can I be happy again? Now let me pivot for a second.

I think I've made that point.

When I was in college, I have a biochemistry degree from Oklahoma Christian University,

and that was back in the days when the biochemistry degree was the hardest in the biological sciences to achieve,

in that you had to take college-level physics and you had to take analytical chemistry

and organic chemistry and physical chemistry, which was the capstone course, two semesters of P-Chem,

but before you could have P-Chem.

You had to take analytical chemistry for two semesters, you had to have two semesters of physics,

two semesters of calculus, trigonometry, all this stuff to get ready to be able

to handle physical chemistry.

Well, what in the world is physical chemistry?

Physical chemistry is the branch of chemistry that only super nerds are allowed to,

I'm sorry, I don't mean to say that.

Hey, if you're a physical chemist out there, mad props to you, high respect,

because you guys are geniuses.

We're also kind of nerds. I mean, let's just admit it, right?

The physical chemistry, friend, is the study of how matter behaves on a molecular and atomic level

and how chemical reactions occur.

It's the understanding of the physical properties of atoms and molecules,

the way chemical reactions work, and what those properties reveal.

And in order to do it, you've got to understand physics, you've got to understand quantum mechanics,

you have to understand high-level mathematics in order to be able to solve these big problems.

So if you want to develop a new chemical compound and use it to develop some kind of commercial property,

some sort of commercial use for it and business around it, Then you've got to understand all the different ways that works and what the reactions inside

that process are and what that material does and what you can understand about it because

you're not going to build a new plastic to make an airplane wing out of unless you really

understand it because you've got to know how it's going to fail and what's going to happen to it and so on.

Down at the quantum level, they have to understand all the ways that that substance interacts

with everything else in order to be able to understand it, predict it, and then commercialize it, right?

That's the understanding, that's what PCAM is.

But on the ground, in college, it's a whole bunch of crazy math equations to figure out

what the heat transfer between two molecules is going to be and all of that.

And I remember a test, it was in second semester of PChem, and there were these two twins in the class with me.

There were only six of us in this class. It was a senior level course in college, right?

So by the time you get to those senior level courses, especially in a small college like

mine, there will only be a handful of students in there.

Because most people that are going to go to medical school, for example, they do pre-med,

which is basically biology degree, and it's the easy path to get to medical school.

I don't know why I did biochemistry. I guess part of me thought I wasn't going to get into medical school and I was going

to need to become a chemist or something and have some other kind of backup job if I couldn't get into med school.

So I wanted to take the hardest thing I could take to prepare me in case I didn't get in

so I would have another career alternative. I saw myself going and getting a PhD or something and becoming a chemist or working for Dow or

or something like that.

So anyway, that was probably a protection mechanism. But I could have just taken the easy route

and done pre-med and general biology and gotten in that way.

But I didn't. So I ended up taking this P-Chem course and I remember and I made an A in P-Chem I,

and second semester, Dr. Baxter, the PhD who was in charge, basically told us,

none of y'all are gonna make an A in this course. I'm gonna make it essentially impossible

for you to make an A.

Well, I did, me and one other guy did it.

And I think that's the way that I made it through school I always thought I was that something was going to be impossible.

So I worked like it was going to be impossible and it turned out to be possible.

So I just kept busting that and going after it. but I remember very clearly in a test in the second semester of physical chemistry.

Was in this problem we were supposed to prove out an equation and derive the solution to this problem that he put forth

And I heard a little sound and I looked over in one of those twins had a little tear running down her cheek

She was just kind of silently crying as we went through this exam because it was so hard,

It was like your dream of becoming a doctor was dying right in front of you because you were never gonna be able to solve

This problem, but I realized as we went through that this particular problem,

problem was unsolvable.

Every math equation that I knew, every derivative that we had learned,

every calculus integration that we had learned, every proof of concept that we had learned that he had taught us

was not working out.

I checked my math, I double and triple checked it.

I turned the page over and started again and tried a different way to solve it.

Basically, the time was running out and I couldn't find a solution to this problem.

I proved all my work out and got down to where I should have been able to put an answer down

and I basically said, this is an unsolvable problem.

I can't solve it with the math that I know and the chemistry that you've taught us.

This can't be solved.

And I ran out of time and I turned my paper in. And I thought, there you go, I failed P-Chem II, I'm never going to get into medical school.

Well, it turns out that was the right answer. The right answer was that the equation can't be solved.

And he did that to make a point, and the point is that sometimes there's not an answer to

the problem with which you're faced.

Sometimes it's impossible.

And he did that, Dr. Baxter did that in PCAM to teach us that some problems in physics

and chemistry can't be solved, and once you realize, you have to be smart enough to realize

that it's time to pivot and move on to a different problem, that there are times when you can't

fix the situation with which you've been faced.

We talked the other day about Paul in the New Testament, who was given a thorn in the flesh

that he prayed and prayed and prayed and asked God to take away.

And ultimately God said, I'm not taking this away.

My grace is sufficient for you.

He had to come to grips with the fact, just like Tina Tisdell that we talked about the other day,

the new character in my book.

She was faced with a situation that she couldn't accept because the answer was unacceptable to her.

And the answer was, you are gonna have a headache, but you don't have a brain tumor anymore.

She couldn't accept that. But she had to say, I want to not have a headache

because I think if I have a headache, it means I'm sick. And if I'm sick, then I can't have a life.

And she couldn't live with the fact that she was gonna have some residual pain,

even though she was cured of her disease. And so we have sometimes a situation

where God says you can't have that.

A problem where you can't solve that and I'm telling you if you've lost a child if you've lost a spouse,

If you've been through these massive things, there's gonna be a part of that that won't ever stop,

It won't ever go away. I know when i'm an old man. I'm still going to be sad about losing my son,

That's an impossible thing to get rid of you. You can't.

And so when you when you're running that equation and you're saying to yourself,

How do I get over this and how do I stop hurting over this? Well, the answer is you can't,

but at the same time, there's another way to pivot and still find the ability to breathe and live

and build hope and build meaning and purpose and even happiness again.

You're gonna be different, but guess what?

That problem that you faced and learned how to pivot from can become something that adds value and meaning

and purpose to other people's lives, and that can start to become a thing

that helps you to build and grow into the future.

That's why Jesus, when he came back from the grave, by the way, still had nail holes in his hands

and he still had a wound on his side because he knew that Thomas was gonna need

to touch those wounds in order to believe again.

Thomas, devastated by the loss of his friend and his savior,

said, I need to put my hands in those wounds or I'm not gonna believe that he's alive again.

And Jesus said, if you wanna know me, touch my side, right? He was able to help somebody else

because of his persistent woundedness, even though he lived again.

And sometimes, friend, you're gonna have to face the fact that it's impossible for you to solve the problem

you've been handed and you're gonna have to pivot and grow and learn to live again, even with that wound,

even with that thing that you can't solve.

So don't let the downstream goals that we talked about a while ago of,

I have to be, don't make yourself think I have to be perfectly healed, I have to move past this,

I've gotta forget that it happened to me, because guess what?

Trauma doesn't stop happening to you.

Remember what Gaber Mate told you, I read that to you the other day.

He said, trauma's not what happened to you. Trauma's how you responded to what happened to you.

You can heal from how you responded. You can do self-brain surgery.

You can learn neuroplasticity.

You learn how to apply your neuroplasticity and you can make new synapses

and you can learn to have a different response

to the memories and the things that you've encountered before but you can't take them away.

It will never stop being true that I lost a son. It will never stop being true

that I went through multiple mortar attacks and saw horrible things in the war.

That won't stop being true. So if my definition of healing had to be

that those things stopped happening,

then that's impossible.

That's what Tina Tisdale got stuck on. And that's what the girl in my P-chem class was crying

because she couldn't get to the answer so that the problem wasn't solvable.

That was the right answer when I wrote that on the paper. Dr. Baxter said good job. You got it

And I said well what I wrote down was that you can't solve this problem And he said that's the answer the answer is the problem can't be solved,

And so you have to learn how to open your eyes to the fact that sometimes,

Problems aren't solvable now. Let me give you the good news. I.

Read an article from Chuck Swindoll from back in 2018 Chuck Swindoll, of course, a really well-known pastor and writer,

whose writing is really encouraging.

And he wrote this article called Seven Impossibilities That Jesus Made Possible.

I'll put a link in the show notes. Really great look at what Jesus did.

Jesus had dominion and sovereignty over the physical things that he had created in the universe,

because he's the author of the universe, right? Look at John 1.

Jesus was the guy who, when God said, and let there be light, Jesus made the light.

So he can make stuff that seems impossible. When Chuck Swindoll wrote about this,

when we're faced with a series of great problems, impossible problems, Jesus sometimes can step in

and take sovereignty over those.

And he gave seven examples, power over quality.

At the wedding in Canaan, Jesus made wine from water and the wine he made was the best wine anybody had ever had.

It was the best wine there was because Jesus can turn something bad into something good.

He has power over distance. When the royal official came to him in Cana in John four,

Jesus healed the child or the servant rather, even though he wasn't there.

He said, it was his son. He said, go home and your son will be well when you get there.

Jesus had power and sovereignty over distance. He had power over time.

The guy had been laying there by the pool in Bethesda.

In John 5, for 38 years, and Jesus said, get up and walk.

And from a medical standpoint, this is fascinating because if somebody's been immobile for 38 years,

it's a lot more than just paralysis.

There's gonna be atrophy, there's gonna be tendons that are shortened and calcified,

there's gonna be muscles that have wasted, there's gonna be joints and bones

that have become osteoporotic for lack of bearing weight.

Like, Jesus snapped his fingers, doesn't say he snapped his fingers,

Jesus spoke the word, and the guy got up and walked,

which means he was sovereign over bone density and muscle atrophy and joint freezing

and all those things, spinal cord wasting and nerves that had forgotten their synapses and all that stuff.

Jesus said the word, and this guy was healed.

So Jesus had power over time and biology, a power over quantity.

He fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes, right?

He could make more out of a situation than there seemed to be even possible.

He made it possible. He had power over nature. When the wind was blowing, the disciples were frightened,

he said, still, peace be still. In John six, he had power over misfortune.

When the guy was blind since birth, he had no hope.

Jesus said, open your eyes and you can see. In John nine, he had power over death.

When Lazarus died, Jesus spoke the word and Lazarus came back to life.

I'm telling you these things to say this, sometimes your problem is unsolvable,

but you have a God who specializes in solving unsolvable problems.

Sometimes his answer seems to be no, like with Paul with the thorn in the flesh.

Sometimes he says, I'm not gonna take that particular thing from you,

but remember what we talked about from Pastor Keller, from Timothy Keller, he said,

God always answers our prayers either with yes,

or with what we would have asked for if we knew what he knew about it.

And that gives me great hope for him because sometimes I want the answer to be yes,

and it's just not yes.

The prayer I prayed, it's silly, it seems like, but I prayed that Mitch would come back to life

or that I would find that he wasn't really gone.

That seemed silly because he was really gone and he didn't come back to life.

But somehow Jesus is still answering my prayer. if I'd known everything he knew.

It would have been a different kind of prayer. And so he's saying yes to that one.

I don't know how to explain that. There's no economy in which you can understand

that when you've lost a child or lose a parent or lose a sibling or lose a spouse, you don't know.

But somehow over time, those promises begin to feel true and they begin to turn out to be true

when you study what's really happening around you in the world.

God makes the impossible possible sometimes and he makes you understand and be able to live with

and live again with answers that seem like no's, but are really good answers from a good father

and a great physician.

There's a song by Austin French that we put on The Hope as the first show's playlist called Why God?

And it works this question of why around.

It starts with why God, does all this stuff happen and people die and things happen

and people are brokenhearted and people fall apart. And ultimately says, I don't know why,

but I know why I have to turn to you.

It reminded me of that Oswald Chambers quote when he says you're either going to fear God

or you're going to fear everything else. Like if you have a healthy relationship with God, you're not afraid of anything else.

But if you don't, then everything is terrifying because if your life is built on how much

money you have or if your children are healthy or if your marriage is okay, if your life

is built on those things, you can lose those things.

That's why my subtitle of I've Seen the End of You was The Things We Think We Know.

When you lose those things that you're certain of, if your life isn't built on something

that's more solid and unchangeable, then you can lose everything.

So this morning to recap, we talked about the danger in having our lives built, our goal of

success built on all the downstream goals and too many choices in the app, and we have to flip back

to understand that we must accomplish the primary goal of living again before we can move on to

anything else. And sometimes the answer is that there's not an answer, and we have to then be

able to pivot to understanding a life without the ability to answer that first question or that first

of prayer or that first wish.

We have to be able to put our lives back together even when the problem is unsolvable.

And that's the self-brain surgery of learning how to create synapses around new realities.

And we have to learn how to say, why God? And work through that and not just give up.

And Chuck Swindoll gave us seven different ways that Jesus can solve impossible situations.

And I think Hope is the First Dose is gonna do that for you too.

It's gonna give you a treatment plan,

for how to make good changes in your heart and in your mind when you're faced with these impossible situations

and how you can come alive again and how you can use that woundedness to help other people

and how you can learn to see the light again by flexing those hope muscles of memory and movement.

Listen friend, we're 13 days away from the book coming out, but every day between now and then

I'm gonna give you a dose of hope.

And this is another one. When it seems impossible,

remember that sometimes the problem is unsolvable,

but the answer still is always yes in Him. There's always a path back to hope and happiness.

And you can't change your life until you change your mind.

The good news is my friend, you can find the path back to hope.

And that's always the first dose, that you have to start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you

by my brand new book, Hope is the First Dose.

It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audio book,

if you're not already tired of hearing my voice.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.

And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,

helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries around the world.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your life,

until you change your mind and the good news is you can start today.

Music.