A Tiny, and Sufficient, Taste of Hope (Wildcard Wednesday)

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

you on another self-brain surgery journey.

We're going to try to solve one little conundrum today.

It's a wildcard Wednesday episode. I've been thinking about this weird word

that I ran across, and it's funny how this word shows up in the culinary arts.

It shows up in culture. It shows up in scripture.

Not the specific word, but the concept behind it. And it shows up in neuroanatomy.

So I'm going to give you a word that's kind of something to think about that

I think will give you a little bit of hope as you try to contemplate how to hold this tension,

between the traumas and tragedies and massive things that happen in life and

how we're supposed to be able to find hope and faith,

and how we're supposed to be able to even find something that looks like happiness

again in our lives after we've been through these hard things.

Well, your brain is going to help you do that.

Your faith is going to help you do that. And I'm going to help you do that today.

And we're going to try to get after it for just a few minutes.

And this is one of these weird things that your friend, the brain surgeon, does.

I find a word and start thinking about all the different implications of it

and spin it around like a Rubik's Cube.

And somehow it starts to make sense. And that's what we're going to get after

today. I have one word for you today, my friend.

Before we get to it, I also have 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 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.

Music.

All right, you ready? Let's get after it. So there's a word, and the word is lemon.

Not lemon like the fruit, not L-E-M-O-N, and not lumen like the inside of a

tube, or if you're an anatomist or a medical personnel, the lumen is the lining,

the inside portion of a hollow organ like your colon or a blood vessel.

So the lumen, L-U-M-E-N, not that, but lemon, L-I-M-E-N.

It's a weird word, right? It's

not a word that we hear or talk about very often. But lemon is the point.

Here's the definition from the American Heritage Dictionary.

Threefold definition here, lemon. The point at which a stimulus is strong enough

to produce a physiological or psychological response.

Second definition. In experimental psychology and psychophysics,

the threshold, the dividing line between noticeableness and unnoticeableness of stimulus.

Number three, in anatomy, the portion of brain substance situated between the

base and the island of Ryle.

Okay, what in the world does that mean? We'll talk about that in a minute.

There's another definition in anthropology. And in anthropology,

it's this sort of place between, this ability to detect something.

And the word liminal, okay, liminal is the adjective form, which means intermediate

between two states, conditions,

or regions, transitional or

indeterminate, existing at the state at the limin that's used of stimuli.

So we're right at that threshold of something where the ability to detect,

the ability to perceive, we're at the liminal edge of something.

And of or pertaining to a lumen, especially a sensory threshold.

And then finally, in liminality, we get to that word, in anthropology,

liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the

middle stage of a rite of passage.

When participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status, but have not yet begun

the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.

Think about preteens, tweens, right?

They're little kids, but they're almost teenagers. Their bodies are starting to change.

They're starting to want some of the privileges and rights that they will have

when they get a little bit older, cell phones, Internet access,

whatever it is, driving.

They're at that place. They're starting to think about dating.

They're starting to think about attraction, these weird sensations that they get in their bodies.

And they're in a place in between.

They're not little kids. They're not teenagers yet. It happens in school,

right? You're not a senior yet.

You don't have the rights and privileges of a graduate yet, but you're close.

You're right on the cusp. It happens to medical trainees when we're almost board certified.

We can almost practice by ourselves. We know all the things we need to know,

but we're not yet allowed to do the thing that we're training to do.

So we're in this in-between state. That's liminality.

It comes with a lot of confusion and anticipation and frustration and excitement,

and all these things kind of jumbled up.

So what in the world are we talking about? Lemon is, in culinary terms,

it's like the ability to perceive a taste of something in a dish, for example.

Like how much salt do you need to have before something begins to have a salty character, right?

How much sweet does something need to have?

If you're tasting wine, for example, you perceive, like people do wine tastings

and they talk about tobacco, pipe tobacco, and they talk about chocolate,

and they talk about earthiness, and they talk about nut.

Those flavors and tastes and essences of something, and how much of something

has to be in something before you can perceive it.

In physiology, we talk about how much pain, how much stimulation do you have

to give a nerve before someone can start to perceive that it's painful or pleasurable.

That's lemon okay that limit that threshold my german title of my book i've

seen the interview they used a word that translates as threshold decisions at the threshold of death.

Was how they translated, I've seen the interview, this idea that there's some

things that happen right at the breaking point, like right where we're about

to break through from one stage to another,

from life to death, from pain to pleasure to not sensing anything,

from taste or not taste, from the ability to perceive.

What are we going to do with this concept? Well, let me get it to you.

Let me just give it to you.

I had this concept I was reading. Seth Godin is a blogger that I read.

He's a marketer. He's written a bunch of great books.

In his blog yesterday, he quoted Duke Ellington, this great jazz composer.

And Seth Godin said, when asked what his favorite composition was,

Duke Ellington said, the next one.

This is the essence of the artistic process. We're in the liminal space between

now and what is about to come. We're fully alive.

So Godin gets right to the heart of this creative process.

And I've been experiencing this for months. So you spend two years writing a

book, editing it, selling it, preparing it, recording the demo,

recording the audio book, working with the publisher, working with publicists, doing interviews.

Your book finally comes out. And in all of that time, you have at some point

transitioned in your mind away from the concepts and ideas in that book,

and you started working on what's coming in the next book.

When you're a writer, you're always working on the next thing.

And in my crazy world, the way it works for me,

I have spent all this time working on bringing you Hope is the First Dose and

in writing Hope is the First Dose and in coming to understand how it was that

we put our life back together after we lost our son Mitch and starting to understand

the brain science behind some of the decisions that we made and how I use this

concept that I call self-brain surgery,

which is really just applied directed neuroplasticity and scripture kind of

smashed together like we do on this podcast every day. Okay.

I started understanding that the vast depth of this knowledge that's out there

of how our brains really work and how that points to things Scripture said a

long time ago and how understanding that software-hardware interface between mind and brain,

and I think connection between spirit, mind, and brain, really unlocks our ability

to be almost untouchable in the things that happen to us in our life,

to be infinitely happier, if you will, even though life is infinitely crushing sometimes.

And so I think there's tremendous hope there.

And it all wraps up in this neuroscience of stuff I've been dealing with for

my whole adult life, right?

So I'm just shocked that in the surgical area, I spent all this time and all

these years learning how to perform surgery and working around the nervous system

and helping people understand what's happening in their bodies.

And I never put it together that that link between the nervous system and our

spirit was really the way that we can become so much more able to handle whatever comes in our life.

But underneath that, if you peel all that stuff away, where I'm getting to it

from neuroscience, there's a spiritual journey that people have been on for

as long as there have been people.

And this tension between what is happening in our physical lives and what's

happening in our spiritual lives

and what we are experiencing now and what we hope for in the not yet,

as Christians sometimes call it, the tension between the now and the not yet.

And I'm just going to say today on this Wild Card Wednesday,

I want to give you this concept of liminality, okay, because I think it's kind of clarifying for me.

When I read Seth Godin's work, I said that's sort of clarifying,

and it took me back to two conversations that I had last weekend.

I talked to Greg Pruitt, who's a Bible translator, and he's written this unbelievable

book, Extraordinary Hearing.

And I'm going to release it soon after I record another interview with Pete

Greek. They've both written books about how to hear God.

I've read three amazing books in my life about how to hear God,

one from Dallas Willard and then Pete Greek and Greg Pruitt.

And I'm going to give you those two, Greg Pruitt and Pete Greek,

close together so that theme will help you to really drill in. How do we hear God?

How do we hear God? Are we alone? Are we just only able to read the Word of God and read His words?

Or does He actually communicate with us? And we're going to get into that, okay?

I'm going to do a third episode where I talk about the neuroscience of it.

And we're going to do all that in a few weeks. I really wish I could give it

to you right now, but it's not time.

But Greg and I had a great talk. And in that talk, he talks about how in the

midst of this hard life, we can really press in and learn to hear God and help

us navigate what's happening in our lives, okay?

And then I had a talk with Tish Harrison Warren, who I've been waiting two years

to talk to her since I read her book, Prayer in the Night.

And Tish tells this story about when she had a miscarriage. Her and her husband,

both Anglican priests in Pittsburgh, she's bleeding.

She's like really bleeding, like could die kind of bleeding.

Goes to the hospital. She's in the midst of this emergency.

And right as she's going, you know, in the middle of the crisis,

she calls for her husband and says, Please pray the Compline Prayer.

Like, pray for me. Like, I want to pray right now.

And she prays the Compline Prayer, which is this part of the Compline Prayer.

It's from the Book of Common Prayer, centuries old, and it says this line.

This is what she wanted to pray when her baby was dying, when she was bleeding almost to death.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this night,

and give your angels charge over those who sleep.

Tend the sick, Lord Christ, give rest to the weary, bless the dying,

soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous,

and all for your love's sake. Amen.

Let me read that again. Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch

or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep.

Tend the sick, Lord Christ.

Give rest to the weary. Bless the dying. Soothe the suffering.

Pity the afflicted. Shield the joyous. And all for your love's sake.

Amen. That prayer, by the way, the compliment prayer, has been turned into a

chorus and is sung by choirs all over the world.

I didn't know this until Tish mentioned it, and I found there's a church in

Seattle where they have sung the Compline Prayer at the end of the day on Sunday services, 9.30 p.m.

Every Sunday since 1957, they've been praying this prayer.

This choir gets together at the end of the day in the sanctuary and prays this prayer.

Why in the world, if you come from an evangelical background like I did,

and we never would have called ourselves evangelicals, but that's what we were.

If you come from that background, you're taught that prayer is this,

whatever you have on your heart to say to God.

And no matter what you're going through, you're just supposed to talk to God

about it. Talk to God. Well, I'm hurting.

I'm scared. I'm lonely. I've been rejected. I've got cancer.

What am I supposed to do? Talk to God.

You know what happens? There are times when you don't know what to say to God.

You don't know. You try to express your faith. You try to find words.

And they say, well, that's what that scripture means when it says the Holy Spirit

will come and pray for you and groans that are too deep for words.

You're just supposed to do it yourself.

But what I've learned as I've gotten older is that the church has answers for

those times when you don't have words.

And Tish Harrison Warren talked about that, why she was in the midst of her

intense personal crisis, losing her baby, possibly bleeding to death.

And she says this, I needed this moment of crisis to find its place in something greater.

The prayers of the church, yes, but more the vast mystery of God.

I'm quoting from her book, Prayer in the Night, by the way.

The surety of God's power, the reassurance of God's goodness.

I had to decide again in that moment when I didn't know how things would turn

out with my baby dead and my body broken, broken, whether these things I preached

about God loving me and being for me were true, yet I was bone weary.

I was heartbroken. I could not conjure up spontaneous and ardent faith.

This resonated with me. And when I read this book, I said, I need to talk to her on my podcast.

I need to get this word out because this is exactly what I felt when I lost

my son. It's exactly what I felt when I was getting bombed almost to death in Iraq.

Exactly what I felt when I was holding the hands of dying nine soldiers that didn't have words.

Tish goes on, that night, the night when she was losing her baby,

I held to the reality of God's goodness and love by taking up the practices

of the church, specifically by taking up prayer, the liturgy of the hours.

Listen to this, friend. For most of church history,

Christians understood prayer not primarily as a means of self-expression or

an individual conversation with the divine,

but as an inherited way of approaching God, A way to wade into the ongoing stream

of the church's communion with Him.

In that moment in the hospital, I was not trying to, quote, express my faith,

to announce my wavering devotion to a room full of busy nurses,

nor was I trying to call down, in the words of Richard Dawkins,

my sky fairy to come save me.

Through prayer, I dared to believe that God was in the midst of my chaos and

pain, sustain whatever was to come.

I was reaching for a reality that was larger and more enduring than what I felt in the moment.

Every prayer I have ever prayed, from the most faithful to the least,

has been in part a confession uttered in the gospel of Mark.

I believe, help my unbelief, Mark 9 24. I wrote a whole book about that.

I've seen the interview, really, I covered that idea. How can I know and believe

and doubt all at the same time? That's the essence of it.

And prayer, in connection to the long stream of historical Christians praying

in desperation for what they're experiencing, can give you some words too.

And Tisch says finally, And as countless nights before, the church,

in the midst of my weakness, responded with her ancient voice, Here are some words.

Pray them. They are strong enough to hold you. These will help your unbelief.

There's one prayer in particular toward the end of Compline,

she says, that came to contain my longing, pain, and hope. And here's it is. Let's say it again.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this night and give

your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ.

Give rest to the weary. Bless the dying. Soothe the suffering.

Pity the afflicted. Shield the joyous. And all for your love's sake.

That's the compliment prayer.

Now listen, I'm going to bring this home. It's a short episode here.

Wildcard Wednesday. We're talking about this weird word, liminal.

Lemon, liminality. Why am I using this word? I want you to understand something.

When you've gone through trauma or tragedy or any sort of massive thing.

When you've gone through that, or you are going through that,

you've got this diagnosis, you've got this loss, you've got this rejection,

you've got this problem, this financial issue, whatever it is,

this death of a dream, you've been training for something your whole life and

it's not going to happen now.

When you've gone through that, you can be destroyed.

It can wreck your heart. It can wreck your faith. When you find out your son's

been stabbed to death, when your son's drowned, your husband has died of glioblastoma

and you're at the bedside, you just found out your mother committed suicide, side.

You just learned that your business is going to go under, right?

At that moment, what happens?

Are you alone? Do you have words? Do you believe there's a God out there,

a sky fairy who's going to come down and save all your problems?

Or do you feel that there's just something that you can sense that you're not

alone? Now, I'm going to tell you what happened with us.

People started showing up. We talked about it the other day.

Mitch dies. We're at the house. The next day, people start coming over, bringing food.

People just come and sit. My friend Zane comes and hugs us and says,

I'm just going to stay here, and you tell me if you need something, I'll take care of it.

I'm not going to bother you. He sat in the corner for days, kept coming back.

Somebody would say, oh, we're out of toilet paper. Zane would be like, I'm on it. I got it.

He just showed up, right? He showed up and showed up and hung out and was just

there ministering with his silence.

But what happened is, in the midst of that time, I just got this sense.

I don't know how to explain it. I could just sort of taste that God was with us.

In the midst of the time when I felt the most abandoned, In the midst of the

time when I felt the most alone, although Lisa and our family and everybody was there.

Remember, you suffer together, but you grieve alone, right?

That's one of my laws in the book I wrote down, the Warren's Law of Suffering.

In the midst of that, there were just these little moments where I could sort of taste something.

And it tasted like hope. And it was, I think, Psalm 34, 18, coming true.

Like, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted.

And it was just this sort of threshold of, you know what?

I've been saying my whole life that I believe there's a resurrection.

And if I believe that, then that means Mitch isn't dead. He's alive,

and he's with his creator, and he's actually, ironically, he's alive.

He's where he was created to be. And I could just sort of taste that.

And I wasn't sure it was real there. Just like when Lisa makes some amazing dish.

She's an incredible professional chef, by the way, personal chef for NBA Hall

of Famer and just tremendous.

My wife has so many facets, you can't even believe it.

Someday maybe I'll get her to come back on the show and we'll talk about the

many facets of Lisa Warren. But so she can cook something sometimes,

and I'll be like just kind of savoring it.

And you don't just wolf down a Lisa Warren meal. You savor it,

and then you enjoy it, and you commune with it.

And so I'm tasting it, savoring it, and I'll close my eyes, and I'll say, hmm, is that thyme?

Is that cumin?

Is that saffron? What is that? Like I'll just get a little sense of something,

and she'll smile, and she'll say, hmm, not going to tell you.

Sometimes she'll actually tell me. But it's that there's just enough that I

can know it's there, but it's not overwhelming, right?

Tata and I talked the other day about how God shows up, and He usually just,

He'll pass on by if we don't invite Him into the boat, right?

He's a gentleman. gentleman he doesn't come blowing into

your life and blow the doors open smash down the wall

and show up like the cool that kool-aid guy that used to crash into the room

on the commercials right God's much more subtle and the Holy Spirit is much

more of a gentleman than that and he just you could just sort of taste him in

the area around your pain it's just this liminal sense,

that he's waiting for you to say keep watch dear Lord because I'm hurting right now,

help me with this burden,

right? And at the same time, it's not just a taste that he's with us,

because he actually shows up. If you ask him to, he shows up and he's there.

And sometimes he looks like Zane.

And sometimes he looks like the guy, Rob Brooks, that would bring food over

and show up for weeks after Mitch died, months even, and ring the doorbell,

leave food, bottle of wine, and a steak that he'd made, and he would be at the

car before he even got to the door.

Never said a word, never never ask for anything, would just show up with a meal.

Sometimes Jesus looks like that, okay? Sometimes it's just you turn on.

This woman emailed the other day and said she was in her car on the way to the

ER where her daughter was dealing with a mental health crisis,

and she just randomly happened to turn on her phone and my podcast in an episode

that had come out months before.

She has no idea how she accidentally played that episode, But it was called

What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do.

And she wrote this email and said, that was a word from the Lord at the time

that I needed it, months after you recorded it.

So you didn't release it that day, but it just came into my heart and my ears at the right time.

That was the Lord, in her words, the Lord using my podcast to minister to her right then.

And that's an experience that we all, many of us have, where if you just show

up, sometimes the ministry of showing up, as my friend Drew Dick just wrote

a book about, just show up. We're going to have him back on the show soon.

Sometimes that ministry is God showing up through you for somebody else.

Okay I just want you today

to have this concept of this tension this

kavah this rope that we're holding on to that that

leads us to hope this tension between what we're dealing with now and we're

in it okay God doesn't call you to come out of your life and pretend like there's

nothing wrong and he doesn't call you to be consumed by your life as if that's

everything he calls you to To live in this place,

in this liminal state between the now and what's to come.

Between what you're dealing with, that he'll come into it with you.

He won't sort of beam you up, Scotty, out of it. He'll come down into it with you.

And that's the difference, by

the way, between Christianity and all other world religions. It's grace.

It's the fact that you don't have to make penance to the king and grovel to

him and do enough for him to get his attention. He comes down to you and gets

dirty and gets in the middle of your story and walks along with you.

That's the only religion in the world where that's the story.

And that's why it's the real story because he came down here and did it.

And he paid the price and he did it, and he'll come back into your story.

And if you're really careful, if you're really discerning, you can taste it

and you can sense it. You're at that place where you know you're not alone.

And that the power in how you can come through these events is in the ability

to just slow down just enough, put that little space in there,

do the thought biopsy, stop listening to the negative thinking,

and taste and see that the Lord is good.

And that that liminal state of being able to perceive that this thing isn't

going to be the end of you, that's, my friend, how you change your mind.

And that, my friend, is how you change your life.

And by the way, if it turns out, this is hilarious to me, there's an area of

the brain called the lemon, the lemon insula.

The insular cortex is this part of your brain deep in the Sylvian fissure,

kind of just inside your temporal lobe and connects all kinds of different areas of your brain.

And the little lip of the insula, the inlet, it almost looks like a port,

you know, a port in a sea to the city where you could find safe harbor.

The port of the insula is called the lumen.

And it connects over towards the inside to an area called the anterior perforated substance.

It's involved in olfactory or smell sensations, which are huge in connecting

memories and emotions and visual close to the optic bulb where your vision comes in.

And the insula connects to just about every structure in your brain,

then it's been implicated when it's dysfunctional in depression and schizophrenia

and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

When the insula isn't working properly, you don't work properly.

And isn't it interesting that the inside portion of that structure of your brain

that's so important for healthy mental state is called the lemon Because it's just the limit.

It's just the entry point into this area that's so important for you to make

sure it's healthy and functioning properly.

That's an aside, but I just thought it was interesting that this word that showed

up today actually also has a neuroanatomical correlate.

And so, friend, I just want you to pay attention to this, okay?

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work or watch or weep this night and give

your angels charge over those who sleep.

The prayer that has been prayed every Sunday night at the church in Seattle

that's been prayed for hundreds of years throughout the church,

those words will come alongside you.

Just add them to your playlist, your prehab for when the massive thing happens.

And learn to just slow down just enough to savor what's happening.

Life tastes bad sometimes.

It's hard, okay? But if you're careful and discerning, you'll perceive that

there's some stuff in there that's not all for loss.

There's some stuff in there that tastes like hope.

You can use a prayer, you can use scripture, you can use worship,

you can use neuroanatomy, whatever it takes to find that something is able to

contain your longing, your pain, and your hope, as Tish Warren said.

And I want to give you that today, just this concept of liminality.

It doesn't have to be overwhelming sometimes.

You might not see it in the handwriting on the wall, but there's hope.

There remains hope, my friend.

That's why I say Psalm 71, 14, every time I sign a copy of Hope is the First

Dose. As for me, I will always have hope.

That's why I sign my emails. Doom, Spiro, Spiro.

While I breathe, I hope. And you can too, my friend. You can taste it. It's right there.

That's liminality, my friend. And you, my friend, can't change your life until you change your mind.

Maybe it's time to taste and see that the Lord is good.

And the good news is you can 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 audiobooks.

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.