Valentine's Day, Lent, and Particle Physics? (Wildcard Wednesday)

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I am so excited to be with you here today. It's Wild Card Wednesday,

and we're going to do a little self-brain surgery.

Today is a unique day because it's February 14th, which is Valentine's Day,

but it's also the start of Lent for 2024.

February 14th through March 28th is the Christian observance period of Lent.

This is the 40 days that Jesus spent fasting in the desert and enduring temptation by Satan.

And according to the Gospels and the Bible, this is when Jesus was preparing

for his public ministry and, of course, also leading up to Easter,

which is the day that the Christian world celebrates the resurrection,

the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of our Lord, which gives us hope that

we can look forward to a future where all this hard stuff is redeemed.

So here we have Valentine's Day, the holiday of love, smashing together with Lent.

I think it's a perfect time to talk about particle accelerators and super colliders, particle physics,

Valentine's Day, Lent, smashing together neuroscience and faith,

and our abide prayer and meditation practice.

We're going to jumble all those things up today. And you're like, Dr.

Warren, what in the world do particle physics have to do with Valentine's Day

and Lent and all of that stuff? Well, I'm going to tell you in just a minute,

my friend, but before we do any of that, I have one question for you.

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 to get after it? Hey, do you know what a particle accelerator is?

This is super nerdy, but in the world of physics,

and we're always talking about quantum physics on this show,

but in the world of physics,

somebody, basically starting way back with James Clerk

Maxwell when he discovered all the

laws of magnetism and electromagnetism and how magnets and

electric fields work together that ultimately led to the

inspiration for Einstein to create the equations around relativity that ultimately

figured out about how light and matter and time work together and how gravity

really works and kind of unlocked all the secrets of the universe as quantum

physics did throughout the 20th century.

All of that had to do with the understanding of what happens inside of atoms,

the small particles that make up the universe.

Well, somebody figured out that they could control electromagnetism in a way

that could speed up particles inside a controlled environment.

And they could smash particles together and blow them up, basically,

which would allow them then to break atoms into their component parts and begin

to study how atoms are constructed.

And all of that led to unexpected things like massive energy release,

which created not only weapons of mass destruction like atomic bombs,

but also the ability to create nuclear energy.

And on a much more practical level, particle accelerators have been used in

everyday things like basically cathode ray tubes that led to televisions and

computers and radiation oncology.

So when you get radiation for your breast cancer or your brain tumor,

that has to do with particle accelerators.

The linear accelerator is the guts of most radiation oncology applications.

And so this has some real-world practical applications in addition to the super

nerdy particle physics kind of stuff that they do out at the Hadron Collider and all over the place.

In physics laboratories around the world. So there's some good stuff that has

come out of it on a practical level, not just atom bombs and not just nerdy

equations on a chalkboard somewhere.

So particle accelerators are a real deal.

Well, I thought about that as I was trying to sleep last night,

believe it or not, because somebody wrote in an email, and I'm sorry,

whoever wrote this, if you hear this and you remember sending this to me,

please email me and let me know.

I'd love to to give you credit for this, but that email must have gotten spammed

or deleted or something.

But I read it a few days ago and I cannot find it.

But somebody wrote in and they were talking about how much they enjoy the podcast

and how much they've gotten out of it.

And she said a very interesting turn of phrase.

I'm always saying that we're going to smash neuroscience and faith together.

And she wrote it as, I love the collision of science and faith that you give us.

The the collision, how science and faith collide.

And that just opened my brain up. And while I was sleeping last night, I thought, that's it.

We are smashing neuroscience and science in general and faith together because

that is going to release all of the energy that God intended for us to have.

He wants us to use our brains to investigate, to understand,

to get to know Him, to pursue Him, to try to figure out the wondrous things

that He's done and how we use those for our lives to find hope because life gets hard, right?

We fall, we hurt ourselves, traumas and tragedies and massive things occur and

we get disappointed and we get overlooked and we can't figure out how to find

something that looks like happiness.

And we smash it together with faith. And God tells us, hey, understand as much

as you can about the universe and understand that I am here to connect with

your mind and your brain and help you have a healthier, better, happier life.

So science and faith colliding, I love it. That's a superconductor.

That's a super collider for your life that will unlock the elementary particles

of your faith. Okay, that's enough of that super nerdy stuff.

And I'm not going to tie you up. It's Valentine's Day. It's Lent.

And on Lent, John Swanson and his newsletter a couple of days ago,

and by the way, John Swanson has a new podcast. It's on Substack. It's great.

Go check it out. Go to Substack and type in J-O-N Swanson, John Swanson. Check out his podcast.

Really good, helpful stuff for hard times.

And John's, as always, great. great. But his newsletter a couple of days ago

said, he doesn't say to kids when he's training them, he doesn't say,

what do you want to be when you grow up?

Because there's lots of different ways they can figure that out as they get older.

But he says, the most important question is, how do you want to be when you grow up?

How do you want to be? What kind of person do you want to be?

That's what we need to be focusing on all the time and not ever let our pursuits

of any other goal, change who we are becoming.

We're not conforming to the world anymore.

We're transforming ourselves by the renewing of our minds. That's self-brain

surgery. That's Romans 12 too.

And so here at the start of Lent, as we're in our eight week digging in,

learning to abide in prayer and meditation and trying to change our brains and.

Change our lives, we're going to assess our situations honestly,

believe that God can help us do these operations and really make positive change.

We're going to pick up the knife and stop contemplating and start operating.

We're going to deepen the exposure and really get after it and try to perform

an operation to the best of our abilities

as self-brain surgeons under the guidance of the great physician.

Then we're going to expect a good outcome.

So if we do that and we know that learning to pray and meditate in such a way

is going to structurally change our brains so that our mind of Christ becomes

more like the brain of Christ,

representing our bodies as a living sacrifice to Him as our holy and acceptable

acceptable act of worship, as Romans 12 says,

right before the self-brain surgery passage of transforming your mind,

it says, present your body as a living sacrifice.

We're giving our brains and our minds to God.

And right here at the start of Lent is we're trying to figure out how we're

going to strip things away, to get closer to Him, to focus on Him,

to become more like Him, because that's how we develop this abundant life that

He said He came here to give us.

So we're going to do that. We're going to collide faith and science.

We're going to press in during Lent to focus on one idea.

I want you to think about that as you do your abide practice,

not what am I trying to get? What am I trying to do?

But how do I want to be?

Do I want to become a person who is truly resilient,

who has truly the ability to stand up under hard times, to reach a hand back

and help somebody else us along,

to pull on that rope of hope and that ruach and that kavah and all of that,

that idea that we're grabbing onto the hope rope and pulling ourselves out.

Kavah and yakal is a ruach. That's not the right word. That's breath of God.

Kavah and yakal are the two biblical words that show up over and over that are

translated as hope, and they really mean wait, which really means hold on to

the rope and don't let go.

How do we want to be? Do we want to be the people who can hold on no matter

what's happening? And so Valentine's Day, I have one neuroscience thought for you.

This was inspired as a therapist that I follow.

On Instagram, she calls herself the faith-filled therapist.

And she's a therapist in the UK who concentrates on neuroscience and we follow each other.

She had this great post today about oxytocin and cortisol.

So oxytocin, of course, is your love hormone.

It's the hormone that you get from holding hands and physical contact.

And it's also the hormone released when you're breastfeeding.

But it's a hormone that basically reduces stress.

It actively fights against cortisol. Cortisol reduces blood pressure.

It makes you feel better.

It gives you an anti-stress state. And cortisol is the primary stress hormone.

And when you're afraid, when you're anxious, when you're fearful,

cortisol is higher. It's released when you're stressed out.

It puts you on high alert, which perpetuates fear.

So check out what the faith-filled therapist, Jo Hargraves, check out how she

connected these dots. I've never heard anybody say it like this.

1 John 4.18 says, Perfect love casts out fear.

So she says this, Prolonged elevated levels of cortisol can have unpleasant

effects on mental health, contributing to anxiety, depression,

and an unnecessary activation of your fear response.

However, many scientific studies show that oxytocin, the love hormone,

can induce anti-stress-like effects, which include reducing cortisol levels

that are associated with fear.

Here's the connection she made. Scripture told us centuries ago,

1 John 4, 18, perfect love, think about oxytocin. casts out fear. Think about cortisol.

Isn't that something? Perfect love. The Bible has all these science tips that

nobody knew were science tips.

The Bible gives us practical advice that turns out to be consistent with science

when scientists finally catch up, right?

Perfect love, oxytocin, casts out fear, cortisol.

That's the physical carrying out of a biblical promise.

That's what what I love about smashing super colliding faith and science together,

friend. She gave us a breath prayer. The faith-filled therapist.

Follow her on Instagram.

The.faith.filled.therapist. The.faith.filled.therapist on Instagram.

Breath prayer. Inhale. God, I am perfectly loved by you.

Exhale. Your love casts out fear. This would be a great prayer to pray during

our abide practice when you're trying to to sort of approach Him and breathe

and imagine what He can do.

And then depend on Him and then experience Him. This abide practice could be,

you could use this breath prayer for Valentine's Day. God, I am perfectly loved by you.

Breathe out your love. Cast out fear. That's a perfect example of the super

collision of neuroscience and faith.

Perfect love casts out fear.

Okay, so we have Lent. How do you want to be?

We're pressing into the abide practice. We want to smash fear out with perfect

love. love that we're going to build up oxytocin and reduce cortisol.

That's a perfect target for Valentine's Day for you today, my friend.

We're going to do all this in the particle accelerator of faith and science smashing together.

And I'm going to give you Brandon Heath's perfect Valentine's Day song, Love Never Fails.

And I hope that you take these ideas and for the next 40 days of Lent,

as you practice in your abide practice, focus on God.

How do I want to be? how do you want me to be and help me become that person.

Help me make real change.

Help me really be able to make progress in getting over these traumas and tragedies

and reframing my expectations and reframing my experience of those things that

have happened so that I can see that yes, I've had these hard things happen,

but no, that doesn't define my whole life.

And I don't have to be afraid anymore because perfect love casts out fear and love never fails.

And my friend, man, you can change your life, but you have to change your mind first.

And the good news is on Valentine's Day at the start of Lent is that 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 audio books.

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.