When to Build the Boat (Wildcard Wednesday)

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

and it's time for some self-brain surgery.

It's Wild Card Wednesday, and on Wild Card Wednesday, I usually bring you back

something from the archive that'll be helpful for you.

And if you heard the episode on Monday, we had Tara Lee Cobble from the Bible

Recap, one of my favorite conversations ever.

We've had some good ones lately, Pete Gregg and Tara Lee Cobble,

just recorded with Jay Warner Wallace about his upcoming new book,

and you're going to love that. We've got Dr.

Ben Carson coming up on the show soon. Just some incredible conversations.

But when I was talking to Tara Lee, she said something about how it's important

to build the boat before it starts raining.

Her idea about preparing your heart with Scripture, with promises, with good things.

The stuff we call prehab here in the self-brain surgery community is the idea

that you're going to go through hard times in your life.

Jesus promised you that. John 16, 33, John 10, 10, over and over we hear the

biblical promise, not of health and wealth and prosperity and everything working

out the way we want it to in the short term, but that life is hard.

And we all know that from a quantum physics perspective. We know that life is

beautiful and hard at the same time, that two things can be true at the same

time, and that one of the secrets, as Pete Gregg said,

to living a life where you can actually find a purpose and meaning and happiness

and faith and hope anyway, is to be able to live in that sort of paradox between

the, we've already been redeemed and we're rescued and restored, but not quite yet.

And between it's abundant, but it's also hard, between in this world you will

have trouble, but have overcome the world, that paradox of constantly living

as if two things were true at the same time.

And we talk about prehab, which is remembering that hope comes from memory,

but also from movement, about changing your address, as Tara Lee called it,

about getting after it and going forward, as we say every day on this show.

And so when she said that, about building the boat before it starts raining,

I remembered an episode...

That we recorded way back in 2020, right after my book, I've Seen the End of You, came out.

And that book, of course, was kind of built around the theme of brain cancer,

malignant brain tumors, and what happens in people's lives when they,

face something that seems hopeless, and how I as a doctor and you as a person

who loves somebody can help them hold on to hope and find faith,

even when they're going through something hard.

And then by extension, how we can do that when we're going through something hard.

And then we, right at the end of the book, got into losing our son,

Mitch, and the way that that devastated us.

And the book kind of lands on, it is possible to find your feet again after

something hard happens.

But in my new book, Hope is the First Dose, we talk about the treatment plan,

about how important it is if you're not in the middle of that hard thing already

to build a sort of preparation in your heart of prehab, building the boat before it starts raining.

And that reminded me of this episode that I did way back in 2020 about an interview

that I had been on somebody else's podcast where he said that,

Hey, the time to build a boat is before it starts raining.

So I thought I'd give you that back today here on Wild Card Wednesday to just

kind of book in the Tara Lee Cobble episode and the great conversation that

we had with her and help you remember how important prehab is as a part of your

treatment plan to become healthier and feel better and be happier in spite of

the trauma and drama and tragedy and massive things that life will inevitably bring to us.

And so I'm going to give you this episode back without further ado.

So remember when we talk about it, when we play an old episode,

I might mention a link or something that might not still be active.

So forgive me if you hear me say something and you click on it and it's not there.

Sometimes old episodes have things like that, but I don't think there's anything

like that in this episode, but I just want you to get this idea,

this concept reinforced that Tara Lee talked about, that we talked about with

Prehab, Tara Lee talked about with building the boat.

In this episode, we talk about the time to build the boat is before it starts raining.

And so we're going to get into that right now. Hey friend, I'm so glad to have you with me here today.

We've been talking a lot about my new book lately since it just came out.

I've seen the interview, A Neurosurgeon's Look at Faith, Doubt,

and the Things We Think We Know has been on sale since January 7th everywhere.

And I've been doing lots of interviews and podcasts and book events all over

the place in support of the book. and I've been answering a lot of the same

questions over and over.

And I'm really glad because I think hearing someone talk about important things

like faith and doubt and hope and fear can really help us prepare for when we

encounter hard things in life.

But one interview I did this week was with Russell Foreman of the Harness the

Pain podcast out of Dallas, a great show, and Russell's a great guy,

and he asked me a question that no one had ever asked me before.

He said,

And that's when it hit me. A lot of us scramble to find answers when something

bad or hard happens in our lives.

We start trying to build the ark after the floodwaters are rising.

And God is faithful. We can do it. We can still survive, usually.

But it's best, it's wiser to start building the ark before the storm hits,

before the rain starts falling.

Before the storm hits, we need to prepare our lives for those hard times.

And, you know, I was thinking about that, and I realized that it's not even just about hard things,

because there's some times in your life when God calls you to some great opportunity,

or He puts a dream in your heart, He puts something in front of you that is

amazing, and you obviously need to take advantage of the calling.

But if you're not ready, if you haven't prepared yourself, then you might miss

out on something when that rain cloud of blessing falls and that door opens

for you that God has prepared, you might not be ready and you might miss out.

And so the idea of preparing ourselves for what's coming in the future,

whether it's hard things or good things, that's been kind of bouncing around

in my head ever since Russell said that to me.

And that's dawned on me that that's really why I'm here.

It's really what my podcast is all about. Today, we're going to go all the way

back to the roots of why I started writing and podcasting in the first place.

Look, it's the first part of February, the second month of the year,

and according to an article in Psychology Today, something like 80% of New Year's

resolutions fail by February 1st.

And that means that you or someone else listening to me right now have tried

and may be frustrated with how hard it is to start something new,

to turn over a new leaf, or quit something,

change something, do something that you felt in December you were really supposed

to do. Well, here's the good news, friend.

It's not too late. It takes courage to change your life.

Sometimes the inertia around staying where you are seems almost impossible to overcome. come.

And sometimes the comfort of sameness is so great that we'll choose to stay

in bad situations or even harmful

patterns because it seems safer than taking a leap into the unknown.

Even if we know in our hearts that God is calling us out of that sameness and

into something greater.

Well, today we're going to find that courage.

We're going to listen to God's voice calling us out of the wilderness of where

we've been stuck, overcome the inertia of sameness and step into to where we

know we're supposed to be.

We're going to reset the clocks and call a mulligan on the new year.

If you failed or already quit or given up on some idea that you had that you

felt you were really supposed to change, hey, it's early February and it's time to start over.

I haven't made the kind of progress on several big goals that I wanted to make

for 2020 yet, and I'm going to start over.

When things get hard, strong people get busy.

Let's pick up the hammer and start building that ark because the rain is coming, friend.

Something great is coming, and we need to be ready. Something hard is coming,

and we need to get our feet on more solid ground, even if we have to build a boat to get there.

We're going to look at three ideas

today. How to prepare ourselves to be resilient when the hard times hit.

How to reset the clocks and start over when we try something new and don't make

it the first or second or fiftieth time.

And how to listen to our hearts when we know God is calling us into what I call

our You Start Today moment.

We're going to overcome inertia, start building the boat, and get ready for

the life we know we're supposed to be living.

And we're going to start today.

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.

This week, we're going to talk about, like I said, how to get ready for hard

things when they come and how to get ready for good things when we have opportunities

that we weren't expecting or when we feel called to something new.

Okay, we're talking about when we need to start building boats in our lives

before the storm hits, before the great opportunity comes.

So we're ready to handle it, to be more resilient, to be able to deal with the

hard things that come or to take advantage of great opportunities that God may bring us.

And the first thing I want to look at is on the negative side of that thought process.

It's it's not often but once in a while people fuss at me a little bit about

talking about how we need to think about tough things coming and say well you

shouldn't focus on that you shouldn't think about the bad stuff that's occurring

well listen here's the here's the idea,

it's not negative to understand that life is hard in fact jesus said it he said

in this world world, you're going to have trouble.

So the idea is we know there's hard things out there, and we need to be ready

for them. We need to be able to handle them.

And if you don't think about it, if you walk around in this bubble of thinking

that the world's always going to give you roses and sunshine,

and then it doesn't, that's the whole point of my subtitle of my book about

the things we think we know.

Because sometimes we think we know this is going to happen, and that's going

to happen, and God's going to come through for us, and our kids are going to

do great and and be healthy and our spouse is always going to be faithful and all that stuff.

And then when that turns out not to be true, it really can be devastating.

So the idea of preparing yourself to get your feet on solid ground that can't

be taken from you, that can't be shattered when the storms of life hit,

that's not a negative thing. That's wisdom.

So I want you just to think about how wise it is to be ready to prepare your

heart, to start getting ready and preparing your heart for what may be coming.

Because all of us encounter illness, all of us encounter loss,

all of us encounter hard things, and we can't control whether we do.

We can't control when we do. We can only really control how we respond.

And one of the things that's wise to think about in terms of preparing your

life is the idea that there are certain things that we may be doing that we

are going to be forced to stop doing someday. day.

Now think about this. If you have a problem with how you spend your money,

if you're not wise with how you save and invest and spend your money,

then if a storm hits and let's say the markets collapse or you lose your job

or you get injured or you get sick and you can't work anymore,

if you've been living on next week's paycheck, you're going to have a problem.

You haven't prepared your financial house to withstand a storm.

Folks, that happens all the time where people are living above their means or

they're spending everything they make and they think everything's going to be

great and then boom, all of a sudden something happens.

Their industry changes, the market collapses, the housing crisis of 2008 and

2009 occur and your 401k is worth a third of what it was.

All of a sudden, you're in a financial storm because you haven't been prepared.

If you're spending more than you're making or if you're spending everything

you're making, There's going to come a time when you have to stop.

When you lose a job, when your expenses go up, there's going to come a crisis

moment and you're going to be made to stop living that way. And it's going to hurt.

So it would be wiser then to stop now, to start changing how you think about

money, to start investing, to start saving, to start spending less,

to start living a little bit within your means a little bit more diligently.

Intelligently, because that storm that comes won't affect you in the same way

if you've built that boat to be ready to withstand a storm like that.

If you're in a relationship that's inappropriate, listen to me right now.

My dad would say, look in my eyes. There's somebody listening to me that's been

flirting a little bit at work.

That's been sending a few text messages or instant messages with somebody that

you shouldn't be talking to because they're not your spouse or you're not their

spouse and somebody else is.

If you're doing that, it's going to come to an end at some point and it's going

to hurt and it's going to mess things up in your life.

And the day to fix it is now, before that storm hits.

You need to quit. So just hear your friend in Wyoming saying it right now.

Stop it. Cut that out. Be prepared for a storm.

And if If you can avoid the storm altogether, avoid it. Quit it today.

If you're drinking too much, if you're having too much alcohol or using some

substance or using some pain medication, that's going to create a storm in your life.

And if you're not ready for it, you're going to be made to quit with red lights

in your rearview mirror, with an accident in which somebody gets hurt,

God forbid somebody else that you hurt, with losing a job, with failing a drug test.

There's going to come a storm, and if you're using a substance or using alcohol

inappropriately, there's going to come a time when somebody makes you quit that.

So the time to fix it is before you have found yourself in a storm because of it.

Now, unfortunately, most of the storms, not all the storms in our lives,

are things that we can control and prevent.

There's just stuff that's going to happen, brain tumors and heart attacks and

people that let us down or people that die and break our hearts or we lose a

child or something horrible happens.

So you can't predict or prevent all the storms. But the ones that you can influence

or the ones that you can prepare yourself for, today is the day, my friend, to start.

Because something's going to make you one day

when the storm hits and it would be better to prepare

yourself voluntarily ahead of time

you'll handle the storm better if you make those decisions now now there's something

about changing a life pattern and doing it whatever it takes whether it's with

professional help or with spiritual help or with finding a friend or a mentor

a spouse to help you through it.

That getting through something like that proves something to yourself about who you are.

It proves something to yourself that you have it in you to do something hard.

And that in and of itself is a preparation for another storm.

So when you have a different kind of challenge later, one of the things I wrote

about in my newsletter this week is that when we have doubts.

We can speak truth to those doubts.

When you're in a situation and your heart and says, I'm not sure I can make

it through this, one of the most effective ways to deal with that is to communicate

to yourself, hey, I've never been in this thing before, but I've been in X,

Y, and Z hard things in the past, and I made it through all of those.

So changing something hard and fixing some aspect of your life.

That is potentially threatening to you will build something inside you that

gives you some resilience and gives you some courage so that you know you're

actually capable of making those difficult decisions.

You have to learn how to speak truth to doubt. Prove that to yourself.

Remind yourself of previous things that you've managed to improve and gotten

through before. And that'll help you build the boat.

On the positive side of this idea of building the boat before the rain starts

coming is sometimes God calls you to a new place, to a new thing.

He opens up a door for you, creates an opportunity for you. And you need to be ready.

There's a story in the Bible where Jesus tells a parable about bridesmaids,

and there's a whole bunch of brides waiting for a groom to show up,

and some of them have oil for their lamps, and some of them didn't think to

bring any oil for their lamps.

And the darkness comes, and the ones that don't have any oil say to the other

brides, hey, loan us some of your oil so when the bridegroom comes,

we'll be able to light our lamps and go out and join him.

And they say, we don't have enough for you. We brought enough just for ourselves.

So the ones that didn't have any had to rush out to the store.

You know, they got to make a midnight run to Target to try to buy oil for their lamps.

I don't really think they had Target. I'm just joking.

Just so you don't send me a letter and say I'm misinterpreting the parable. Sorry about that.

So let's, you know, these brides have to run out at night to try to find oil

because they didn't prepare.

And the bridegroom shows up while they're gone and they have the wedding and

they get left out. and they end up not getting to get married because they weren't prepared.

So the whole point of that, to tell you that story today, is this.

Sometimes you may not be able to see over a horizon where God may call you to

something new, but you can do things to be ready. Keep your resume up to date.

Make positive changes and keep your education up to date. Be reading and learning

and growing some aspect of your life. Keep yourself physically fit.

Keep yourself healthy. You know, sharpen yourself with other people and mentors

and mastermind groups and always keep your brain ready and have your eyes open

and looking for opportunities and pray for opportunities for things to get better for you.

And then when one opens and shows up, you'll be ready.

So that's the positive side of that. Learning how to be agile and able to capitalize

on opportunities that God brings to you is super important.

And it's the same idea of building that boat. Be ready. If the floodgates of

blessing open and you're not ready, you didn't prepare, you didn't have your

oil for your lamp, you might miss out on some great thing that God had in store for you.

Okay, let's transition a little bit. If you made a New Year's resolution this

year, if in December you sat down and said, I'm going to do X in 2020,

I'm going to lose this weight, I'm going to get in shape, I'm going to save

more money, I'm going to invest better, I'm going to stop drinking,

I'm going to do whatever it is.

If you made that resolution and it's February 4th and you've already messed up,

you've already let that go by the wayside, you've already basically created

an opportunity for you not to, you've already missed out on the opportunity,

I should say, to get to that goal.

You need a mulligan. You know what a mulligan is? So golfers have a thing where

you're supposed to count every stroke.

If you accidentally hit a ball two feet, you're supposed to count that as a stroke.

But when you're playing a friendly game of golf, your friend,

your partner, your player that you're playing with might say,

oh, that's okay. You can take a mulligan. I'll give you another shot.

And you can agree to let the other player have a shot that he didn't have to

count or she didn't have to put that on the scorecard.

You can start over basically, and it doesn't count against you. That's a mulligan.

I'm not sure where the term came from. I didn't take the time to look that up

before I started talking about this.

But a mulligan is an opportunity to put the ball back on the tee and take another shot at it.

So here's the good news. Even if your golf partner won't give you a mulligan, I will.

I'll give you as many mulligans as you need.

So if you need a mulligan for 2020, Lee Warren grants you a mulligan today.

Not that you need me to, but if you feel like you need somebody to tell you

it's okay to start over, to take another shot, you can have one courtesy of me.

Heaven knows Lisa gives me mulligans all the time.

She's the most patient, gracious woman, and she has to put up with a lot being married to me.

She gives me limitless chances to do over and try again and restart.

And you know what? That's because she's like God.

God is a God of grace and mercy. He's a God of never giving up on you.

He's a God of never quitting on you, and you can always have another chance with Him.

So the question is this. How do we actually reset those clocks?

How do we take that mulligan? How do we start over when we try Try something

new and don't make it that first or second or 50th or 100th time.

When we keep trying over and over, how do we do it?

Well, the first thing is, I've noticed a pattern in my life,

and I think it's ubiquitous among humans, that when we fail at something,

the enemy, you can think about it as the devil.

I believe it's the devil. He wants to make you basically fail and wants to remind

you of what a loser you are and wants you to sit down and give up because he

doesn't want you to achieve what God wants you to, what God has enabled you

to achieve with your life.

But also your brain chemistry is wired where

you have negative thoughts more powerfully than positive ones

so however you want to look at it you're going to

feel something akin to shame when you

fail at something and i just want to tell you if you want to successfully learn

how to reset the clock and put the ball back on the tee and take that mulligan

you need to remember that it's okay to start over there's a verse in isaiah

chapter 1 18 where chapter 1 verse 18 where god says it's It's almost like he's clapping his hand.

He says, hey, let's settle this.

He says, come now, let us settle the matter.

And he goes on to say, though your sins are as scarlet, I have washed them white as snow.

So he's talking basically about the idea that God says, hey, wipe it clean. I have.

So why would you carry around this problem that I'm not making you carry around?

Don't allow yourself to feel shame

because shame will keep you stuck shame will keep you

from putting the ball back on the tee shame will

keep you from starting over when you clearly need

to start over because the idea that if you fail in something by the end of january

that you can't start over until the following new years that's just false it's

silly to go 11 more months with the same behavior pattern when you knew in your

heart in december that you needed to change it just because you didn't get off

to a great start in January. Just start over now.

Pick up the ball, put it back on the tee, and start over.

Now, the second part is this. This is important. If you failed once already

this year or twice or a hundred times already this year with whatever it is,

fail differently next time.

Just be smart enough to study the problem.

Be honest with yourself about what factors led you to not being successful there. How did you miss?

How did you mess up? How did you goof up?

What happened that led you to not keeping that promise that you made to yourself

or to your spouse, or to God, or whoever in December, and fail differently next time.

You might still fall short, but make a vow to yourself that you're not going to fail in the same way.

It's the idea of not making the same mistake twice, right?

Just don't fail the same way next time. And it's like when Thomas Edison had been in the light bulb.

He failed hundreds of times, thousands of times.

And when they asked him about it later, they said, how did you keep on going

when you failed so many times?

And he said, I didn't fail. I just learned a lot of different ways that are

not effective for making light bulbs.

He learned from every opportunity. He learned from every chance,

everything he tried and didn't work, he learned.

And he never failed the same way twice. And that's what we have to do.

Now, before we go any further, here's this week's thing that will help.

This week's thing that will help is actually a Bible study that was pulled on

the publishing team from Waterbrook, pulled a Bible study out of my book,

I've Seen the End of You. And they put it together.

They asked me a bunch of questions about scriptures that were important to me

and ideas that I had around the book.

And they pulled this together and put it together on YouVersion,

which is a great Bible app, the Bible app that you can download for free,

and you can read the Bible and take notes and do Bible studies and all of that.

But there's a Bible study built around the ideas out of my book,

I've Seen the End of You. And it's a five-day long study.

You can do it by yourself, or you can do it with a bunch of friends online through email.

You can connect with other people and have a community, a small group,

or a group study built around the study.

And I think it will be very helpful along these lines of preparing ourselves

for hard times or how we get through hard times.

And you can get it for free at the website bit.ly slash warrenstudy.

Bit.ly slash warrenstudy.

I really think this will help you. Now, one question you might ask if you're

out there, if you're not a person who studies the Bible, you might say,

what's the value in doing Bible study?

Well, there's an idea, and I'm talking to believers right now,

but I think this would even help people who aren't believers because there's

enough language in there that I point you to some ideas from Scripture that

you could use even if you didn't believe in God that would still be helpful to you.

But in the Bible, in the book of John, in chapter 14, Jesus is talking to the

disciples, and He's talking about when He goes back to heaven.

He says, hey, I'm going to leave, but the Holy Spirit's going to come.

And when you're having trouble, I'm paraphrasing here, when you're having trouble,

the Holy Spirit is going to counsel you.

He's going to guide you and he's going to remind you of the things that I've

said. He's going to remind you of God's words.

And so here's the thought that makes it relevant to us.

When you're in trouble in your life, when you're having problems,

the Holy Spirit will remind you of Scripture.

He'll give you insight into things that God wants you to remember.

Remember, but He can't remind you of something that you haven't put in there.

He won't reveal to you Scripture that you haven't read before.

That's just a biblical fact that you're not going to get most of the time.

Now, God can speak to us in however He wants, but most of the time,

at least in my experience, He reminds me. He did exactly what He said in John 14.

I'll be in some kind of situation and this Scripture will just come to my mind.

And I won't even remember when I read it, but it'll be clear enough words that

I can Google it and there it will be.

And that's helpful in that moment where I'm trying to help a friend who's going

through some hard thing and boom, the thought will come into my head of a scripture

and a verse that was exactly right for that moment. That's what the Holy Spirit does.

So studying the Bible gives you an immense amount of weaponry in this battle

of life that we're fighting.

And if you do that, then you're, it's, it's exactly the same thing as picking

up the hammer and building a boat that will help you get through the storms of life.

Scripture and Bible study prepare you for hard things and opportunities to help

other people when they're going through hard things.

That is immensely valuable. And that, my friend, is this week's things that will help.

A Bible study, five days long, you can access for free at bit.ly slash warrenstudy.

I'll put the link in my show notes, bit.ly slash warrenstudy.

That is this week's thing that will help.

Okay, so here's the third thing. And I want us to square this away today.

And it's about how to listen to our hearts when we know God is calling us into

our moment, the moment that we call, you start today and what to do next.

If you read my newsletter, then you'll see that at the end of every letter,

almost every letter, I say, you start today.

At the end of every segment of my podcast, I say it, you start today.

And then I start the music, boom.

Why do I say that? Well, going back to 2014, in the months after we lost our son Mitch—.

I realized, and it became kind of a thing in our family to talk about,

that we don't know what tomorrow is going to hold.

You don't know how many more opportunities you have to take a picture of your

kid or a video of your spouse.

You don't know how many more days you have before you get that diagnosis that's

going to change everything. You don't know.

You just don't know because life is short. Life is hard. The poet said life

is brutish, nasty, and short, and it can be.

It's also beautiful and lovely. But you don't know how tomorrow's going to play

out. So you've got to fix stuff that needs fixing today.

You've got to do stuff that needs doing today.

And so I'm always saying, start today. There's always a moment where God calls

you to something, and it's time

to get it done. And you have to make a decision. Am I going to start now?

Am I going to put it off? Am I going to delay?

And if you delay and you wait, you might miss it.

Have you ever been sure that you were supposed to do a certain thing?

That you're supposed to quit something, you're supposed to start something,

you're supposed to propose to somebody or break off a relationship or say yes to something?

Have you ever felt absolutely convinced in your heart that your heart was almost

screaming at you to do something? Of course you have. We all have.

And I'm not talking about how we sometimes convince ourselves to buy something

by telling ourselves all the reasons we need it or how we work up the courage

to ask that girl out on a date.

I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about those moments in your life When

you absolutely clearly know that God is calling you to something,

you've been inspired, you feel a calling, you absolutely become convinced that

it's time to do the thing.

And when you get that, that's what I call a You Start Today moment.

It's when you know that if you don't do it, it's going to hurt you.

It's going to hamper your future. You're going to hose yourself in some way

if you don't take that opportunity. Okay?

I know hose wasn't the best word there, but I felt good about the alliteration.

Hosing is a thing that I say because that's what you feel like sometimes.

You mess yourself up. You hose yourself.

You get to a position where you don't take the shot when you had it,

and somebody else does, and you miss out on it.

And so those you start today moments are those moments in your life when you

just got to go, and if you don't go, it's going to hurt you.

They come at different times and in different contexts in our lives.

You know, girls, when you know he's the one, it scares you to death, right?

When you finally found the person you know you're supposed to spend the rest

of your life with, it scares you.

When you know you've got to write that novel. I'm talking to my friend Christy

in the South right now. It's time to write again, sister.

When you know it's time to write, you're afraid of your friends making fun of

you. Not that any of my friends ever made fun of me about writing.

Maybe a couple of the ones that read the novel I wrote that was terrible.

Just kidding. When you hear God telling you that it's time to quit that habit

that's killing your family, it's time to stop gambling, it's time to stop drinking,

it's time to put those pills away.

When your heart is calling you to make a move, to change jobs,

to accept an invitation that could change everything, I've got one of those

right now, actually, a speaking opportunity that scares me to death.

But if it actually plays out, I'm going to take it.

The thing about those You Start Today moments is the more important they are,

the more likely they are to be dramatically capable of changing the arc of your life.

And when that happens, the scarier they are and the more vigorously they will

be resisted. Never forget, friend, that you have an enemy.

The Bible says the enemy of your soul, the devil, he comes to steal and kill

and destroy the quality of your life.

He doesn't want you to be happy, doesn't want you to be effective,

doesn't want you to receive blessings, doesn't want you to influence other people positively.

Steven Pressfield, the writer, calls it the resistance.

He doesn't think about it spiritually, but he acknowledges that there's always

a resistance to great change and great creation and great art.

There's always something pulling you back.

It's inertia, it's friction, or sometimes it's just plain old laziness or complacency.

Sometimes it's a limiting story or a lie that you've taught yourself.

We've talked about limiting stories before, where these stories that we tell

ourselves, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm from too small of

a town, nobody ever listens to me, I can't do it, I'm not big enough.

Those are limiting stories, and they're lies, because you can do anything that God calls you to.

If He calls you to it, He will equip you for it. That's the truth.

But that moment, that thing is out there.

That resistance, that enemy is out there waiting to talk you out of,

trip you short of, or keep you from taking advantage of your you start today moment.

And usually, even after you do it or step into it and you're on the right path,

it seems like nothing magically happens.

There's almost always a moment where we say, wow, I did this thing and nothing's

happening. And you become discouraged.

And you wonder if you made the wrong decision. That's the enemy.

Me. That's the resistance.

Just this week, I received an email from a man who's trying to start something new.

He's been called and invited to teach a volunteer class to help young men who

are first-time fathers embrace the opportunity and become good dads.

It's important work. It's in a community situation where a lot of dads don't

step in and honor their commitments, and they disappear, and they leave the

women to raise these babies by themselves.

So he's got this opportunity to step in and equip young men to be present and

capable and successful fathers. That'll change generations.

And he wrote this beautiful sentence. He said, I was born to do this.

But then the next sentence he wrote about all the different reasons it's scary

and why he's not sure he can do it.

That happens. That's the resistance. When you're called to some great thing,

to some new opportunity, there will be resistance.

My writer friend says the same thing to me and Lisa all the time.

She'll email and say, I haven't heard from my agent in a couple of weeks.

I don't know if my book's going anywhere. And she'll doubt herself.

When you know it's your You Start Today moment, my friend, what will you do?

That's the question. When it's your YST moment, your heart knows it and you know it.

So don't let fear, don't let the enemy, don't let resistance or old lies or

limiting stories keep you stuck. Don't hurt your heart.

When it's your time, you can't wait for tomorrow.

Look, this has been a lot of different things that we've talked about today.

But the promise is it's going to start raining at some point in your life,

either a torrent of hard times or at some other time, an opportunity,

a deluge of blessing, an opportunity is going to come along for you,

that God is calling you to, something amazing, one of those such a time as this

moments like Esther had in the Bible.

And you don't want to be like those bridesmaids that didn't prepare and didn't

bring the oil and they got left out, they got hosed at the end.

They were right there at the precipice of the very thing they'd been called

to, but they didn't prepare themselves and they missed out. And it cost them everything.

Look, it's time to get ready for whatever storms of trouble or of triumph are coming in your life.

It's time to change your mind so you can change your life.

It's time to prepare ourselves to be resilient when the hard times hit.

It's time to reset the clocks, to re-tee the ball, to start over when we try

something new and don't make it the first time. It's time to listen to our hearts

when we know that God is calling us into our You Start Today moment.

It's time to summon the courage to take that next step. And it's time to build

the boat. And it's time 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 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.

Or if you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer,

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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.