Your Brain and Hope, with Max Lucado (Theology Thursday)

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you for some self-brain surgery.

And it's Theology Thursday, and I'm going to bring you back a special treat.

Back in September, shortly after the launch of my new book, Hope is the First

Dose, I had the incredible privilege to sit down for an hour and have a long

talk with my old friend, Max Lucado.

And I'll give you the whole setup in a minute, but there's so many new listeners

here, and it's Theology Thursday.

And on Thursday, we tend to go a little deeper on the spirit side here on the podcast.

Now, if you want to go super deep on the spirit side and smash faith and scripture

together, the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast is doing that.

We've got some incredible things coming up for you on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.

But here, we take a little more science-first approach, and we smash faith and science together.

But on Thursdays, I like to wrap it all up and bring it home.

And today, we're going to have a talk with Max. I'm going to bring you back

from September because there's so many new listeners.

We had Tara Lee Cobble on the show

recently. We've got hundreds of her listeners hanging out with us now.

So grateful if you came to us from the Bible Recap or from hearing Tara Lee

or some of the other incredible guests we've had recently on the show.

Then I want to give you an opportunity to understand how hope and your brain

work together. How does your brain react to hope?

And when you're fighting through the traumas and the dramas and the tragedies

and the massive things of life, what do we do when we need hope?

And how do we use our brains and our minds to manufacture it when it seems to be in short supply?

That's what we're going to talk about with Max. It's a great talk with one of my favorite people.

Max is an incredible human being. In addition to being one of maybe the most

successful living Christian writer and maybe one of the most successful Christian writers of all time,

Max is the guy who understands how our spirit and our great physician work together

to remind us of truth and help us to use our minds to change our brains, to change our lives.

And without further ado, let's get into this talk with Max. And I'll be back

with a brand new Frontal Lobe Friday episode tomorrow in response to a listener

question that's really going to help you change your mind about something important.

How do you arrive at mastery of self-brain surgery?

And how do you avoid the sort of shame and guilt and doubt when it seems to

be really hard to get your mind under control and use it to help you and not

to hurt you? That's where we're going tomorrow in in front of a little Friday.

But for now, let's get after this talk with Max Lucado for Theology Thursday.

God bless you, friend. We'll talk to you soon. Good morning,

my friend. I hope you're doing well. I am Dr.

Lee Warren, and I am really excited to bring you this episode of the Dr. Lee Warren podcast.

We're going to do a little self-brain surgery with an old friend of mine.

Back on September 7th, I had an opportunity to sit down for an hour via Zoom with Max Lucado.

Of course, he needs no introduction. Max has sold literally hundreds of millions of books.

He's He's probably the most successful living Christian author, maybe of all time.

One of the most successful authors in the world at this current moment.

Um, Max has written, I think over 40 major books, plus a bunch of children's

books and Bible studies.

And he's just America's pastor, as he's been called by USA Today and other papers,

other newspapers he's prayed with and for presidents and world leaders.

He's just an incredible, incredible leader in the inspirational space and,

and has always been a personal friend of Lisa and Tata and I,

he was our pastor in San Antonio.

Antonio Dennis worked side-by-side with him at the Oak Hills Church for years

as the pastoral care minister there.

And Max has been really important to me in my faith walk, not only through his

writing, but through his friendship.

He's one of the people I call when something hurts in my life.

He's just been an incredible friend.

And with this book, he not only gave us an endorsement, but he also offered

to do this live one-hour event.

And we had it back on September 7th. It was hosted by the great people at Baker

Bookhouse in Michigan and Waterbrook, the publisher.

And we finally got the video. I told you I was going to be able to share that

video with you, and they finally sent it to me.

So I want to just strip the audio out of the video, and I want to give it to

you here in case you listen to podcasts somewhere in the world where you can't get the video.

We're going to have the video available for you soon on my website.

We're working on that and for some social media clips and all that.

But here's the full-length, uncut, hour-long conversation between me and Max,

hosted by Baker Bookhouse. You'll hear the Baker Bookhouse folks at the start of the episode.

And I just wanted to put it in a convenient place for you so you could hear this incredible hour.

I told you we're going to do a lot of neuroscience in Season 9.

In this conversation, we talk about your brain, how your brain processes trauma.

We talk a lot about faith and doubt and how hope springs up in the midst of all of that.

And so this is going to be a good place for you to have a resource to hear me,

the surgeon, talking to Max, the pastor, and two guys who have known a lot of

heartache and pain and how we find our faith in the midst of all those doubts.

So there's really 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 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.

Good evening from beautiful Grand Rapids, Michigan. Welcome. I'm Dr. Bart Denny.

I am the nonfiction, Bible, and academic book buyer here at Baker Bookhouse.

And on behalf of all of us here, thank you for joining us tonight for an evening of hope.

It's an honor to introduce to you our distinguished panelists.

Dr. Lee Warren and Max Lucado are here with us to discuss Lee's fabulous new

book, Hope is the First Dose.

Lee is a neurosurgeon and inventor and an Iraq war veteran who wrote about his

experiences in his excellent book,

Nowhere to Hide, A Brain Surgeon's Long Journey Home from the Iraq War.

And as a fellow Iraq war veteran and brother in Christ, Lee,

I just can't praise that book highly enough.

I read it some years ago and loved it. Can't praise it enough.

Lee plays the guitar, loves to make connections between faith,

science, and the realities of life.

And Max Lucado needs almost no introduction. Max is a pastor,

a speaker, a best-selling author whose books have sold over 145 million copies in 50 languages.

And in his writing, Max's passion for Jesus Christ and his love for people shines through.

Max has brought encouragement to countless thousands of people over the years, including yours truly.

And thank you for being here tonight, gentlemen. We surely do appreciate it. And again, Dr.

Lee Warren and Max Lepedo are talking about Dr. Warren's newest book, Hope is the First Dose.

And I know everyone here is looking forward as much as I am to this discussion.

But just a few notes of housekeeping.

We do hope that you'll interact with each other in the chat room and that you'll

encourage one another there.

However, Lee will not be taking questions from the chat room.

In fact, when you registered for this event on Eventbrite, there was an opportunity

for you to ask a question beforehand.

So after the book discussion, Lee will field as many of those pre-submitted

questions as our time allows.

And if you don't have your copy of Hope is the First Dose, you can find it on

our website at bakerbookhouse.com.

And for a limited time, a very limited time, just through this weekend,

we're offering this tremendous book for 30% off.

That is the best price I could find anywhere online. And we can only hold that for a few days.

But again, that's BrickerBookHouse.com and just search for Hope is the First Dose.

And, folks, before Lee and Max get started, would you mind joining me in a moment of prayer?

Our Father in heaven, Lord, we are truly grateful for this time together.

Lord, we look forward to what you have laid on Lee's heart.

We pray that this discussion might bring encouragement and hope for those who need it.

I pray that this discussion will help each of us to grow, Lord,

in our daily walks with you.

Most of all, Lord, I pray that this time together tonight serves to glorify

you, Lord, and ultimately to point others to the greatest source of hope,

Jesus Christ, our Savior, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Amen. And well, with that, Lee, I would love to hand it off to you and to Max.

And we look forward to, again, what the Lord's laid on your heart tonight.

Thank you, Bart. Bart, we're so grateful to have the folks at Baker and Waterbrook

supporting us tonight. Max, I'm so thankful for you, my friend. It's good to see you.

Good to see you, Lee. You look terrific. Been too long. You look great.

You do, too. It's been a long time, and hopefully we get to see you down in San Antonio soon.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm at the church office right now.

I know you're at home, and I had your book out this afternoon,

reading it for the second time.

I'm so honored. Oh, my goodness. So honored to be one of the people who endorsed that book.

But I got to tell you, I might need to get another one, because as I was walking

down the hallway, as often is the case at a church building,

I ran into somebody who had been in a counseling session.

And so we chatted and I said, how are you doing? And it's not going too well.

She's had a bit of trauma.

And I said, well, I've got just the book for you. I gave her mine I got to get

it back because I realized that was my signed copy I know where she lives I

can get it but it's a great,

it's a great book and I've been so happy to endorse it not just publicly but personally,

in urging people not only is it full of insights it's just beautifully written

just beautifully written so well done my friend Thank you, Danny.

Well, I want to just thank you for that, Max. You know, you and I have had a

few conversations over the years of the idea of me having two sort of two careers.

And you were so kind. You can't figure out what you want to do when you grow up, can you?

When I finally grow up, maybe I just got out of the operating room.

That's why I'm still wearing scrubs today.

I love it. And Bart mentioned that you're a guitar player.

I was going to pull that one out myself because I remember some of the best

conversations we had were back when you lived here in San Antonio and you played

on our in our praise band and we would have visits either before or after church or at rehearsal.

You're a you're a really good guitar player.

Thank you. I remember we did a song one night.

I played at the first Saturday night service that O'Kell's ever had played lead

guitar. And we actually sang one of my songs that night.

It's kind of a rock and roll kind of song.

And you came out and the first thing you said was, this ain't your grandma's church, people.

Yeah, we've never quite recovered from that, Lee. I don't think so.

Hey, Max, I want to tell you, you know, I think all of our children were baptized at Oak Hills Church.

And all of them, you know, as they've grown up. and it's been a long time since

you've seen them, but you knew Mitch.

I did. We're here tonight to talk about some of the things that we've learned

in our experience now over a decade of being bereaved parents,

which nobody ever wants to be.

But I just want to remind you and thank you that in the days after Mitch died,

I got a package, a FedEx package from you, and it was a copy of your book,

You'll Get Through This, before it was even published.

And that meant so much to me and Lisa.

And I've just reached out to you over the years as a pastor and a friend.

And so many times you've come alongside me when things were hurting and been

there with a text or a phone call.

And I just, I'm really grateful for you and Dean Lynn and the way that you knew

and loved Mitch, but the way that you've come alongside and pastored and befriended us over the years.

Well, it's my joy. It's my joy. I love you guys. I love Lisa, your wonderful wife.

She's a great, great friend and has a beautiful voice.

And of course, at the risk of taking up all our time, letting people listen

to how much you and I like each other, what people may not know is that your

father-in-law, Dennis,

was one of, when I came to this church in 1988,

we had three people on staff.

I think he was number five or six. Dennis could tell us.

And he was just right down the hall from me. He was the equivalent of an executive

pastor. He ran our business.

But then what we found is that, though he did a fine job running the business,

what really put the wind in his sails was when he would go visit someone in

the hospital, And he would come back just full of insights and encouragement and what to say.

And so it wasn't that long before he became our chaplain.

And I learned so much from your father-in-law.

So please, and your mother-in-law, Patty, who we cherish, who's in heaven.

But please give Dennis my love when you get the chance.

I will. He's listening right now, so I'm sure he heard you. And you spoke at

Patty's funeral. So we have had a long history together, Max,

and we're grateful for you. A lot of cross paths, a lot of cross paths.

And you've helped me, Lee. I don't know if you remember.

I wrote a book on anxiety, Anxious for Nothing.

And I was really trying to get my mind around all this medical terminology about the amygdala.

And I'd heard people say things and I didn't even know if I was pronouncing it correctly.

And I said, what am I doing hitting, beating my head against the wall?

Paul, I know a neurosurgeon.

So I don't know if you remember this, but I emailed you and you gave me a thorough explanation.

I probably owe you some royalties because, you know, you just helped me understand

that and the role that the amygdala plays in anxiety.

And so, yeah, you've been a go-to guy for me and I appreciate it.

I hope I don't ever have to come to you for brain surgery, but if I ever need it...

I got your number. I hope not, too. I'm pretty good at neurosurgery,

but I'm not that great at giving haircuts. So you'd be in a little trouble.

I appreciate that. Max, you know, I asked you if you would do this tonight because

I thought it would be helpful for folks to have a conversation between a pastor and a surgeon.

Both of us walk alongside of a lot of people who are hurting.

And, of course, a lot of times in my career, I have to be the guy to deliver

the bad news. And in your career, you're the first people somebody calls often

when something is happening and they're hurting.

And so I thought it'd be an interesting conversation to have about hope and

the difference between hope and faith and hope and optimism.

And I thought you might have some questions for me about the science side of all these things.

And then my world is kind of a dual path between being a bereaved father and

a surgeon who helps people in these hard times and a guy who's been trying to

figure out how to find the light again a few times in my life.

And so I just I couldn't think of anybody better to call than Max Lucado to

say, hey, what do you think about having this conversation?

So grateful that you're here. And why don't you just talk about some of that

stuff for a minute and then we'll chat about it.

Well, I'm very grateful.

No one can talk about massive trauma better than someone who has gone through it like you have.

And there is no more raw trauma than outliving your child.

Yeah. I just don't think there is. I think it's tragic when you bury your spouse.

I think it's heartbreaking to bury your parent.

But to lose a child it's just there are just no words there are simply no words

and even the word trauma seems weak but.

To try to articulate what I imagine you must have gone through.

Lee, I think you've done all of us a favor by exposing your heart,

letting us feel your pain with you as you not only inform.

Remind me, but inform most of

the passing of Mitch and how you had to process that and your unique ability

to process it and help us understand what in the world is happening in our brains brains, uh,

and how our mind, as you call the software of the, of the brain, uh, activates.

Neurons and syntaxes and that, that, that, that we're not just going crazy.

We're not just going crazy.

Um, so I think if, if I could ask you, if I could pretend I'm interviewing you,

I think my My first question to you would be, was there a moment,

was there an event in which you said,

I'm going to be able to breathe again?

You know, was there something? I've heard you talk about hearing the promises of God.

I know that you had a grandbaby born the same day you buried your son.

And so most of us know what the tunnel of trauma is.

We go in and we just think we'll never get out of it. But we do.

Was there a time in which you turned to Lisa or said to yourself,

you know, there's some there's some light in the sky again?

Yeah, you know, I think there's there's two things that stand out.

One is, as you mentioned, we had Scarlett, who was our first granddaughter.

And there was this kind of a dual complexity to the tragedy,

this massive thing that we talked about, because we were all planning on being

in San Antonio on that Friday when we had Mitch's funeral instead.

And our daughter, Katie, was

unable to come to be at her brother's funeral because Scarlett was coming.

And so there was all this complex stuff where there was things that were supposed

to be really happy that weren't happening and things that were supposed to be

unifying family event of having a funeral that parts of our family weren't able to be at.

So it was this big, complex, jumbled up mess. But I think.

The fact that that light of a new life and a new member of our family came into

the world on the same day that we were going through the hardest thing we'd

ever gone through gave us kind of a tangible reminder that there was still good out there.

You know, one of the things that happens to people in trauma sometimes is they

get into this lie, really, that your brain tells you that this is it. I'm done for now.

It's never going to be okay. It can never move forward from this.

But we had this little baby that had a whole life in front of her, holding her in our arms.

And there was still something new to live for. There was still some good out there.

And so I think that was one thing. It's just that God gave us that timing of

Scarlet was we knew that there was still purpose and meaning in our family.

We knew that all of us had things to live for and to look forward to.

And we just had this little person who reminded us of all of that.

So that was part of it. And I think another part of it was from a scientist's

side, you know, I had this constantly work in this kind of dual world between

the things we believe and the things we know.

I wrote a whole book about that in the past.

And we were in the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center a few weeks after

Mid-Staff when we first went back to our office.

And our office was in this place at the Auburn University campus where there

was a lot of research going on in the brain imaging of what happens when you

think about certain things.

And for the first time, Lisa and I were able to watch an experiment happen where

the researchers were asking people to think about certain things that made them

sad or think about things that made them happy.

And we could see it on the screen, what was happening inside these people's

brains when they changed the things that they thought about. Yeah.

The researcher would say, okay, think about the worst day you've ever had in

your life. And you could see what parts of the brain would activate and where

the blood flow was happening.

And then they would say, okay, now think about the best thing that's ever happened

in your whole life, the happiest memory that you have.

And the brain would come alive with all these different lights and blood flow was changing.

And Lisa tied that to the idea of what Paul was talking about in Philippians

4, which you wrote a whole book about.

And she said, these people change their brains by changing what they were thinking

about. And to me, it reminded me that God has given us all this hardware to

take command of the things that we think and feel.

And we can change it by deciding to obey him and believe his promises are real.

Because he says, I do have good things yet in store for you.

This is not the end for you.

And no matter what you're going through, there's a possibility of hope and a future for you.

That's what Jeremiah 29 is about. And so, you know, I think it satisfied that

science piece in me to actually see it with my own eyes that these people change

their minds and that's how they were able to change their life.

It's self brain surgery.

And that kind of that did something to me as the scientist. I had the I had

the dad part and the grandfather part.

And then I had the science part. And then my spirit just started coming alive

with the possibility that I could feel something like hope or happiness again. Yeah.

It's not easy, though, is it, Lee? It's not.

It takes sometimes it takes everything we've got just to defy despair, much less pursue hope.

Those shadows, they can they can come really, really quickly.

Can you talk for just a minute about the difference between fact and feeling

and how feelings cannot be trusted?

I think we've talked about this before, and so I'm hoping you're nodding your

head because, you know, I'm kind of luring you into it. I think it's a fascinating conversation.

Well, I think that if we zoom out from this conversation a little bit and just

look at our society right now, I mean, we're living in a society that tells

people that what you feel should be pursued and almost worshipped.

Like, if you feel it, you go get it, you know, take it.

And so we have a cultural part of that. But from the neuroscience side,

it's very clear the things you feel are not facts. They are chemical events in your brain.

So when you feel fear, for example, your brain can tell you that you ought to

be afraid, even if there's nothing that you really ought to be afraid about.

A good example of that is if you open a drawer in your house in San Antonio

and there's a rattlesnake in there, the brain is going to tell you to be afraid

because there's something really to be afraid of.

But that same set of chemical triggers, Max, happen if you hear a noise in the

middle of the night and your brain says, oh, there's a killer in my house that's going to murder me.

You feel the same thing that you felt when that rattlesnake was there because

the same chemicals trigger that event.

And it's a limited palette of neurotransmitters that make you feel the things that you feel.

But the truth is feelings aren't facts. They're just triggers that point us

towards something that may or may not be true.

And so understanding that is the first step to saying, yes, I feel this set of things,

but I can take command of my brain and I can tell my brain to take charge of

those feelings and I can turn those thoughts around and my brain will reliably,

your brain will reliably produce

different chemicals if you tell it different things to think about.

And so that's a critical piece of understanding the trauma response and understanding

grief and anxiety and all of these things is just to understand that just because

you feel it doesn't mean it's true and you can change how you feel by changing what you do.

There's something to the Apostle Paul's admonition then, isn't there?

Take every thought captive. Take every thought captive.

Like a man said, just because you have a thought, you don't have to think it. That's right.

That's a great quote, isn't it? Yeah, it's your quote.

I put that one in the book. That's all thought management.

Thought management. You know, and this is this is a bit of a new idea for many people.

And that is when you have these thoughts swirling around in your head,

take them captive and take them before, you know, the apostle says,

take every thought captive and present it before the throne room.

And so we take that thought and we present it before Jesus. And a practical

practice of this, Lee, that I've found is we talk to Jesus and we say,

Jesus, I'm having this thought of despair right now.

I've just buried somebody I love more than life, and I haven't seen sunshine.

And I feel like I'll never, I'll never, ever be happy again.

That's how I feel. But Lord Jesus, is that true? Is that true?

See, what we're in pursuit of is truth. Jesus said it's the truth that will set you free.

And so the truth is, according to the Bible, weeping may last for the night,

but joy comes with the morning.

So in a moment like that, equipped with a few statements of truth, you choose.

You say, OK, I don't feel like I'm ever going to be happy again.

Yeah, I don't. And can I quickly say, if that's you...

Be kind to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Cut yourself some slack.

But see if you can't give ear to the truth, because that's what truly will set you free.

It may take forever. It really may take a long time. Or it could be tomorrow.

You just don't know. But what you don't want to do, right, Lee,

is just cave in to that despair.

That's right. That's exactly right. Right. You know, we we teach this this thing.

It sounds silly, but we talk about this bad thought biopsy.

I think about when I when I take care of somebody, if you come to my office

and you tell me I've been having these headaches and I say, well,

let's go to the operating room and I'll open your head up and see if I can find

a tumor in there. You would say, hey, time out.

Don't you want to do this? I think I won't.

Yeah. You'd say, well, let's get some data before we take action on this thought. Right.

Because that might not be the right diagnosis and I might not apply the right

treatment if I don't get some facts first.

And so we teach this idea of biopsying those thoughts. That's what Paul's talking

about in biblical terms in 2 Corinthians 10 5 of taking every thought captive.

The thing about doing a biopsy is, though, is that once you grab that thought

and you just put a little space in between the feeling or the stimulus and the

response that you take, once you grab that thought and critically examine it,

then you can ask yourself three questions of it.

And the first question is, like you said, is this thought true?

And sometimes it is true. I mean, when you lose somebody, especially,

you say, I'm never going to feel anything other than sad about losing my son. That's true.

But the next thought might be, well, that means my life has no more purpose. And that's not true.

And so you take the first thought, and if it is true, then your second question

is, is that thought compassionate or is it at least unharmful to me?

And if it's not a compassionate or unharmful thought, then I need to direct what my next step is.

So you can have a true thought, but then you decide what to do with it and turn

it into something more helpful to you.

And the third thing can be, is this thought harmful to me? Is it untrue and harmful?

And if it is, then you need to replace it. You need to do some kind of radical

thought transplant and let God put something more hopeful and helpful in there for you.

So I've learned to sort of take command of that first thought because five to

one, we know from the neuroscience side that about five to one,

your thoughts are biased towards negativity.

And that's just that's true. That is amazing to me. I've heard you say that before.

Did I read that in the book, too? Yeah. Or did I read that in one of your interviews?

I think that's worth underlining. I wish we could pull out a highlighter and highlight our screen.

Five to one. Five to one. So only one out of every five thoughts I have are

really worth thinking, right?

Yeah, that's true in general terms. And the reason for it is God wired us to

protect us. So when you're a baby and you touch a hot stove the first time,

you make a very powerful synapse in your brain that says, that thing is going

to hurt me if I touch it again.

And so then for the rest of your life, when you see a stove,

you know not to touch it without having to think about it.

You see the hot curling iron, you know you ought not to touch it because it's going to burn you.

But the problem is that we have a lot of things that make us feel that same

set of chemical transmitters that feel like pain.

And so we'll say, wow, you know, somebody broke my heart one time,

so I can't get close to somebody because I'm going to feel that same thing if

I do, and it's going to hurt me again.

And so we have all these synapses that fire based on prior experiences that

aren't necessarily true in the current moment.

And that can be really harmful in the post-trauma, post-massive thing phase,

because you start feeling all these things that remind you of what you felt

when you lost that person.

Or when I went through the Iraq War, I had a lot of those triggers when I got

home, things that made me feel like I was getting mortared when I wasn't getting mortared.

And then if you get stuck in that feeling, then you can get stuck in rumination

or in shame or regret or all these what-ifs, and you can't move forward in your life.

How do you move forward? How do you take that memory and the false triggers

that subsequent events have, how do you rewire that?

I think the first thing is to be aware of what's happening in your brain.

There's some fascinating research that's been published recently.

Mary Frances O'Connor, who's going to be on my podcast pretty soon,

did some brain imaging research of these people that go through what we call complex grief.

Complex grief is about 10% of people that have gone through some major trauma

or major loss and they get stuck there and they just can't move forward.

They're stuck in rumination. They're stuck in guilt and thoughts of the past.

And the brain imaging has shown that there's an area of the brain called the

subgenuine anterior cingulate cortex.

We'll call it the cingulate. And that part of the brain is right in the middle,

and it's like a big switchyard, almost like a gear shift in your car, Max.

And it gets stuck in neutral sometimes when you've had major trauma.

And it's like taking the gear shift in your car and putting it in neutral.

And no matter how much you push on the gas pedal, that car is not going anywhere

because it's stuck in neutral.

And so the cingulate, if you can re-engage your cingulate gyrus,

then you're going to be able to say, OK, yes, I'm hurting.

Yes, I miss that person. Yes, I feel devastated. But I need to re-engage my

brain and let myself move forward.

And you do that by remembering that this isn't the first hard thing that you

or other people have been through.

And that other people have made it forward in their lives.

And you have too in the past. And so there's possibility of moving through that

hard thing because other people have done it.

And that's why I love the Lamentations so much. You know, the guy in Lamentations

is remembering all these horrible things that are going on and he decides to take action.

He says that I'm gonna move towards hope. I take hope, I grab hope.

Hope is a verb, it's an action word.

And I see it as that shifting the gear and making that cingulate gyrus do its

job again and getting me moving forward again.

So I think just knowing that parts of your brain are going to tend to be immobile

and stuck when you're going through hard things and then remembering that it

is possible to motivate them to move forward by thinking about different things.

And that also happens when you move your body physically.

So when you're feeling stuck and you're feeling depressed and you're feeling

like you can't do anything,

that's a good time to take a walk or make a phone call

or read your Bible or do something thing because your

brain can't really multitask it's just really good at switching

back and forth really fast and so when you do something

else you generate positive neurotransmitters and

you'll start building rewards around that and you'll start making

new synapses that'll help you switch and drive forward out of that hole you're

basically creating new thought habits right that's right we tend to have bad

habits when it comes to thinking uh

one of the things that i I see people struggling with a lot of spiraling.

You know, this is bad. Now this is bad. This is bad. Now this is bad.

And it's a habit. It's a thought process. So something bad happens.

And so you assume something else is going to happen. And that reminds you of something else.

And then you get ticked off at so-and-so. And then you wish we had a different president.

And then you think, you know, we're potty trained too early.

And it's a downward spiral.

So what you're talking about is developing a new way of thinking.

And I think what the Apostle Paul said, let your mind be transformed.

Is that correct? Am I? Yep. Romans 12. Yeah.

And so the Holy Spirit will help us have a new way of thinking.

You talked about lamentations. It made me think about the psalmist who said,

I lift up my eyes whence comes my hope.

And I think there's something physical there. You know, the psalmist could keep

focus down, but the psalmist says, no, I'm going to lift up my eyes from whence comes my hope, my help.

And it's almost like a victorious or fist clench or punch of the air.

My hope, my hope comes from the Lord.

And so it's a conscious choice. Joyce, I have a good friend.

He's a well-known, I won't say his name, I don't have permission to do so, but he lost a son.

And he said that for about...

I want to say 30 days, they kept praise music going in their house nonstop, 24 hours.

They just put a praise station on and let Christian music and praise music so

that it would always be sowing seeds of hope,

you know, to counterbalance the challenge of despair.

Despair and so what you're describing here lee

i think it's just powerful powerful well

i you know i think it's really important to say this

at this juncture in our conversation like if you're hearing us and you are dealing

with serious anxiety or serious depression and you really can't move forward

and you're trying don't forget that sometimes you need a doctor and sometimes

you need a therapist and sometimes you need medicine and there are times when

you need professional help. So don't, don't hear us.

Don't think that we're saying there's no role for that. I'm not saying that

at all, but there's a tremendous amount of positive movement that you can make

in your own life by these techniques and things that Max and I are talking about.

Tremendous amount of power in remembering that you've come through hard things before.

There's a tremendous amount of power in recounting God's promises and looking

for ways that they've turned out to be be true before, because they will turn out to be true again.

And I saw, you know, we had this, this day that Lisa and I came to,

to think about the fact that do we really believe that we get to see Michigan?

Do we really believe that? Because as Paul talked about, I can't,

can't think about where he said it right now, maybe first Corinthians 15,

where he says, if there's no resurrection, then we're above all people,

most to be pitied, right?

If we're living our our lives and it's not even true, then that's just pitiful, right?

So we had to come to believe that because for...

For me, I started thinking, gosh, if I don't get to see him again,

then what is life really?

I mean, is life really have a meaning and a purpose or is it just you live out

your days and it's all over?

Like I needed to believe that he was alive and I would get to see him again.

And that became this real thing for me. I understood why people feel that way.

And so I started saying, well, if that promise is true and I need it to be true,

then all these other promises have to be true, too, because the Bible says that

God can't lie and that every scripture is true.

And so then when he says that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted,

that needs to be true, too.

And all of a sudden I started seeing it. I would have the worst day ever and

you would send me a text or I would open up my mail and there was a book from

Max Licato in the mailbox or Lisa would walk in the room right at the worst

moment or one of our kids would call her.

God was just showing up and being kind to us in different ways.

And so then that day was a little bit better because he was kind and close to

the brokenhearted. Right.

And then when you feel all alone and I felt like nobody understands and maybe

even God doesn't care about me anymore, I would open up my Bible and I would

find the Lord longs to be gracious to you, Lee. He will rise to show you compassion.

He'll get up out of his chair, Max, to come and be nice to you when you're hurting.

And I would just start finding those words and they started coming true.

And over time, the light just started kind of coming on again and it got a little

bit brighter. And it's this kind of dual, I call it quantum physics thing,

because in the quantum physics world, more than one thing can be true at the

same time, which is hard to understand.

But the math is true that God can say something like, Jesus can say in John

16, 33, this world is going to give you trouble. You're going to have a hard time in this world.

And he can also say in John 10, 10, I came to give you an abundant life.

And both of those things can be true at the same time. And that's how we can

make it through because when it's all hard, you need to know that it's also

still good, that there's still good stuff out there.

When you think of hope and compare that with optimism,

biblical hope, as opposed to, I don't know, secular optimism or just the optimism.

Can you unpack those two concepts from your viewpoint?

I think so. So, you know, there's a lot of science around, there's a lot of

research around hope and the difference between hope and optimism.

And actually from a secular scientific point of view, some people say optimism

is better than hope, but I think that's not true. I think it turns out to not be true.

Optimism is this, and sort of secular hope and optimism, I kind of put those

together, is this idea of hoping for a particular thing to be true or to come

true or to come to pass, right? that if this happens, I'll be happier.

If that happens, I'll be okay. Or I'm going to make it as long as this set of circumstances occurs.

And that, and you can be a generally optimistic person and sort of be always

willing to say, Hey, it's going to be okay. Or that's going to work out for me.

And you can have all that, but it may or may not turn out to be realistic.

And then when, when you lose the thing that you thought you had to have in order

to be helpful, then if that's what you built your hope on, then you turn out

to be hopeless and hopelessness turns out to be the most dangerous thing anybody can have.

It's way more dangerous than cancer. Hopelessness is the deadliest disease that people can encounter.

But biblical hope, Max, isn't something, is not hope for something, it's hope in someone.

And so if Jesus really did pay for my sins and he really did die and he really

did overcome death and he rose up again, then that means I can believe that

he's going to do that for me, too.

And so I think that some people say, what's the difference between faith and hope?

And I think it's the easiest way for me to say it is faith is the belief that

God can do anything he says he can do.

And hope is the knowledge or the belief that he'll do those things for me.

And so will he do it for me? And I believe that he will.

And so Jesus lived this life and he did the things that he did and he overcame

death, hell and the grave.

And because of that, that's why I know Mitch is alive.

And that's why I know Patty's alive. And that's why I know I'll get to see him

again, because hope really is a hope in someone and the things that he's done for us.

And so I think that's the biggest difference is if your hope is based on something

that you could find out isn't true or that could be taken from you,

then you're really in a dangerous place.

You're in a very dangerous place if your life's happiness and meaning and purpose

depends on a circumstance that could change or a person that could die or an

amount of money that could become less because of inflation or something else.

If your hope is in something that cannot be taken from you, then it can really

be bulletproof. And that's what we learned after we lost Mitch,

that we dipped down for a while and we were doubtful and we were hurting.

But it turned out that the bottom of all those emotional holes held.

And the bottom was, he's really true and he's really real.

And I'll give you one more. You know, this is a long answer to your question,

but people say all kinds of weird things to you after you go through major trauma.

Maybe you lose somebody.

People say, the well-meaning Christians say, Romans 8, 28, at your son's funeral,

you know, God's going to work this out for good somehow. And most of the time

you want to punch them when they say things like that.

It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel right. So it's not a good thing to say

right after somebody dies.

But I'll tell you something that's weird, Max.

Over the 10 years since we lost Mitch, two different times I've gotten emails

from people who said, Hey, Dr.

Warren, I was going to kill myself today until I listened to your podcast or

until I read that email that you sent out.

And I feel a little hopeful and I'm not going to do that now.

And so because I started writing and podcasting and doing all these things out

of the pain of losing my son, a couple of people have lived that might've died.

And that's a good thing. So here we are back to quantum physics.

So it's never going to be good that Mitch died.

It's never going to be okay. It's never going to stop hurting.

But good has come out of us being faithful and moving forward towards those

promises and deciding that other people could be helped by learning some of

the things that we've learned along the way.

And that's why we do all these things. And so Romans 8, 28 turns out to be true,

that good things can come.

God can work good stuff out of any soil that your life is tilling if you'll

just hold in there and hang in there long enough.

It takes time and it takes years sometimes, but you'll start seeing that even

that hard one to swallow can turn out to be true.

Don't waste your sorrows, in other words.

That's right. So would you say then that a person who has gone through a trauma,

whether they wanted to or not,

has been enrolled in a particular school of suffering?

And some graduate with postgraduate degrees in the School of Suffering,

which qualifies you to do something that somebody is going to need.

You know, you and Lisa and your family can do what a thousand of us pastors cannot do.

You can sit next to somebody who has just bid farewell to a child they love more than life itself.

You can sit down on the couch next to them and say, I know how you feel. I know how you feel.

As a pastor, I might say, I can't imagine how you feel, or I try to imagine, but I've not been there.

But because of your particular struggle,

you can, and you can then with the same comfort God gave you,

you can begin extending that comfort to other people.

And what I'm hearing you say is that though you would give anything to not go through it.

But you're discovering some purpose in it and that God can use it.

And that that buoys you and helps you go through it. Am I hearing you correctly?

That's exactly right. I mean, that school of suffering. I remember this Isaiah 4810.

He says, see, I have refined you, not like silver is refined,

but I've refined you in the furnace of suffering.

And for me, I remember talking to God about that verse as I read it.

And I was like, I don't feel like you're refining me. I feel like you're cooking me.

I feel like I'm being burned up. And I came to this crossroads where I had to

say, okay, God is telling me that this fire can turn me into something better

than I was before. He can burn something out of me.

And I'm not saying he put me in the furnace for that purpose,

but I ended up there and he can turn it around and he can burn something into

my life that will be powerful and meaningful.

And I remember another surgeon came up to me shortly after Mitch died,

and he was not a friend. There's a guy that I knew who was another surgeon,

and he was one of these kind of, I don't really know what the word is, jock.

He was kind of one of these big kind of burly sports guys, you know, orthopedic surgeon.

And we never really had talked, and he walked right up to me,

Max, and he put his hands on my shoulders, and he braced me the first time he saw me.

And he said, Lee, I don't know what to say to you, but I know this.

I know your son wouldn't want his death to cause you to die too.

Said don't let it have a 200 mortality rate because

your son would want you to make something out of your life that would honor

him and he just walked off like that was the that was the most important thing

anybody said to me after mitch died is don't let his death kill you too and

i think that that comes into the context of this school of suffering idea in this that mitchell.

Would want his dad to tell a story with my life that honors him.

And so his life means something beyond that it just wiped me out.

And so in the context of my relationship with him, his life still has all kinds

of meaning and purpose because I'm using what I learned from him and from even

my experience of losing him to try to help somebody else find that context.

Viktor Frankl said that famous line that he said, that suffering stops feeling

like suffering when you give it purpose.

And that's what I think the School of Suffering is all about. Yeah, yeah.

I think we've talked about my father and my dad died of Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS.

We were serving in South America at the time. We were in Brazil.

And I had volunteered to my father when he was diagnosed with ALS.

I had volunteered not to move to South America.

And my dad wrote me a letter that I'll treasure to the end of my life.

And in one of the lines, he said, go, please, God, I have no fear of death or eternity.

Now, my dad wasn't a theologian. He was a mechanic. He made his living in the

oil fields of West Texas.

But he had landed on a faith that enabled him to weather that trauma.

It was horrible. I mean, it was two years of horror.

You know what ALS does to a body. And here's a robust mechanic in his early

60s who was hoping to pull a camper trailer around the U.S. in his retirement.

And all that was taken from him.

But he said, I have no fear of death or eternity.

And even that, though, wasn't quite enough for me. I think I was struggling

with it, Lee, more than my dad was.

But there was a moment some month or so after my dad died that I received a

letter from a friend of my father's.

I didn't know him well, but they worked together as mechanics.

And this friend wrote me and he said, I would visit your father every week.

Week, and he watched my father, you know, digress into a wheelchair,

into a bed, and onto a breathing machine.

He watched that digression, and he came to the funeral, and I remember meeting

him, but I didn't know him well.

But he said, I watched your father suffer with dignity, he never complained.

And I decided that what Christ did for him, Christ could do for me.

And I became a Christian at the funeral.

Now, Lee, it didn't surprise me that somebody would respond to my dad that way,

because daddy really did suffer with dignity.

But what I needed to hear, I needed to hear that my father's passing had an eternal impact,

eternal impact, not temporal, but literally changed a person's eternal mailing address.

Wow. And I just needed to say, okay, there was a significance in that.

God was using even that tragedy to reach someone's life.

And, of course, the ultimate expression of that is the death of Jesus on the cross.

Take a human being, place them at the foot of the cross on the day Christ died,

and they'll say, well, there's no purpose in this.

No meaning in this. This is horrible. Here's a man being butchered and slaughtered

and stripped and whipped and crucified. There's no good in this.

But man, here we are still talking, you know. Three days later,

Jesus vacated the grave, and we realized that he did it for us.

And the greatest display of love was in the most atrocious murder that the world has ever seen.

And so this is what you're talking about how something can be horrible.

Can I use the word beautiful? You know, horrible, but also we can find beauty in it. We don't dismiss.

We don't dismiss. We don't pretend. We don't suppress.

Just the opposite. We elevate the pain. We present it before God.

But then we say, Lord, help me to find the beauty in this and help me to find the meaning behind it.

Wow. I think it's exactly the right point.

And I think one nuance of that that we need to say for the people listening

who are hurting over something, Jesus rose from the dead after that beautiful, horrible, cruel thing.

And he came back with his wounds.

Okay. This is really important, friend.

All you listening, Jesus didn't come back with his wounds all healed up.

And the reason he didn't is because Thomas needed to see them. am.

Jesus said to Thomas, you want

to know who I am? You put your hand in my wound and you'll know who I am.

And that's what we have to do is live in this life with our wounds visible.

Because my friend, Jarrett Stevens, who's a pastor at Champion Forest Baptist

Church in Houston says, scars tell better stories than trophies do.

It's exactly right. People need to see your wounds. And thank you for sharing that incredible story.

You know, Max, we got, we had about 10 minutes left And there are two questions

that people wrote in, just hundreds of you wrote in beautiful questions.

There are two that I thought we needed a pastor's touch on.

And the first one is a woman named Tamara wrote in, Max, and said this.

How do you deal with the guilt of losing a child?

My son, Kenny, at age 20, passed away from suicide five years ago.

And I struggle with guilt and the things I should have daily.

Max, how do you, as a pastor, how do you address that? I had the parental guilt

of a child's suicide. That's just devastating.

I think, first of all, what was her name again? Tamara.

Tamara. Tamara, if you were right here with me in my office,

I would say, can you be kind to yourself?

Don't feel bad for feeling bad. Yeah. Okay. Just don't. Just don't.

Give yourself permission.

And don't put yourself on a clock. you say it's been five years you may have

placed an expectation on yourself that well after five years i should be over

this or somebody may have said that to you we all heal at a different pace,

and so be kind to yourself take a deep breath and um and then secondly um i

have um And I tell about J.J.

Jasper in one of my books, and he lost a child, and he had to call.

You had to do this too, Lee. He had to call the siblings.

The little fellow was killed in, I think it was a four-wheeler that flipped

over, a little youngster, single age. I can't remember the age, but he had.

So J.J. called the siblings, and he said, as he called them,

I think there were four of them. He said, I want you to think about all the good you know about God.

Before I give you this news. There's some wisdom in that.

So Tamara, think about the good you know about God. He still loves you. He still cares.

He's watching over you. He's going to get you through this.

Don't give up. So hang on to the good. And then lastly, I think what we've been

saying is really helpful here.

What's feeling and what's fact.

You know, you didn't make that happen.

You did not make that happen. And that's not a message from God when you have that thought.

So you need to please take that thought captive, present it before the throne

room of Christ to say, God, is this true?

Is this true? No, it's not true. It happened. It's horrible.

If you could do anything to have prevented it, you would have.

But you've got to move out of this feeling of guilt, got to be kind to yourself and begin responding,

break out of this cycle, this downward spiral, just kind of push out of it and

say, okay, dad, come it, dad, come it.

I'm not going to let that thought hold sway over me.

And the more you do it, the more you'll create that faith thought habit that

we've been talking about.

It's not going to come overnight, but it will come. It will come.

That's exactly right. I have nothing to add. That was a perfect answer.

We needed some pastoral wisdom on that. And Max, the other question is just equally devastating.

A woman named Sherry, my faith has been shaken.

My 10-year-old granddaughter, Jalen, passed away in May from glioblastoma, brain cancer.

Such a tragic loss for me and our family. Here's the question. How do we go on?

So again, if you were here in my office, I would not give you a quick answer.

I would want to hear more.

I would want to hear more about how this hurts, how it makes you feel.

And so based on that, we might go two or three different directions.

I quite likely would invite you to consider a couple of scriptures.

One of which is the words of the Apostle Paul, that this brief and momentary

struggle, It's not worth comparing with the glory that outweighs them all.

And that passage can come across a bit trite because I'm not saying that what

you feel is brief or momentary.

But I think what the Apostle Paul was saying there is in comparison to eternity

and the eternity that Lee will have with Mitch and you will have with your granddaughter. daughter.

Can we put eternal perspective here? I wanted more time with my dad. I sure did.

And everybody on this call, I imagine, has somebody that they would say got taken too soon.

I get that. And I hear that.

In comparison with eternity, I think my dad, who's probably Probably in that

great host of witnesses, Mitch and your granddaughter would say, you know what? I'm OK.

I'm OK. You stay faithful because it's brief and momentary. And boy, a vapor.

And we're going to be home with them and in the presence of Jesus.

I do not mean to downplay.

I would not get to that point in the conversation quickly, you know,

only if you allowed me that permission, because you got to grieve.

You got to grieve it out. But you can't grieve like those who have no hope.

Because we have that. That's right. Thank you so much, Max. And,

you know, a couple more things. We're almost out of time. I want to respect

your time. You've been so gracious.

Max has taken a night to night with us less than a week before his own book launch.

You've got a brand new book coming out, Max. And just tell us just a second about your new book.

I'm so excited about it. I don't have a copy yet, but I've already ordered it.

So tell us about your new book.

Well, I just happen to have a copy.

Now, I am excited about this. This is called God Never Gives Up on You.

And it's a conversation about one of the most fascinating people in Scripture, Jacob.

Jacob, you know, he was a scoundrel. I mean, the guy was a scoundrel.

He seemed to be running from God more than he was running toward God.

So if you've got it all together and you're always running toward God, this book's not for you.

But if you've got a few more downs than you do ups, you might learn something

and benefit from how God was faithful.

The hero in the Jacob story is not Jacob. The hero is God.

Amen. You know, it's amazing to me that you've been doing this for as long as you've been doing it.

I've written three books and it's like it's like people say it's like having

a baby. Maybe I can't say that I'm not a woman, but it's certainly a labor of

love and it's difficult.

And friends, I would encourage you, Hope is the First Dose has a bunch of stuff

in it that we didn't cover tonight that will be helpful to you if you're hurting.

Max's books always do that for me.

He's the one guy that I can say without question, I read everything you write

and it just means so much to me.

And Max, I just, it would mean the world if he would just leave us tonight with a word of prayer.

And I'm just so grateful for you and Dean Lynn and the work that you're doing

and the help that you've been to me in my life. And for your time tonight, thank you so much.

You really helped me to put some words on hope.

It's my honor. It's my honor. And thank you, Lee.

Not only does this book contain amazing wisdom, it's just beautifully written.

Just beautifully written.

I don't get why some people can be brilliant surgeons, great writers, and play the guitar.

Could you not just give me one of those?

Lord, we thank you for this time. We do. I thank you for Lee. I thank you for Lisa.

I thank you for Dennis. And I thank you for Patty and for all these dear ones.

We thank you for Mitch and pray just a blessing over his memory and continued

help and strength for the Warren family.

And all these who have been kind to lend in an hour of listening and thought, we pray for them.

We know that you hear everybody's concerns, and we pray for strength and faith.

Help us to be strong in these very, very difficult and dark days.

We pray for those who are lonely, who are depressed.

We pray that if anybody's considering suicide, that you'd urge them,

call them back, call them into hope.

And that, Heavenly Father, you would hear the prayers that are being offered.

We thank you for the empty tomb. We thank you for the promise of heaven in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Thank you so much, Max. And friends, all over the world,

I notice there's at least five countries represented here in the folks listening.

We're so grateful that you spend an hour of your time with us.

And remember that whatever you're going through, God has a plan and a purpose,

and you can give it meaning and purpose, it won't feel as much like suffering.

And there is a plan. There's always a plan. You can change your life by changing

your mind. And hope is the first dose.

So shameless plug for the book. And I'm so grateful that you spent some time

with me and Max tonight. Max, love you. Thank you so much, brother.

Love you too, Lee. See you soon. Yes, sir. God bless you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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.

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Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states

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Remember, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And the good news is you can start today.

Music.