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When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up, or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren- I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered where God is in all this mess. This is The Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, where we'll take a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier, feel better, and be happier so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us. You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers, but you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's gonna take some spiritual-brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, your host for Spiritual Brain Surgery.
Today, it's almost Christmas. I'm recording this on Sunday, the 22nd of December, 2024.
It's just a few days before Christmas.
And it's a time of year when there's a lot of stress, and there's a lot of busyness,
and there's a lot of craziness, and it's all about the joy, and the children,
and the gifts, and all of that stuff for many people.
I just want to acknowledge that there's also a lot of things for many of us
that are hard about the holidays.
And so if you're one of those people that has been through something hard this year or in years prior,
and if holidays are hard for you, if there's an empty seat at the table,
or if you're recovering from some sort of trauma or tragedy or massive thing,
or if it's difficult for you to reconcile the life that you're living with the
one that you feel like you're supposed to be living,
then I just want to acknowledge that and I want to remind you of a
few things today as we change our minds about Christmas
so that if it's hard for you maybe you can
see it in a different way maybe you can even understand that it's designed for
something a little different than we might think so we're going to talk about
Christmas and do a little spiritual brain surgery that is a kind of a gift you
can give for yourself today as we get into Christmas we will have a new Tuesdays
with Tata episode as well.
So we'll give you a little extra Christmas bonus episode here for spiritual brain surgery.
But I just want to talk to you for a few minutes today about what it means when
we say we wish you a Merry Christmas.
This will be our 12th Christmas since our son Mitch died.
And every Christmas, of course, is different. And each year that goes by,
it's a little bit less obvious, a little bit less top of mind,
but there's always something missing.
Every time we get close to these times of years, the birthdays,
the holidays, all those things, the anniversaries of the day,
they're hard, but they also get the change over time. And recently on the Dr.
Lee Warren podcast, we talked about an operation, a self-brain surgery operation
that you can learn called the loss to legacy shift.
Loss to legacy shift. If you go back and hear that episode, and I'll link it
in the show notes, then it's a way to understand how you can turn over time
the traumas and tragedies and dramas and massive things, the hard stuff that we go through.
How you can find a way to live with that stuff that happens.
Without letting it become the defining thing of your life or without letting
it destroy you, but also hold it close and not move on from it,
but how to carry on with your life.
And the way to do that is to find a way to give it purpose, to find a way to
take the things that have been hard and give them some sort of purpose so that
they're not just senseless tragedy, so that it's not just this random act of
horror that came into your life,
a random act of devastation or loss or limitation or whatever.
And so you find a way to give it purpose. Viktor Frankl, the concentration camp
survivor, psychiatrist who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, and I always half-heartedly
hate to quote Frankl because it's so cliches. Everybody quotes Frankl.
But the reason everybody quotes Frankl is because he put the pen on the paper
and wrote down what we all feel when we're searching for how to process our
suffering and the way to process it without being destroyed by it is to give it meaning.
So Man's Search for Meaning is the exact perfect title for that book.
But I ran across a quote from him the other day that I had never heard before.
And he said, if you want to light up the world, you have to be set on fire first.
Something to that effect. If you want to illuminate the world, you must be burning.
And it's a great reminder that if you think about it, if you really critically
examine your life, all the great stories you've heard, whether they were works
of fiction or movies or books or real life stories that you've seen,
all the things that were inspiring and moving to you that gave you the most hope,
that inspired you, that brought a smile to your face, even as they drew a tear,
All the great stories involve someone who went through some type of devastating
event, some type of real crushing scenario, some great peril, some major struggle.
All the great stories involve a person triumphing over tragedy in some way,
don't they? Think about that for a minute.
If you want to light up the world, you have to be set on fire.
Now, I'm saying this to you as a form of encouragement because I want you to be encouraged.
That there is a path to finding that meaning and purpose and substance and meat
and yes, even joy and happiness and all those things again, after you've been
through some kind of massive thing, there is a path to that.
Whether it's this is your first Christmas after the thing or whether the thing
is actively going on in your life or whether it's been 30 years and you're still
stuck, there is a path forward.
And so today I want to just, I want to share some personal stuff with you and
I want to give you the reason why that path is there as just a way to understand
that when we say have yourself a merry little Christmas,
that it's not just a cliche, it's not just a little thing to say,
but that there's actually a reason why you should strive to have a merry Christmas
even if you're suffering.
And I'm going to tell you why right after I tell you about the sponsor for this
episode of Spiritual Brain Surgery.
This episode is brought to you by Timeline.
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When mitophagy fails, mitochondria lose efficiency and they can't do their job.
So we have a power failure in our bodies.
The compound that's key to keeping mitophagy happening normally is called urolithin A.
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Christmas of 2013 approached in a very dark way for us.
Lisa and I were living in Auburn, Alabama at the time, and our only child that
was still in our home was Kaylin, who was a junior in high school at the time.
And Kaylin was spending that Christmas with her mom, who lived in a nearby town.
And it was a dark Christmas because we, Josh and Katie, our other two kids were in San Antonio.
We just had our first grandchild. Scarlett was born on the day that we buried our son.
And I told that whole story, by the way, and I've seen the end of you and in more detail.
And Hope is the First Dose.
My two books, if you want to learn more about my story or if you want to see
a way to be encouraged in the midst of all your hardships and difficulties and
find a way forward that can lead to happiness and even healing,
those two books will tell you the story.
I've seen the interviews kind of descriptive of what we went through.
And Hope is the First Dose is prescriptive. It's a treatment plan for trauma
and recovering from trauma and tragedy and other massive things.
So check those books out if you want. Be a good gift to give somebody for Christmas
or a good thing to give yourself if you're trying to find a way to heal.
But Christmas of 2013 was approaching. It was dark.
And Lisa and I decided to drive over to Atlanta, which was about 100 miles from
our house in Auburn, and do some Christmas shopping and spend a few days just
getting out of our environment because it was, to be honest with you,
it was hard to be home after we lost Mitch.
It was hard to be in the house and see his room and see his clothes.
I used to go down to his closet and smell what he smelled like on his clothes
that were hanging in the closet.
And I remember very distinctly the day that I couldn't smell him on the clothes
anymore because he'd been gone long enough that the smell faded.
And it was heartbreaking. I don't know if you've been through anything like
that or not, but it was devastating when I couldn't smell them anymore.
It was just hard to be home. So we were in Atlanta and we were going to have
dinner at a nice restaurant. So Lisa wanted to get her hair done.
So she was getting a blowout at this place. I think it was dry bar somewhere in Atlanta.
And I was sitting in the parking lot in the car, listening to the radio, just waiting for her.
And I remember this, like it was yesterday. It's very distinct.
James Taylor's song with Yo-Yo Ma, his version of the old Beatles song,
Here Comes the Sun, came on.
I'll never forget this. The song came on, here comes the sun,
here comes the sun, and I say, it's all right.
Little darling, it's been a long, cold, lonely winter.
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been, here comes the sun,
and I say, it's all right. Little darling, the smiles returning to their faces.
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been. Here comes the sun and I say, it's all right.
Little darling, I feel the ice is slowly melting. Little darling,
it seems like years since it's been clear.
Here comes the sun and I say, it's all right.
And I heard that last verse, it seems like years since it's been clear.
For some reason, I heard it in my head and in my ears as, it seems like years since you were here.
And I remember I broke out in tears and I said, no, the ice is not melting.
No, the smiles are not returning to our faces.
It's not been years, it's just been weeks. And I don't understand and I don't
know that the sun is going to come.
I remember like saying that I was weeping. And then the next song that came
on was a version of the old Angela Lansbury song, We Need a Little Christmas,
which if you know that song, it's super upbeat and haul out the holly and all that.
It's really upbeat and peppy. But for some reason, Leanne Rimes did a version
of that song, and it's incredibly melancholy.
We Need a Little Christmas right this very minute. and it's just melancholy and dark, almost dark.
And I was sitting there weeping and just weeping and weeping.
And Lisa came and she got in the car and says, what's wrong?
And I told her the whole story and she was crying too. It was just one of those times.
And I'll tell you that ever since that happened, I can't hear any version of
we need a little Christmas or any version of here comes the sun without thinking of that moment.
I can feel what it felt like to sit in that car and hear those songs and think
about my son and be looking into the face of the first Christmas without him
and not be in agreement that the son is going to come back. It didn't feel possible.
And I didn't feel like I was going to have myself a merry little Christmas.
So if you resonate with that, I got some news for you today, friend.
This is just a little Christmas message for you here. And I'm now approaching
my 12th Christmas without Mitch.
And I'll just tell you, the son is back.
It does come back. The sun does rise again.
And if you're stuck in the darkest night, you don't have to do any work for
the sun to come back. You just have to live long enough for it to dawn.
So if you're in that early moment of grief and it doesn't feel possible yet
for you to work it out somehow where you're going to be able to put your life
back together, you just have to know that if you can just hold on, the sun's going to rise.
The Bible says it. Nobody can stop the sun from rising.
Nobody can stop the day from dawning. And God's mercies are new every morning.
So if you can just hang on, it's coming, I promise.
It might not feel like it right now. But here's some good news for you.
I read a book and I've had him on the podcast. Randy Alcorn wrote a book called Happiness.
And Randy was on the podcast a while back and we had, in fact,
he's been on a couple of times, but the first time was to talk about his book, Happiness.
And that book really inspired the thinking that led me to be able to articulate
what I wrote about in Hope is the First Dose.
And Randy was gracious enough to endorse that book. And I was so grateful.
But Randy's book, Happiness, changed my mind. And I'm talking about fundamentally
changed my thinking about what God wants for us in our life.
And it starts with when I saw the power of the and in John 10,
10, Jesus said, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy.
But we can say and, but I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.
Notice what Jesus says. He doesn't say, I'm going to come and keep the enemy
from stealing and killing and destroy.
I'm going to come and defeat him, and he won't defeat your life anymore.
That's not what he says, and it's not what he does. Now, obviously, the rescue's underway.
Okay, if you're a Christian, you believe in the hope of the resurrection.
You believe that there's another day coming when our bodies are going to be
restored, and our relationships are going to be repaired, and we're going to
see those people that are already ahead of us, and everything's going to be
right, and our tears are going to be dried up.
We believe all that. But right now, in this life, Jesus said.
I am coming here so that even though the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy,
I'm here that you might have life and have it abundantly.
And I saw that always before as an either or, friend, but it's a but and.
It's yes, you're going to have things stolen from you. Yes, you're going to be killed.
Yes, your life in different ways is going to be destroyed by the enemy who doesn't
want you to have abundance. but I came that you might have life and have it abundantly. Okay?
I was raised in a tradition where Christians weren't encouraged to be happy, really.
It was not about happiness. It's about obedience. It's about how much can you
do to try to earn your way to heaven.
And if you happen to be of a pleasing, cheerful disposition,
that's great. We were supposed to put a smile on and pretend like we didn't have any problems.
But really, it wasn't about being happy. It was about being in heaven.
So you had to be careful how you lived and make sure you repent of everything.
You're constantly working out your salvation in a way that's,
I'm saved. I'm lost. I'm saved. I'm lost. Am I okay? Am I going to heaven? Am I going to hell?
Just this oppressive, stressful, non-abundant type of Christianity that I was raised in.
And so I had this in my head when Jesus said, John 16, 33, in this world,
you will have trouble. I would say, yep, amen.
And he would say, but take heart, I've overcome the world. And I would hear
that as, okay, someday when I die, I get to go to heaven and that's overcoming.
Someday he's going to blow the trumpet and he's going to come back and that's
overcoming. But right now it's really awful.
And I went through a divorce. And I went through PTSD after the Iraq war. And I had nightmares.
And I saw all those horrible things. I was living in that place of either or.
And I didn't yet know that Jesus said, but and. He said, the thief comes.
But I came also. You can have both. That's the big breakthrough.
So it started for me when I read Randy Alcorn's book, Happiness.
And here's, I'm going to read you from Randy Alcorn's book as a gift for you
to help you change your mind about Christmas and about your life in your post-massive thing TMT world.
Here's what Randy said. The angel's message to the shepherds at the birth of
Jesus condenses the gospel to its core.
He said, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people, Luke 2.10.
The gospel isn't for some people, it's for all people.
The Greek adjective translated great here is megos.
This isn't just news, but good news of mega joy.
It's the best news there ever has been or ever will be.
What characterizes this good news is a deep, everlasting joy for any who will receive it.
The contemporary English version renders the verse this way,
good news for you, which will make everyone happy.
Though the English Standard Version uses happiness and its derivatives only
13 times, it joins the New American Standard Bible and several other translations
in using the word in Isaiah 52, 7,
how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news,
who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness.
This important messianic proclamation begins with, thus says the Lord,
Isaiah 52, 3, meaning that God himself is directly responsible for each word.
All scripture is inspired, so all the words are ultimately from God,
but it seems that the Holy Spirit typically worked through the vocabulary and
speech patterns of the human rider, see 2 Peter 1.21.
Here in Isaiah, God tells us directly that our mission is bringing everyone
the good news of happiness.
Paul clearly refers to Isaiah 52-7 in Romans 10-15 as he references the gospel,
demonstrating that this good news of happiness is in fact nothing else but the
gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ.
This means the Bible tells us explicitly that the gospel is very much about happiness.
Let me tell you, in the Beatitudes, when Jesus over and over said,
blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers,
blessed, that word blessed is translated incorrectly.
The actual word is makarios in the Greek.
Makarios is the same word from which we get English words like macarena and
macaroni. These words that refer to happiness, it translates literally to happiness.
Jesus is telling us directly and explicitly that he came here on this earth
and lived his life so that we could be happy in spite of the steal and kill and destroy.
In spite of, in this world, you will have trouble.
So the translators were afraid of telling people that they could be concerned
about happiness, and they had to spiritualize it, so they came up with this word blessed.
But everywhere in the Old Testament where that word shows up,
in the Hebrew, it's asher, and it literally means happy.
And in the Greek, it's makarios, and it literally means happy.
Jesus, my friend, is telling you that in spite of your massive thing,
in spite of the trauma and the tragedy and all that stuff that you're going to go through.
Because remember Pete Gregg said, God doesn't airlift us up out of our troubles.
He parachutes down and walks through them with us. He fights the fight with us.
The rescue's underway, but we're not delivered until the horn blows at the end or when he comes back.
But in the midst of that, he's part of the rescue with us.
Hebrews 9.22 says, Without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness.
The promise was that somebody had to die for our sins.
Somebody had to die in order for justice to be served and for us to have the
opportunity for grace to save us.
And God's mercy and his gentle and lowly spirit, He wanted to save us,
but we sinned, and there was a cost to that sin, and the cost was Jesus' life.
But here's the punchline, okay?
That sacrifice that was required to satisfy God's justice to pay for our sins
could have been carried out by Jesus in any number of ways.
He could have just given himself up and died.
He could have been sacrificed as a sinless baby. He could have lived 12 years
and been sacrificed as a perfect child.
He didn't have to live 33 years on this earth. He didn't have to go through
all that he went through. He didn't have to be betrayed.
He didn't have to be abused and beaten and put on the cross.
He didn't have to be betrayed by his disciples.
He didn't have to do all that. God could have satisfied that in a number of different ways.
He could have sacrificed Jesus without him having to come here and do the things that he did.
Could have been some sort of spiritual transaction between him and the enemy
to satisfy that justice.
Why did he come? He told us in John 10.10, I came that you might have life.
And have it abundantly. This is a both-and transaction.
And so here's the deal, my friend. As we get into Christmas,
as you get into this time when there's an empty seat, or there's a reminder
of what you've been through, or there's a memory that it used to be a certain
way, and then life happened, and trauma happened, and your body's changed,
and you've been through this, or you've been through that, or you're dealing with this,
that there's still a both-and available to you.
Quantum physics describes a situation where two things can be true at the same time.
An electron can literally be in two places at the same time.
It can be a wave and a particle at the same time. And what separates it,
what collapses it into one reality and not the other, is your attention and
your perspective and the way you attend to it.
The power of how you put your mind and look at something, the perspective with
which you look at something, The quantum Zeno effect and attention density and
Hebb's law and all that stuff is what turns a possibility into a reality.
It's what turns a thought into a thing. And that's how you can learn to see
the both and that is true, that Jesus told us. And it's hard to see sometimes.
Paul said it in a number of different ways in the New Testament.
We see through a mirror dimly. Now we see in part, but then we'll know in whole.
Now we see a part of the story. We don't see reality as it really is. We will someday.
But this is one of those times when Jesus pulled the veil back a little bit.
And he said, hey, you can have both.
You don't have to live in this place where everything is stolen and killed and
destroyed and you're defined by your traumas and you're crushed and burned up
in the furnace of suffering.
You can be refined in the furnace of suffering, God told Isaiah.
You can be changed. You can be transformed. You can change your mind.
You can shift your chair from patient to doctor. That's my entire mission with self-brain surgery.
Is this idea that how we look at things is what turns those things into one
thing and not another thing.
And you can be in the same room with two different people and they can encounter
the exact same thing and one of them can see it as a negative thing and one
of them can see a possibility or a hope or a promise in it. And you've been through that too.
You can decide that something means that you're devastated forever or something
is a challenge, an opportunity, a door, a possibility. The Bible says,
I will turn the valley of trouble into a door of hope for you.
But you can't see the door of hope if your eyes are fixed on the valley of trouble, friend.
So I'm just telling you, if this is your first Christmas, it's not time for
you to do that work yet, okay?
All you need to know is that the dawn's going to come again.
If you can just hold on to that hope, if you can believe that there is a day
coming when it's going to start to feel a little bit lighter, when little darling,
the smile is returning to your faces, little darling, it seems like years since
he's been here, but here comes the sun, okay?
Here comes the sun, and you might not be ready yet to say it's all right.
You might not think you need a little Christmas, but friend,
you do. You need a little Christmas.
And there's possibility and power and hope.
And even if you're set on fire by this thing you've been through,
I can tell you that this loss to legacy shift is the self-brain surgery operation
that you need to let that setting on fire be the thing that allows you to illuminate
the world in the way that only you can because of what you've been through.
And that Romans 8.28 promise that's so offensive when you first hear it,
when you're hurting and somebody says God uses everything for good,
or God will work this out for good, you want to punch somebody in the mouth
when they say that to you, when you're really hurting, okay?
But it turns out to be true. It's the reason I'm here talking into this microphone
at three o'clock in the morning, four days before Christmas.
It's the reason that I podcast and write books and write my newsletter,
which you should subscribe to, by the way, drleewarren.substack.com.
The reason is because two things can be true at the same time.
The reason is that I realized, like so many others have done before me,
that to tell a good story with your life, you've got to go through great adversity
and you've got to find resilience and peace and hope and promise and power and
possibility and all that stuff.
And it's there because of both and.
It's there because of John 10.10.
It's there because the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy.
But He came that we might have life and have it abundantly.
Listen, friend, I'm grateful for you. We're praying for you.
If you're suffering this Christmas,
we're so sorry and we're hurting with you, but here comes the sun.
It's coming. You don't have to do any work to make the sun dawn today in your
world and in your life and in your heart.
It's coming. I feel the ice is slowly melting.
It seems like years since it's been clear, but guess what, friend?
Here comes the son and I say it's
all right listen you can't change your life until you change
your mind and one way you can change your mind is to accept the
both and of what Jesus said in John 10 10
to recognize that Jesus came here so that you could be happy that makarios doesn't
mean some sort of spiritualized blessed state and you just knuckle down and
hold on till he comes back it means you can be happy and it's going to look
different than you thought it was Trisha Zody wrote this incredible book,
she's going to be on the podcast soon,
called Another Beautiful Life After Her Husband Committed Suicide.
And she put together, with God's grace, another beautiful life.
It was different than the one she had. She didn't want it.
You don't have to want it, but you are living it now in the post-TMT world,
and you got to get after it.
And the way to do that is to change your mind so you can change your life.
Now, we've got some incredible things coming on the podcast.
We've got Ian McGilchrist, who wrote two of the best books on perspective and
mind shift and what the right and left half of our brains do.
They're not for the faint of heart. The short one, which is called The Master
and His Emissary, is 1,200 pages long.
And the long one, which is called The Matter With Things, is like 3,000 or 4,000 pages.
Ridiculously long, two-volume books. You can't read the whole thing unless you're
really interested in neuroscience. It's hard, but the writing is brilliant.
But Ian McGilchrist is the reason I'm able to articulate and understand how
we bring perspective and attention and how that changes our reality.
And his work is instrumental in the work that I did to write the Self-Brain Surgery Handbook.
And it looks like we're going to be able to get Ian McGilchrist on the podcast.
I'm not sure when, but it's coming, Lord willing, in the near future.
So we have some incredible things coming up. I just want to encourage you.
But today, I wanted to tell you that if you feel like you're burning up,
recognize that process is allowing somebody else to see a little bit of light
and find a little bit of hope because of what you're going through.
And that means that you're taking your loss and you're turning it into a legacy.
And it's not just a senseless tragedy anymore because it means something and
it's making a difference.
And if you just keep getting up every day and getting back in the fight and
remembering that the light's coming again, Then I say to you on this Christmas of 2024, my friend,
little darling, it's been a long, cold, lonely winter, but here comes the sun.
And the good news is, my friend, you can start today.