Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren back with some more spiritual brain surgery for you.
The number one, by far, number one downloaded episode of the Dr.
Lee Warren podcast in 2024 was the episode I did with Ann Voskamp.
Now, the good news is Ann is coming back to the show in about two weeks because
she has a brand new book coming out that's called Loved to Life that drops on February 11th.
So we're going to have another conversation with Ann Voskamp.
But I wanted to put that episode over here on spiritual brain surgery just in
case you missed it because I want to make sure that you get the full impact
of that episode to prepare you for the conversation we're going to have over
on my other podcast the Dr.
Lee Warren podcast soon so if you haven't heard this or even if you have this
is a moving and powerful episode we get deep in the neuroscience of faith and
it's just an incredible conversation I think it will help you now remember we
played this episode already so we talk here in a few minutes about giving away
some free copies of Ann's books There are no free copies left.
They've already been given away, so please don't write in for a free copy.
We will have some copies of her upcoming book available on the next episode, so stay tuned for that.
Without further ado, I want to give you a chance to understand what you believe,
why you believe it, and how to defend it and share it with others.
That's the mission statement of the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast,
and we're going to get some of that done with Anne Voskamp right now.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you for this week's episode
of Self Brain Surgery. I'm so grateful and honored to be sharing this time with
you, and I pray that this episode will be helpful.
We have an incredible special guest with us today.
Anne Voskamp is a farmer's wife from Canada.
She is the mother of seven children and the author of four New York Times bestsellers.
The first time Lisa and I ever heard of Anne was when someone gave us a copy
of her book, One Thousand Gifts, shortly after our son Mitch died.
And that book was very helpful to us in processing what we were going through.
She had another book called The Broken Way, The Greatest Gift,
Unwrapping the Greatest Gift and 1,000 Gifts have all been New York Times bestsellers.
She's got numerous other books and Bible studies.
1,000 Gifts was on the New York Times bestseller list for 67 consecutive weeks.
It has sold more than 1.5 million copies and has been translated into 20 languages.
That's an incredible success and it just illustrates that book was so helpful
to people who are hurting.
She's been named by Christianity Today as one of the 50 women that most shape
our culture in the church today.
She's a partner with Compassion International as a global advocate for needy
children, and she is a regular loser of library books, she says.
She's constantly reading and learning, and her work has been very helpful to
me and Lisa and millions of other people.
I've been incredibly honored to have my books featured on her blog a couple
of times, and I think Anne probably has sold more of my books for me than I
have. Her audience has really embraced our work.
And we've got probably thousands of people who listen and read my work because of seeing.
My work on her blog. And so if you're one of those folks, we are grateful that
Ann connected us and that you're here because of her.
And today we get to talk to her. We had a great talk.
We actually talked for a little over an hour. The conversation went deep into
neuroscience. We talked about scripture and prayer and how science and faith smash together.
And you're going to eat this up. You're going to nerd out with us as we talk
about limbic system and how the hippocampus is designed and all the different
ways that scripture and faith and science interact with one another.
Ann and I had a great conversation. I think it's going to be very helpful.
Ann has two new books out. They're both prayer journals.
One is called Gifts and Gratitudes, A Year of 1000 Gifts.
The other one is called Sacred Prayer, 90 Days of Deeper Intimacy with God.
That's the one we're going to talk about mostly today.
The sacred prayer model that Ann gives us, I think, is incredibly useful.
And we'll work you through a strategy of how you can go deeper in prayer.
This episode takes some surprising twists. It's emotional. It's powerful.
It's deep. and I think it'll help you. And without further ado,
let me introduce you to my friend and your new friend, Anne Voskamp.
Friend, I'm so excited to be with you. This is a long-awaited conversation we're
having today with the incredible New York Times bestselling writer and one of
my favorite people, Anne Voskamp, is with us on the show today. Welcome, Anne.
Well, the joy is all mine, Dr. Warren. You have ministered to so many for so
long, so it is a privilege and a delight and a gift from the Lord to get to
actually cross paths with you, sir.
Thank you so much. We've never met in the flesh, but this is actually,
this is our first time speaking.
We've exchanged some voicemails, but it's our first time to actually have a conversation.
Your words, Dr. Warren, your books have long deeply ministered to me.
And your work in your ministry online has ministered to me day after day.
So just from the bottom of my heart. Thank you so much, Anne.
I appreciate that. Hey, we're going to talk today about a new book that you've got, Sacred Prayer.
So before we talk about prayer, we ought to start with prayer.
So would you mind praying for us, Sam?
Abba Father, we come before your throne, and we thank you, Lord,
that even the unspoken broken, that we don't know how to put words around,
not only do you know every detail of it, but you are Emmanuel,
the God who is with us and comes, sits with us, and witnesses us.
We thank you that you are the God who does not abandon us, but comes alongside us.
You are El Roy, the God who sees, and the God who stays with us.
So, Lord, we just bring our whole selves to you this morning,
and we ask you, Lord, that you as the wounded healer would touch those places
of unspoken broken that we don't know how to put words around,
and that encountering you, Lord,
and your healing presence will be strengthened and edified as we move forward,
leaning on you every step of the way because you are the way.
We pray all of these things in the name of Jesus, only one who has ever loved
us to death and back to the realest life.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen. Wow, thank you so much. I'd love to now, I thought, oh,
this morning this is getting ready.
I thought, oh, I have a million questions for Dr. Warren about how he manages all the details.
And it's like, how do you keep all of the, like seriously between writing,
between sharing and ministering online
and podcasting and then being any doctor
with a practice who's like a surgeon operating
on brains how do you manage all of that it all
came together for me and when i realized that writing and all those other things
were part of the practice i just had to expand my idea that i'm treating people
in areas that hurt them with everything And that united everything.
So now it all feels like part of the same mission. Wow.
So I'm learning how to tell better stories when I'm practicing and I'm learning
how to minister to my patients better when I'm writing and all that stuff just
works together. That's it.
That's really profound, actually.
Thank you. I'm supposed to be interviewing you. No, I know, I know.
I have a million questions for Dr. Warren, but I don't know if it's supposed
to go the other way, but I don't know if it's going to be a question for you.
How did you come to that epiphany?
I don't know. I think maybe we should talk about it when we get going.
The turnaround for me was when I was, the work that led to, I've seen the interview,
that second book of mine, when I realized a big part of my job was to help people
have hope when I knew they were dying.
Right? And so then it was, if I can't fix you with surgery, how can I still help to heal you?
And that insight is when I realized my job isn't primarily surgeon.
It's help you figure out what's really hurting and what to do about it.
And that doesn't always mean you're going to live as long as you wanted to,
but you can still be alive as long as you're living. So that was it for me.
That is very profound. I know that our listeners, most of them have probably
read some of your work. They certainly heard me talk about your work.
Give us just a little 30,000-foot view of Ambos Camp and your walk and your story a little bit.
Oh, thank you, Dr. Warren. I was raised in a non-Christian home,
and as I write about in 1,000 Gifts, my very first vivid memory is being four
years old and standing on a chair at the kitchen sink beside my mom on washing dishes.
Actually, this time of year, it was November 2nd, actually.
And looking out the big farm window, kitchen window, and seeing my 18-month-old
baby sister toddle after a stray cat in our farmyard in a service truck.
Came into her farm yard with propane for the corn dryers and didn't see her.
And she was crushed and killed in front of my mom and I.
So as a little girl seeing something so traumatic and horrific,
I grew up with a lot of fears.
And as a little girl, the time I was seven, I was diagnosed with ulcers and was in the hospital.
And then as a teenager, I started cutting, trying to release all this pain that
I didn't know how to process or articulate.
And then by the time I was in university, I was diagnosed with agoraphobia and panic attacks.
So I lived in a world of high vigilance all of the time. Right.
To try to avoid the next trauma that could happen at any moment.
Like I felt like I was walking a minefield all the time.
I had come to saving faith through a goodness Bible club when I was 13.
You can cerebrally know God, and that knowing of God, that love of God,
has not actually migrated down into your bones at all.
That you can relax into Him, that you can take the perfect love of Christ,
and it drives out all fear.
It kicks fear to the curb. that hadn't really happened in my life till someone
also in November, more than 12 years ago now, dared me to write down a hundred things that I loved.
And kind of girl, if you're going to dare me to do a hundred,
I'm going to do a thousand.
And I realized that as I grabbed a pen and a scrap piece of paper and just started
jotting down things that I loved, I realized, oh, what I'm actually doing here,
is I'm counting all the ways that God loves me.
And that began my migration from a universe of fear to living in a universe of love.
And that God's grace was more than sufficient. God's grace was always coming to meet me.
And when you start to count all the ways that God loves you,
you start to realize that you can always count on God.
He is Jehovah Jireh, the God that provided for you in the past is going to be
the God who continues to provide for you in the future.
So that really was my journey into, wait, I don't have to live in fear.
I don't have to live with a tight grip control on my life that I could begin to relax.
Into that universe of love where I could trust that God is always good and I am always loved. Amen.
Wow. Now that's that journey from brokenness and fear into this life that you
now have where you're ministering to people with that.
That's what God does, isn't it? He leads us out of our brokenness,
but then puts us in front of people who are broken in the same way so we can minister to them?
I think we have deep empathy and a deep resonance with people who are going
through really difficult experiences where they feel ultimately what Jesus says
on the cross, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Ultimately, that is the cry of every human heart.
We feel a sense of aloneness and a sense of forsakenness and abandonment.
It's our worst fear. We are born to be attached to God and to the family of
God, to know that we belong.
And our deepest fear is that we are alone in our sorrow, in our heartache, in our brokenness.
And I think it's C.S. Lewis who says that we read to know that we're not alone.
And I hope that when you pick up a Dr. Warren book or Dan Voskamp book,
you're reading pages to go, oh, wait, I'm not alone in this story.
This is someone who also has gone through deep valleys and has come to the realization
that every valley is but the valley of his cupped hands, that God is actually
holding us in this moment.
He is giving us withness and witness.
And so how do we take our wounds and our brokenness and say,
here, this is me vulnerably and honestly before the wounded healer.
I want to have an encounter with you, an experience of you, God,
so that you touch these winds.
And I am healed and comforted by you so that I, too, can go out into the world
and offer your healing comfort to others.
Wow, that's exactly right. Which is what I think you do every single day, Mark DeWarn.
Thank you. That's a conversational way of relating to him, which really is prayer,
right? I think we have this, I was raised in a very transactional kind of faith.
Prayer was confession and checklists and then shopping lists. What can you do for me?
Or here's what I need for me. Can you break that down? Because I think that
so much of our faith is actually transactional as opposed to a transformational
encounter and experience with God.
And I think that the understanding of, if we can understand what does transactional
faith look like, that really informs our understanding and our context and the nuance of prayer.
So can you really unpack what, so people understand, oh, maybe my faith does
look more transactional than I realized it did.
I think it naturally either springs from or leads to, or maybe it's circular.
Springs from or leads to legalism, really, which is this idea that if I do the
right stuff, then I'm justified in asking him to do stuff for me.
Or if I don't do certain things, then I'm justified at expecting him to honor and bless me.
And so it's this constant, am I good enough? Did I try hard enough?
Have I been faithful enough in order to expect even to be worthy of asking God for something, right?
So I think the subtext under justified in asking him or having expectations
that I have done X, Y, or Z, now I expect I'm justified, the subtext to that
is a sense of entitlement.
If I go, I have done this, a formula, I've punched this all in.
I have been obedient and done X, Y, and Z, Lord, now I am entitled.
This is the contract we have, Lord.
That now I deserve. Now I'm praying about this terrible situation in my life
or this heartbreaking, unexpected chapter in my story.
I expect I'm entitled now for you to end the story in the way that I imagine
the best ending to that story.
And that's, like you said, that transactional relationship with God is a contractual relationship.
That's right. There isn't a
covenantal relationship with God that understands, this is my Abba Father.
I'm grafted into a family of covenant,
and I'm going to trust that this covenantal relationship I have with my Abba
Father, who is the king of the universe, means that I can trust that whatever
he allows to happen, I think it's Kay Arthur who says.
Is filtered through fingers of love, that I am in communion with a father who
has my best interest in mind.
That when I pray, I may have an imagination for how I think the story should
end, but I worship a God who has the whole world in his hands,
the whole universe in his hands,
he understands how the way this story would end would impact this story,
which would connect to that story, which impacts all these other stories.
So his ways are higher than my ways.
Can I walk in communion with him and have a prayer life with him that trusts
that he has a better way of ending this story than I know with my finite understanding?
Wow, that's exactly right. And I think the way I looked at it was,
Because I'm working to try to gain favor with him so that maybe he'll help me out or not punish me.
And it was this constant, am I saved and am I lost? I have heard that so many
times. It's a very vulnerable realization.
Yeah. Sometimes we can make in our own hearts and minds. It's hard to put words
around it and say it out loud.
But then when you have that kind of, look, I've worked so hard for your favor,
and I'm praying, and the story isn't unfolding the way I anticipated,
imagined, or hoped it would, what does that end up doing to your relationship with God?
That's exactly right. If you don't, if your life doesn't turn out the way you
thought it should have, then you blame him for your suffering,
which we've both covered that ground, I'm sure, different times.
And the listener who's gone through something like that, too.
You lose your child or your sister dies in front of you. You do blame God for
a while, and it takes some time to work through that, to figure out.
God's big enough to take all of that weak.
God's big enough to take all of the honest lament.
And us, we go back to Psalms over and over again, because there you've got David,
and he's howling at the Lord for completely an unexpected story where,
look, I've been so faithful to you, Lord,
and here all these terrible things are happening that you could intervene and
you could change the story, and yet you choose not to.
What does it look like to not have a transactional relationship with God?
Where unless, if God doesn't provide X, Y, or Z, I am walking out the door of
my relationship with Him.
Or at the very least, I am, I'm pulling back and having a more guarded,
arm's length relationship with you, Lord.
That's right. That brings from that transactional relationship to a covenantal relationship.
That I am in covenant with you, Lord. That we are kin.
Kin being etymologically related to that word king. He is my King Jesus,
but he is my kin, which is also related to that word kind.
He is a loving, kind God.
We're grafted into his family and his heart. He is a kind Abba Father who is King of the universe.
I can trust how he is unfolding the story.
And yet, he's also, not only is he big enough to take the painful stories,
he holds the bottles to catch every single one of our tears in the midst of the story.
And he doesn't waste any of those tears and uses those tears in very tender, compassionate,
merciful, gentle ways to water new seeds in our life, to bring new growth and
new hope out of the wildernesses and the barren desert places.
Three years ago in the same place, in the same way that my sister was killed.
My father was crushed and killed underneath a tractor.
And you get, I know what it's like to sit in a place and go,
oh my goodness, how can this same traumatic, horrific event not happen once
but twice in the same family.
And where is God in this story?
And yet, when you've practiced and strengthened a muscle of gratitude,
that trust that He is a good, loving, kind Abba Father.
And you keep looking for pinpoints of light in that dark valley,
things that you can articulate your gratitude to the Lord for.
You remind yourself, speak to yourself, remember.
Literally, in the broken world, where we feel dismembered by all kinds of trauma,
we are remembered and put back together again when we remember God's loving
kindness and His goodness.
And then I'm like, I don't understand why the lines in this story are so painful, right?
But I am trusting that my Abba Father is the Word, literally the logos of the
universe, the logic of the universe.
And as the Word of the universe, He is the author who is ultimately writing a good story.
I may not like the lines of this story right now or this particular page or
chapter, But in the end, the story is going to be redeemed into a good story.
And he's ushering in the kingdom of God so that every sad thing is,
by his grace, slowly becoming undone and untrue because of the grace of Jesus.
Amen. Can we unpack for a second, though, on the human level?
You're this really successful Christian writer who ministers to millions of
people, including us. I don't know if I've told you, but shortly after our son
Mitch died, somebody gave my wife, Lisa, a copy of 1000 Gifts.
And that book was really ministry to us and helped us get through that time.
But your father and your sister died on the same ground from which you made your living.
You lost your family in the ground where you provided for your family.
And it reminds me of that Jason Green was a guy who his daughter,
infant daughter, was killed by a brick that fell off of an apartment building.
I remember. I've read this book. Yes.
That book. And he said, a piece of my city took my child away.
And so what was that like processing that somebody who's gone through something
traumatic like that in the same place two times?
How did you walk through that?
And how did your faith help you navigate that difficult connection?
Yeah, well, I think as farmers, and I am a seventh-generation farmer,
and my husband, they're farmers as far back as they can go on that family trip.
And to see that, to know that I lost both my sister and my father on a farm
because of farm accidents, deplete.
Painful. And in those situations, evil.
Satan, literally Satan means the prosecutor of your soul. He can hiss all the time.
Do you really think God loves you now when something's so terrible?
Do you really trust him now in the midst of your story?
And in the weeks after we lost my father, not being able to sleep and waking
up two or three o'clock in the morning, night after night, and replaying so
many things and feeling so cold that I couldn't get warm.
But in the dark, female's night watches prayer. And I just, I really believe
that, I don't know, it's been attributed to several different authors who said
in different ways that there are no atheists in foxholes. That's right.
Anyone who takes incoming fire in any way finds himself taking the way of prayer.
You're going to be in the middle of your valley, in the middle of the heat of
the battle, in the middle of the dark, in the middle of deep grief.
And the way forward is always, Lord, here's my broken heart.
Here is my shattered life.
There is nowhere else to go in this whole hurting world than to the word himself,
who can restore and re-story you when your story doesn't turn out the way you expected it to.
And for me, really taking refuge
in the Psalms, because David is so honest about his lament, he doesn't.
Sanitize that in any way. He doesn't religionize it to make it beautiful before the Lord.
He is honest and howls it to God.
And yet, there's a difference between complaint and lament.
Complaint is howling about something and not trusting in the goodness of God,
accusing God, sitting in a place of despair with accusations against God,
whereas lament is honest about the deep loss and grief and heartache and takes
it to God and pounds on his chest,
but wrestles with God, doesn't let go of God, has no apathy towards God,
and still trusts in the midst of this, I don't understand, and I am in agonizing pain.
I believe that you are still a good God who is going to work good in this situation.
So, I think the worst thing to do, which is so tempting.
In the midst of loss, and loss comes to us in all kinds of different ways,
is to go indifferent and apathetic or guarded, or like you said,
this is transactional, and you didn't come through the way I thought,
so I am withdrawing. I can't trust you.
And those trust issues leading you to either walk out the door on God or to
still keep up the facade of faith with God, but to really not want an intimate
encounter with him because you don't trust him anymore.
That apathy and indifference is really the opposite of faith.
That's right. But in the midst of your loss and your pain, if you can still
wrestle with him and still keep coming to him with all of the questions and
the doubt, if you can still keep holding on to him as you pound on his chest
with all of the ache and the pain,
that is what is going to refine you and ultimately heal you and grow you into
a future that still yields much good.
That's right. So sometimes we move from that transactional type of prayer and
we go through something hard and then we get into that apathetic state like you just mentioned.
And sometimes we end up not not believing anymore, but maybe just not believing
that he believes in us so much and we quit praying.
We forget that our power source comes from prayer. and how do we, what happens to us?
Why do we sometimes stop praying?
What's your diagnosis there? I think sometimes human behavior researchers would
say that we have, in the face of difficult challenges, we have four responses.
We can either fight or flight, freeze or fawn, or sometimes they say we can
just flop depending on which researcher you talk to.
That's right. Look at their studies.
And we all do that at various times in our lives where we just freeze up,
or we fawn to try to please people to find our way forward, or we actually flee
from a situation, there's flight involved, or we actually fight,
and that's our engagement process.
And I really believe that there's, Scripture tells us there is another response
that we can have in the face of challenges, and it's the prayer is a response,
which we all do in those foxholes.
There's nobody who's in a foxhole or taking incoming fire that isn't actually
praying, that is ultimately a response.
Prayer actually activates that prefrontal cortex that's involved in our executive
functioning, as opposed to the traumatic incident is activate that limbic system,
which leaves us in this hypervigilant state.
But prayer actually, seeing as this activating that prefrontal cortex,
is a base in our mind where we can be that soothing happens and reflection happens,
which ultimately is a fueling.
So, instead of our responses being fight or flight, freeze or fawn,
if we enter into prayer, that's a space of refueling and reflection,
which allows us to know this is actually the best way forward.
So, there may be points in time where you're not praying, where you're frozen,
and that's okay. God has so much grace for the seasons that we're in and say,
I'm not, this is a valley.
He takes us to me through the valley of death, the valley of loss,
but we don't live in that valley.
We are moving through it. So there may be a season where I'm finding it hard to pray.
And God doesn't, literally scripture tells us the Holy Spirit interprets our moans and our groans.
So it's not like we need to be able to go ahead and articulate some long, eloquent prayer.
It's coming from the Lord with the moans and the groans and the tears and the howling.
The Holy Spirit interprets those prayers for us.
And then being a place of, if I can move myself closer to my Father in a posture
of prayer, even if I don't have words, and allow this posture of prayer,
which is activating that prefrontal cortex, allows me, in His presence, I am soothed and calmed.
Lots of times we think when I come before the Lord in prayer, I'm coming for answers.
Ultimately, coming before the Lord in prayer is to enter His presence,
and His presence is peace. That's right.
And that peacefulness allows us to reflect on God's kindness towards us.
It allows us to reflect on our actions. and in His presence,
He can go ahead and show us a way forward that allows us to reflect more of
His presence in the world.
So, I think sometimes we come before God in prayer looking for answers.
And answers, honestly, we think we want answers, but answers can be cold.
We honestly don't want cold explanations.
We ultimately want a warm experience of God's presence with us.
And that actually calms us and soothes us.
So that a much more faithful way forward becomes apparent to us.
That's right. I'm going to break the fourth wall for a second.
Listener, I'm looking right in your eyes here.
I'm not talking to Anne, I'm talking to you. Back up four minutes.
Anne Voskamp just gave you a better lesson on neurotheology than I've given
you in this podcast in a long time.
The tying together of what's happening in your brain and what's happening when
you pray is what I've been talking about for a while With all the research that
shows your hippocampus gets bigger when you pray and meditate more.
Yes. It's 22% over six weeks, which is amazing.
Hippocampus. Let's just sit with that for a minute. Right. If that isn't an
invitation, we all go around, I wish I was smarter. I wish I could get a new brain, a new mind.
Literally, praying is giving you a new mind, the mind of Christ,
so that your mind moves with the mind of the God who rules the universe.
Can you just reiterate that statistic right there for us again? Yep, absolutely.
This neuroimaging study, Andrew Newberg and Penn did this study where they looked
at meditation and prayer, particularly spiritual meditation and contemplative
prayer, Pete and Greg kind of stuff.
Six weeks, 10 minutes a day of people that had not previously had that experience
and were scanned before, so they had comparisons. So it wasn't like people had
big hippocampuses and that made them want to pray, which is what everybody thought before.
It was that after six weeks, their hippocampus was 22% larger and more metabolically active.
So what it literally means is that you get structurally less able to be anxious
and structurally more able to be grateful and cognitively aware that you're
choosing a path towards connecting and communicating with God.
Okay, so that's what the science at Penn State, that research concluded.
And scripture tells us in Philippians 4, 6, do not be... 2,000 years ago.
Yes. Do not be anxious for anything, but...
In prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.
So, the two books that I just released, which is, it's Gifts and Gratitude and Sacred Prayer.
Because this way of life that moves with gratitude,
gratefulness, and prayerfulness is actually changes us neurobiologically to
move forward in a way towards the meaningful,
joyful life that we're all deeply looking for exactly what
you said god's word actually unpacks all
of this when he's inviting us commanding us
to live this way that now's research like 2 000
plus years later is actually confirming it's amazing it just you can nerd out
on all day let me give you one little two i think this is original with lee
warren i think god gave me so hippocampus has been called the guard dog of your
nervous system because it's looking it's always surveilling for threats, right?
Your hippocampus is out there looking for what's going on, what's happening.
It takes that potential threat and drags up a memory, goes to the library and
finds a memory of some situation that reminds it, am I supposed to go and run away here?
Am I supposed to figure out a plan? What am I supposed to do?
And so hippocampus is guard dog, right? If we know that praying increases the
size of your hippocampus and
makes it better at that job, makes you less anxious and more resilient.
Then Philippians 4 becomes almost an inside joke because it says the peace of
God will guard your mind. I don't know.
And it's, wait, God told us that doing this will make our hippocampus bigger
and be a better guard dog. I thought that was amazing.
That is absolutely, that is original with Lee Warren, and it's really profound.
Do we, and I guess what it's actually, that verse from Philippians 4,
6 is actually an invitation.
Do we want the peace of God to guard our minds?
Like we get to, it's hard sometimes to think, I'm just, my circumstance is.
Is controlling this. But no condition in our life gets to control the condition of our hearts.
We have a choice and invitation to go ahead and say, I am going to lean into a life of prayer.
As you said, like it's 10 minutes a day.
If you go ahead and lean into a life of prayer, if you go ahead and lean into
living a life of gratitude so that when we come before the Lord,
we enter into His presence with thanksgiving.
We see over and over again in Scripture, Prayerfulness is connected to thankfulness
because you can't come into God's presence without a heart of gratitude for
all of God's previous graces.
We look at Daniel. Daniel was a man of prayer. What does he do?
He has set times of prayer where he gets down in prayer, prays. How?
With thanksgiving as he had done before. So my whole,
I think when you go ahead and you're unpacking a little bit about that hippocampus
is constantly that guard dog that's on guard looking for trauma,
looking for where we need to be vigilant.
When you're four years old and something terrible happens, your way of life
becomes, I need to be hypervigilant all the time because at any moment someone could...
So the only way to go ahead and actually rewire my mind or rewire anyone's mind
after trauma is, okay, How am I going to go ahead and, as scripture tells us,
do not be anxious for anything, but with prayer and supplication,
with thanksgiving in your heart, how am I going to choose to have a life of
gratitude and live with a posture of prayer?
Because that's literally going to, at a material level, change my mind and my
way of being in the world.
That's right. That's why we call
it self-brain surgery. You're literally structurally changing your brain.
When we think about that i think
can be really it can be really tempting dr one
to see ourselves as victims in a broken world yeah these terrible things have
happened to me and they have they truly have yeah but where do we have agency
in our own story and we have agency to do exactly what you say.
Self-brain surgery. We have agency. Am I going to pick up a pen and write down
three things that I'm grateful for every day, which is going to increase my happiness by 25%?
Am I going to go ahead and have a posture every day of beginning my day in sacred prayer?
Because that's actually going to rewire my brain and give me more of the mind of Christ.
We have far more agency. We may not like the story that we're in,
but we have agency to write good lines into the story that we've been given.
That's absolutely right. You've given us in the new book and sacred prayer,
you've given us a new acrostic. We have all these sort of mnemonics for how
we work through a prayer.
You've given us a new one, sacred. So let's break that down for a minute.
Nobody's probably had the chance to read the book yet because it just came out.
They're going to hear this next week.
So give us that stillness, attentiveness, cruciformity, revelation, examine, and doxology.
Unpack that for us a little bit. I think it is that acronym.
And I'll start at the bottom first so you'll see how it happened in my life.
D is doxology. Can you live a life of gratitude, a life that is constantly looking
for, training your eyes to see? We have a choice.
We have agency over, what am I going to keep looking for? Am I going to look
for the black dot on every white piece of paper, or am I going to look for expansive grace?
I have a choice on what I'm going to train my eyes to see.
So doxology is about training my eyes to look for God's gifts and His grace,
which is really what happened out of 1,000 gifts.
So you'll see where that came in my life. The C of sacred is cruciformity.
How am I going to live shaped and formed like a cross?
Which really is about, we see Jesus at the Last Supper. He takes the bread that
was given him, which was the bread of suffering, which was the bread of going to the cross.
He took that and even gave thanks for that, broke it, and passed it on.
Can I take everything in my life, give thanks for it, see it as grace,
even the painful things?
God is going to use those painful things for grace in my life.
And then live broken and given out into the world, being a gift out into the
world, passing on the comfort that I have received through those hard things
as a gift out into the world.
So my second book, Broken Way, was really about living a broken and given life,
a cruciform life that is formed and shaped like a cross, those cross beams reaching
out into the world. So that's the C of sacred.
So you'll see what was happening very organically in my life.
Sacred isn't an acronym that I just came up with, and here we'll paste that onto my mind.
This became an organic outgrowth of my journey of working through trauma and brokenness.
So sacred, I would wake up in the morning and I would immediately feel anxiety
from the moment I opened my eyes.
I felt overwhelmed with all the things that I had done and that persecutor of
my soul hissing at the back of my head all the time.
Before I even got out of bed, you're not good enough. You've already blown it,
repeating all of my failures to me.
Right. And you always, oh no, the first thing I need to do every morning.
Gitty breath be still and know that I am gone.
That was a reorientation. I keep it right here on my desk all the time, a compass.
All of life turns on the turn. Moment by moment, we have decisions to make.
Which way are we going to turn?
And for me, looking at Scripture, we see over and over again,
the first posture we need is a posture of stillness. Moses leading the Israelites out from Egypt.
They're caught between a rock and a hard place. They're caught between the Red
Sea and no way forward and the Egyptians coming at them.
And what does God tell the people of God to do in Exodus 14?
He says, Be still. Be still and let the Lord fight for you and you will see
my deliverance. It's completely counterintuitive.
We want to jump in wholeheartedly and control the situation.
The first posture is this open-handed of stillness, where it's a posture of,
I know that you are the God of the universe, and that you are in control,
and you're the one writing the story.
So sacred prayer begins with the S is stillness.
And ultimately, sacred prayer is a journal that you're going to write in over
90 days to foster this deep intimacy with God.
But ultimately, it's a way, the reason you're going to move through that acronym
over the course of 90 days is you really, it's about training your brain to think a new way.
I was talking to a lady last week, and she's been working through sacred prayer.
And she said, oh, I am seeing that I'm actually training my mind to think long
after I've closed the journal to go, oh, I'm anxious.
Where do I begin? I begin, first of all, stillness. Be still and know that I am God.
The A of sacred is attentiveness.
We are attending, our minds, our whole bodies are attending to the world around us all of the time.
Like we said, our hippocampus is screening for what do I need to be vigilant
about? What is the incoming danger right now?
We are choosing what we're going to be attentive to all of the time.
So sacred, the A of sacred is, I am choosing to be attentive to what?
First of all, to God. The first question he asks us is, he's asking us,
where are you in scripture?
He wants to attend Genesis. He's asked Adam and Eve, where are you?
And we need to be attending.
We say in real estate all the time, the most important thing is location.
I really believe that in our spiritual walk, the most important thing is location.
Where are you in relationship to God? If we want to have a relationship with
God, not a religion with God, not this transactional experience,
but an actual a covenantal relationship with Him.
We need to get up every day and go, where is my soul? Can I locate my soul?
Attend to where my soul is in relationship to God. So it's attending to three
questions every morning.
God asks us, who do you say that I am? If you can go ahead and reorient your
soul every morning to, who do I say God really is?
If I believe that my God is, I'm the king of the universe, what am I actually afraid of?
If my father is the king of the universe, I think it's really important for
us to be really intentional every day about actually articulating, who do I say God is?
That's a reorientation of your mind at the beginning of the day.
It's also asking yourself that question, attending to the question.
Because we have all these questions for God in prayer. Why didn't you do this?
How come this didn't happen?
Why isn't this happening the way I thought it would happen?
So lots of times our prayers really are, it's a questioning God.
And I think prayer really is about slowing down, being still,
and attending to God's questions for us.
Who do you say that I am? Question that he asks Hagar, where are you coming from?
And where are you going to? If we want to live a life not by default,
but a life of deliberation, a life of design, we have to slow down every day
and go, wait a second, where am I right now in my mind?
It's actually really, Dr. Warren, it's actually doing cell brain surgery.
It is. You're slowing yourself down enough to ask yourself the questions.
Where am I right now? God asked Hagar. And where am I going to?
That's all about compass again.
Trajectory. Where do I want my mind to take me today?
And then, appallingly, Jesus asks his disciples in the New Testament, what do you want?
Attend to that question. What do I really want?
Calvin says that our souls are constant idol factories.
That's right. And we're constantly creating these idols of the things that we want.
When we have to slow down enough and attend to Jesus' question to us in prayer,
if prayer is really a conversation, We're listening to God asking us questions,
and we're responding to Him.
What do I want? When you write that down every day, it's like,
oh, are my wants actual idols?
Have I made an idol out of something that I want? Or are my wants aligned with
God's will and ways in the world?
Or am I misaligned with my wants?
Slowing yourself down enough to go, these are the things that I really want,
so that I can come to the place of saying, not my will be done, but your will be done.
So that's the A of sacred is really attending to God's questions to you.
And as you answer those questions, you are doing your own kind of self-brain surgery here.
The C, as I mentioned, is cruciform. I believe that nothing is...
Is nothing transforms in the world until we live cruciform in the world.
And do I live shaped in the posture of a cross in all things?
That posture of living cruciform, shaped and formed like a cross,
is a posture of surrender, a posture of sacrifice, a posture of reaching out.
If I can slow myself down in prayer every morning and say, Lord,
how are you asking me to live cruciform today?
That is engaging before the Lord. These are the things I need to surrender to, Lord.
This is what I need to sacrifice today, Lord. What do I need to give up today, Lord?
And who am I going to reach out to as I live a surrendered, sacrificial life?
Ultimately, the sea of sacred cruciform. Cruciform is the form of love.
Love is about sacrifice.
So when we say, who am I going to reach out to or what am I going to sacrifice today?
It's about the posture of love. Who are you asking me? What am I being asked
to sacrifice in my own life so that I can reach out in love to others in my life today?
And that really is like the center of sacred because really it's living a,
I think the center of a meaningful, fulfilling life is living shaped in form
like a cross cruciform. And then the R of sacred is a revelation.
We want God to reveal the way forward to us every day.
And he is the word and he reveals the way through his word.
I don't think you should go out into the day thing. I want someone to reveal
the way forward. I have to find the way forward.
Don't go out into this day without coming to his word and asking for a fresh
revelation from God that will show you the way forward today. day.
So it's the R of Revelation is, can you write down every day,
what is one fresh revelation from God's Word that you've received today that
you're going to carry out into the world today?
So it really is, I think too often we as Christians can gather manna from God's
Word from last week or on Sunday morning.
And that was fresh manna for that day.
You need a fresh revelation of God every single day to move out into the world.
That if we want a new mind, we actually have to come to the word of God who's
going to give us new manna, a fresh revelation of himself.
For you, for literally it's his way of saying, this is the way,
walk in it, not turn to the right nor to the left.
Then the examine of sacred manna.
To slow down every day, and it's being able to examine our own minds.
To being able to step apart from ourselves, as you speak of doing self-brain
surgery, we need to be able to step aside a little bit from our own thinking
and examine our own thinking.
To slow down and realize, oh, what am I actually afraid here?
Because literally our minds are fueled by two things. Our minds are fueled either by fear or by love.
So when I'm slowing down enough to pick up a pen and write down the things I'm
grateful for, I'm counting all the ways God loves me, and I'm fueling my mind on God's love.
Oftentimes, because we live in a world that is broken and there is trauma and
heartache, we can start to allow our minds to be fueled by fears instead of love.
So the E of examine is to slow down and examine, what am I afraid of?
360 some times in scripture, God is asking, do not be afraid.
He knows that we, so much of our lives and our thinking is fueled by fear.
So examine is about slowing down and writing out.
God says, what are you afraid of? Actually writing down those things that you're afraid of.
And then the D of doxology, of sacredist doxology, because I want it to come right after.
When you when we are afraid in our
minds it's activating the amygdala
and that hippocampus which then goes ahead and we
have that stress hormone cortisol that goes crazy but when you're actually grateful
you pick up a pen you're living in that universe of doxology and looking for
things to be grateful for that also activates the hippocampus and the amygdala
which regulates cortisol in our minds.
That's right. It means you simultaneously cannot feel fear and gratitude at the same time.
So that we have sacred when you're praying like, Lord, these are the things I'm afraid about.
As those things are on the page, you immediately are going to move to doxology
because it's impossible to simultaneously feel fear and gratitude at the same
time and write down the things that you're grateful for.
When you've moved through this sacred way of prayer, you have actually rewired
your mind to move out into the day with the Lord moment by moment,
companioning with Him on the way.
Wow. I love it. I had no idea that it was so in line with what we're talking about here.
And the people that are listening to this will be completely nerding out on.
I've been nerding out because as I see you share more and more about self-brain
surgery, oh my goodness, you and I are definitely literally on the same wavelength.
I really, for me, honestly, and I found in the days and weeks and months after I lost my father,
and it really was, it was compounded trauma because it peeled off this gab from
my sister's loss and trying to navigate, why did this happen twice in the same family?
It was so painful, but actually literally picking up a pen every morning and
moving my way through sacred prayer, having a way of life, a rhythm of life
that was sacred, set apart, literally is what sacred means,
so that I could rewire my mind, it actually literally felt the way that the
sacred prayer, this way of life was like holding back the tsunami waves of trauma.
Wow. That there was a way forward. And I think we need to grow this muscle, this soul muscle,
so that when the trauma happens, I know what to do that keeps me,
it's not just going to give me a way forward, but it's going to intimately keep
me in Jesus, who is the way himself.
And as I live in him, he is my way forward.
Wow. That's profound. Anne Voskamp, this has been long awaited,
but it was worth it. And I'm so grateful for your time.
Just as we land this plane today, there's somebody listening who just got the
news, just got home from the hospital, just buried their mom.
Like somebody's in that acute phase. So give us a pastoral word for that person
as we get ready to wrap this up today.
First of all, Dr. Warren and I are sitting here offering you witness and witness.
That's right. You are not alone and we see you.
God, Emmanuel, that Roy, the God who sees, the God who is with us,
he gives you witness and witness.
And right now in the angst
of deep grief or shock and trauma
the temptation can be to race to
try to escape the pain to run towards something to numb out the pain and the
gentle tender invitation is
to be still and to know God the compassion of God Could you sit just with,
be still with Psalms 23?
And to know that the Lord is my ship. God is the good shepherd who is coming
alongside you to lead you to green pastures,
to comfort you, to heal you, to take you through the valley.
Be still and know that He is God. Pray Psalms 23 today and let that truth.
Generations have been held by the truth of psalms 23
you sit with a whole witness of
saints who have walked with psalms 23 you are
not alone and the good shepherd will come after you and hold you and he will
be the one who literally carries you through and then thank you for that that's
going to move the needle for somebody today and we're excited for you and the
success of your new book and the way that it's going to lead people through
a new relationship with prayer.
And I can't wait to hear about the next book. We'll hopefully have you back
on the show to talk about that one that's coming. You're from Tyndale, right?
Yes, I have one coming. I have one coming from Tyndale in February,
and then I am on book deadline for the next book.
And I really believe that we're writing out of our own stories,
our own encountering the Lord as he leads us higher up and deeper into himself, as C.S.
Lewis says, so that we're writing out, this is the journey I'm on.
Can we pilgrimage together, limping sojourners on the way, leaning into the Good Shepherd Himself?
Amen. God bless you, my friend. We are praying for you and grateful to see your
face and have this conversation today.
I'm so grateful to you and Lisa and Kenna. Wait to hold.
Each one of your books has profoundly ministered to me.
I have underlined and highlighted and dog-eared pages of your books,
so I am anxiously awaiting how the Lord has spoken to you, that we could hold
those pages and encounter Jesus himself through your faithfulness, Dr. Lee.
Thank you so much, my friend. God bless you. We'll see you soon.
God bless you. Thank you.
Was that a great talk? I told you. We went deep. We nerded out.
I think you probably learned a lot. I did.
And I'm excited for you to delve into the sacred prayer model.
It will really help you. That book is available now everywhere books are sold.
Anne's got two new books coming out next year, so we'll look forward to that
and hopefully prayerfully can have her back on the show in February as she launches that next book.
And we are grateful for the work that she's doing.
I hope it's been helpful to you, friend. there is a path, there is a process,
there is a reliable method by which you can become healthier and feel better and be happier.
And it starts with understanding that you're not just your brain,
you're not stuck with the brain that you have, and that your creator,
your great physician, has wired your nervous system in such a way that when
you press in, you will find progress.
You don't have to stay stuck, you don't have to stay sad, you don't have to
stay sick, you don't have to stay broken.
And Anne's helping us see how prayer and meditation can connect with our nervous
system in a way that helps us to heal and grow and change and find hope and
meaning and purpose again.
No matter what you're going through, check out Anne Voskamp's books,
annvoskamp.com. We're so grateful for her and the time that she gave us this week.
I pray it's been helpful to you. I'd love to hear your feedback and your comments.
Send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com, and we will look forward to hearing from you.
You can also send a voicemail, speakpipe.com slash drleewarren,
speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren.
If you want to leave a voicemail, we play those on the show sometimes.
Tell people how you found out about self-brain surgery, how it's helping you,
what it's doing in your life, and let us know how you're doing.
Okay, friend, we're grateful for you. I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren.
It's been an honor to be here with you for some self-brain surgeries today.
Be sure and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and sign up
for my newsletter, drleewarren.substack.com to get your weekly free self-brain
surgery prescriptions.
And remember, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And the good news is, you can start today.