Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: I'm going to be honest in a way that maybe I shouldn't be and admit that I was skeptical about this conversation because even after I said yes to hosting this guest, I really wasn't sure how I felt about the concept of taking control of our personal healing with our minds. I'm Kristen Mockler Young, and this is Becoming Church, the podcast where we discuss how the message and movement of Jesus is not just about becoming Christians, but about becoming coming to church. My guest today is Dr. Lee Warren, who is a neurosurgeon specializing in the intersection of neuroscience and faith. While I was concerned it might be a little woo woo or lean toward spiritual platitudes that say just praying about it can make us feel better, I was pleasantly surprised by what Dr. Warren had to say. So if you're a little skeptical, I get it. But listen in with an open mind and see what God just might have you learn today.
I do also want to give you a warning that Dr. Warren tells a story about the tragic loss of his son today. So if that's something that you yourself are still trying to heal from, you may want to come back to this one later on.
All right, Dr. Lee Warren, I will just call you Dr. Warren the one time. Welcome to Becoming Church.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Thank you so much. It's great to be with you today.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: And now we can just be on a first name basis, you know, Lee, Kristen, now we're friends.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Well, I'm so excited to have you on Becoming Church because you are a neurosurgeon and I have never spoken to a neurosurgeon before. So will you start by just telling us kind of like, what does your day to day even look like?
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm a medical doctor. I did my specialty training in neurosurgery, which involves brain surgery and spine surgery and surgery on nerves and blood vessels that relate to the nervous system. So basically brain tumors and aneurysms and head injuries and hemorrhages and strokes and stuff like that in the brain, Chiari malformations and hydrocephalus and all that kind of stuff and then spine stuff. So ruptured discs, back pain, neck pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, ulnar nerve, you know, pinched nerves in the elbow, carotid artery surgery, anything that relates to your nervous system or a nerve somewhere we take care of, basically.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: I love that you just list these off like it's so old hat for you. And I'm like, wow, that's amazing.
Is there anything that people would be surprised to learn about being a neurosurgeon,
[00:02:29] Speaker A: maybe.
I think one of the. One of the things that. That most people might not think about is that we're just normal people. Like, everybody thinks, oh, he's a brain surgeon. He's a rocket sciences.
But I trained until I was 32 years old, so I went to kindergarten at 5 and finished my training at 32 and never stopped going to school.
And so what you do in. Once you get out of medical school is you go to training, and you basically just practice in a progressively less supervised way, and you do stuff thousands and thousands and thousands of times. So just like any other job, like your job. You know, we talked about Darwin Gray a minute ago. He was an NFL football player. Yeah. Any other job depends on somebody teaching you something and then you practicing it a whole bunch of times. And so it's not some superhuman endeavor. It's just that we do it a million times, and then we finally get to where we're sort of safe to be allowed to do it by ourselves and get a license for it. So I think it's. It's one of those things that isn't really uniquely special, if you will. It's just something that it takes a very, very long time to get good at.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Okay. Well, I would say it's specialized, for sure. Right, right. These very specific things. So I do want to know, you know, how do you actually feel, and you can be honest with us here about shows like Scrubs, the Pit, Grey's Anatomy.
How do you feel about all these depictions?
[00:03:52] Speaker A: My wife hates watching any kind of medical show with me, because I'll be like, oh, he's not holding that rider. No, nobody would ever do that. Or, you know, nobody ever dies from that. Like, Grey's Anatomy. When it first came out, we only watched a little bit of it.
But when it first came out, like, every time that guy took somebody to surgery, it'd be, like, for back pain, and the guy would die on the table or be some magic, massive emergency. Like, that never happens. Like, it's crazy. And then there was a scene where I can't remember his name, but the McDreamy guy, the neurosur surgeon. Yeah. Was holding an instrument literally upside down, like, backwards in his hand in the wrong way.
And then they had a TV monitor on the wall as if he were operating with a microscope so everybody could see what he was doing, but he wasn't using a microscope. He was just looking at the patient. So it was like, that's impossible. Like, so things like that Just drive me nuts about medical television.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: Okay, that's fair, that's fair. Is your wife in medicine also?
[00:04:44] Speaker A: She ran our practice for 12 years. She's a business person. Entrepreneur. Yeah.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Very cool. Very cool. Well, thank you. Thank you for that.
I know that a lot of people, especially I would say, Christians, don't expect experts to talk about both faith and science. Usually it's like we pick one or the other and they tend to be put in opposition of each other. So talk to us about the intersection of neurosurgery and spiritual formation.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. First, just on a more zoomed out level, there is this common belief that science and faith are enemies.
But the truth is it's a PR problem and it's a misnomer that science and faith have anything against one another. And the reason for that is Western science, especially the scientific method of how we decide how we figure out what things are true or less untrue over time, started with Christians like Galileo and Kepler and Copernicus and Newton and guys like that. Maxwell, Tycho Brahe, all the, all the great astronomers and scientists and chemists and mathematicians were Christians. And they started the formal process of how do we figure things out for the purpose of explaining things to people, to glorify God with them?
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: In fact, there's a little known thing. The, the lab at Cambridge University where Watson and Crick worked out the structure of DNA. It's called the, the Cavendish Laboratory. That laboratory was founded by Maxwell, the guy who figured out that electromagnetism and light are the same thing. Basically whose work was instrumental in Einstein's work for discovering relativity and gravity and all that stuff. Maxwell started the Cavendish Lab. And over the doorway of the Cavendish Lab, he had inscribed in Latin the words of Psalm 103 which says, Greater the works of the Lord, they are to be pondered by all who delight in him. And his whole purpose was to magnify and explain some of the things that God did so that people would be in awe and wonder and worship him. So science and faith have never been enemies. They actually are designed to illustrate two different things. I think it was Newton maybe, or maybe Descartes. Somebody said God gave us two books, the Bible and nature. And nature is one of the ways that he reveals himself to us, which is what Paul said in Romans 1 about how the truth about God's creation about God has always been plain to everybody who will look at his creation. Right.
So I think when it comes to neuroscience, what's really interesting is it's showing us progressively more and more. This thing that I've always believed, which is that if science is supposed to be a system by which we can learn what's true, right, where we're supposed to look at the world and figure out what's true about it, science is supposed to be the engine by which we can do that.
Spiritual people, religion, scripture, all purport to do that job too. Like we're supposed to be showing what's true in the world, right?
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: But if you really look at it, what things that we believe to be true scientifically today were.
Are still things that we thought were scientifically true 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 300 years ago. Hardly anything, right? Almost everything in science evolves and changes over time. And I don't mean evolves like in evolution, I mean changes in a way that we progressively get better at what we thought we knew before and what we used to think we know we don't think anymore. And we kind of laugh at people who think, oh, the earth's not flat and the earth's not the center of the universe and. And all that kind of stuff. And, you know, we shouldn't take cocaine for your cold, and you shouldn't take, you know, thalidomide to not feel nauseated when you're pregnant and all that kind of stuff. So we learn over time that science is bending towards what's true. And scripture has always been pointing right at what's true. And so what I've. What I've come to see and what has been really helpful to me in my personal life after some of the things I'm sure we'll talk about today, is that, that science is a method of getting closer to the truth.
Scripture has always shown us what's really true and in the places where they overlap. So there's some places where scripture doesn't. Doesn't touch. Like scripture doesn't tell us what the formula for sodium hydroxide is.
Comment on that. But in the places where it does, and especially where God says, this is how you are going to flourish in your life, if you do this, you will feel better. If you do this, you will live better or live longer. Every place where God says something like that, science is coming around to say, you know what? That's right.
And neuroscience is a great example. In the 20th century, since we invented. Since somebody, some smart person invented what's called functional brain imaging, which is basically where you can put somebody's brain in a scanner and see what it's doing. And not just see what it looks like, but you can see what parts are active and what chemicals are getting made and all that stuff. Since then they've come around to starting to say, you know what? We've discovered that you can't really be anxious and grateful at the same time, which is what Philippians 4 said. We've discovered that the mind and the brain may not actually be the same thing, which is what scripture said all along. You know, we've discovered that willpower and grit and resilience are produced by effort. And having it almost requires you to have suffered a little bit, which is what Romans 5, 3, 5 says. Suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And so over and over and over we have these places where God wrote a prescription like, if you live like this, you're going to be happier. And then science eventually says, you know what, that's true. And so if you just zoom out a little bit every time you hear somebody on the news or in your classroom or somebody say, hey, you know, science has figured all this stuff out, we don't need the Bible anymore, we understand what's true. If you hear something like that, it seems to conflict with scripture. Just wait a little while, like wait a century or two, and eventually people are going to say, we were really wrong about that, weren't we? Now we know this is true. Like a good example is the sexual revolution. The 60s, right? The psychologists, everybody said, hey, you're going to be happier if you just don't worry about all those norms and you know, be with whoever you want to and live your life and live your truth and all that stuff and everybody's going to be happier. And then the, the sociologists started looking at that pattern of what happens over time. And 30, 40 years later, they're all saying, you know what, people are really happiest when they're in monogamous long term relationships. When they're in two parent families, kids do better. Like all that stuff produces happiness. And that's what scripture said all along, right? So, so anytime you see you think there's a conflict between science and faith, archeology and the Bible and science and any, anything, cosmology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, whatever it is, just wait a little while and science will start bending towards the truth of what scripture said all along. That's a principle that I think I can say. It's a, it's a, a law almost scientifically, because I, I just don't think there will ever be anything that the Bible has to be Changed about.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Wow, I'm like taking so many notes over here. I'm just like, it's fascinating to me.
Lee, how do you think that it came about that Christians, do we fear science? Is that what it is? Like? Why is there such a divide I think within Christianity because you see it right.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: You have to go back about 300 years to get to the root cause of this.
A guy named Isaac Newton who gave us the first theory of gravity and the equations that explain planetary motion and all these really smart guy.
Newton was a Christian, a devoted Christian. And his whole work, Principia Mathematica and all the works that he did were aimed at showing God's glory in the universe. But he came up with a theory that if you broke something down into its parts, that you could then study the parts and understand the whole. This was sort of predict what the thing was going to be capable of doing. And that got morphed and, and co opted into a worldview called materialism.
Materialism is sometimes also called reductionism or determinism, but they're basically the same thing. And that materialism is now the core tenet of all the natural sciences, really all the sciences, and to the point that it's a religion among them. Like you're not allowed to question materialism. And what it turned into was not a method of studying things, but a worldview that says we are actually just the products of the things from which we are made. So the universe happened however it happened. We don't know how it happened, but it happened. And then life sprung up out of non life somehow. And then evolution happened for billions of years. And then people develop, the species developed neurons and then out of neurons developed this ability to think and be aware of yourself and what we call mind. And all of that stuff science says, scientists say, I should say all of that stuff is just the product of the material. So that means they literally think that the neurons in your brain generate everything that you are. Everything you think, feel, believe and do comes from neuronal activity. Even though there are neurons in the retina and in other parts of your body that don't do those things. Only the neurons in the brain, in the cerebral cortex, they think can do that thing of giving you consciousness and awareness and self, self awareness and all those things.
And yet. So Newton never meant for materialism to spring up out of his work. It was a world, it was a process for him trying to understand things, break it down, study it, figure it out, put it back together. You're going to understand it now they literally think that you are incapable of being anything more than the cells in your body and the sum total of the collective nature of how they behave. Right? And so materialism is a worldview and a belief system, just like religion is. The scientists won't usually acknowledge that because they think it's scientifically validated. But here's the truth.
Science means the things that you can test and prove over time, right? That's the process of science. The scientific method is you observe something, you come up with a theory about what makes that thing tick and how it works, and then you test your theory. And then if the theory doesn't match out your. Your results of the tests, the experiments, then you're supposed to revise the hypothesis. The problem is they came up with the theory of evolution and the theory of materialism, and they have been unwilling to revise the hypothesis despite 300 years of no evidence that it's actually true.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:14:40] Speaker A: And if you're an academic, if you're a Christian, who's a biologist, for example, I know a guy named Michael Behe. This happened to like, if you're a biochemist and you're a Christian and you write a paper that says, hey, our data doesn't support this, then you get fired, or they won't publish your paper or you lose your grant funding. And so you're just not allowed to suggest anything that doesn't support materialism. You're not allowed to suggest anything that challenges Darwinian evolution. So it's not that science has proven this is that all the smart kids in the room decided that they believed it. And now you have to produce, you have to work as if it's true. And so people really need to know that, especially if you're raising kids. If you're raising kids and they're going off to public schools, you need to arm them with some things. Like, hey, you're going to hear a lot of stuff, but look at the Bible and know that that's actually what's true. Like, we may not understand how old the universe is, or don't try to make the Bible say things it doesn't say, but understand that the truth is in the Word and not in what people say who are scientists just because they have academic credentials, right? So there's a physicist, Blanket, Richard Feynman.
He's the guy that figured out what happened to the space shuttle Columbia when it blew up, or Challenger, rather, the O rings and all that. He testified before Congress and was the guy that figured out what happened. But he has this famous quote that you can be a PhD and still be a moron.
Like, like you don't. Just having an academic degree doesn't make you smart, it just makes you educated. And so that means that there's a lot of things that are science, that are the product of scientific endeavors. And then there are a lot of things that are what we would call scientism, the things that are said by scientists, but they're not scientific things. And what happens is in the media, they get conflated. If you're, if you're an atheist who happens to be a biochemist or a neurosurgeon or whatever, and you write a book that says, oh, these religious people are a bunch of idiots, then they'll publish that and they'll put it on the front part of Barnes and Noble and they'll put it on the homepage of Amazon and all that, no question asked, because it sort of supports the worldview. But if you're a Christian who's a neurosurgeon and you write a book that says, you know, there's evidence that the mind and the brain are not the same thing, and that's sort of what the Bible said all along, they won't publish that. Or if they do, it'll be at the back of the bookstore in the Christian book section. Right. So, so you just have to understand that, that when people say there's a conflict between science and religion, it's because the idea that there's a creator God challenges materialism at its core. Like, you have to start asking yourself some questions about your life if that's true. And all you have to do is just keep publishing papers if materialism is true. And so there's really not a conflict, it's just a worldview that's at odds with a faith based worldview.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: That is fascinating, especially coming from a scientist to hear. Like you said, I think science and scientism.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: Like even just those two, I would have, I would have never considered to see this is because I just have been so conditioned to just blindly believe whatever I've been taught. So I'm like, well, science is science. Like it's data, it's clear, it's cut and dry, but it's actually not.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: That's right. And it's actually, people don't know this, but more than 50% of Nobel laureates in this, in the hard scientists or hard sciences are Christians. Like, it's not true that most scientists are atheists. It's just that those are the ones that get on the news and get interviewed on CNN and get, you know, most of their papers published and get the grant funding and all that. So if you look at the last hundred years more that John Lennox studied this, more than 50% of Nobel laureates in physics and math and in the hard sciences are Christians, are believers. Wow.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: Okay. Well, thank you for that little peek behind the curtain. That was fascinating. You, you mentioned, Lee, that this was a, this was personal for you. Was there a moment where kind of like the science and faith overlap really became personal in your life?
[00:18:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
So I was raised as a Christian and Bible believing parents who always pointed us to the Word and really did a great job of showing us that the answers to your troubles are going to be found in Scripture. So I had that foundation.
But I was also raised in kind of a fundamentalist sort of legalistic denomination, if you will, where it was effort and diligence and trying to please God and all that stuff by, by way of trying to make sure that he does, gives you favor and does good things for you. And when he doesn't, it means you did something wrong and all that kind of stuff. So I had this sort of, this sort of theology that, that believed that effort was the thing. And then I got into real life after I grew up, went to medical as a science kid. So I went to med school and became a brain surgeon and all that. And I ran into a very difficult first marriage that my faith system wasn't helping me figure that out and it just wasn't working. And, and everything I did made it worse, it felt like. And my, my theology didn't help me understand why I was trying so hard and it wasn't working. Yeah. And I got, I went to medical school on scholarship from the Air Force.
And so thank you for paying for med school taxpayers.
And I went.
In 2005, I was deployed to the Iraq war as a combat neurosurgeon.
And, and I deployed literally on the heels of my marriage falling apart and literally going through a divorce while I was in war. So it felt like I was at war before I left.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: And my faith just was sort of not helping me understand why my life wasn't working when I'd been raised to believe that your life would work if you did all the right things and had the right faith. Right. And so then I went through, I did 200 brain surgeries in a tent hospital and, and, and got mortared 120 times and, and went through all these hard things. And basically I got caught outside in A mortar attack one day on the base. I was on my way from point A to point B and a mortar attack happened. And there was no place around to hide except this little concrete wall. So I just went and kind of made myself as small as I could and set up against this concrete wall while these mortars were going off and explosions were happening.
And I. For the first time, sort of, this will surprise you, surprise the listener. Neurosurgeons are sort of control freaks, right? We like to control everything. And for the first time in my life, I was like in two situations I couldn't control. I couldn't control what was happening with my marriage. I couldn't control whether or not I was going to get blown up that day and die. And so I just had to basically say, God, I get it, okay, Maybe you sent me out here to convince me that I'm actually not in charge of what happens in my life. Maybe I need to trust you.
And so I came home from the war pretty scrambled.
My brain was telling me stuff that I didn't understand. I was feeling unsafe in places where I was objectively safe. I understood the neuroscience of trauma and all that, but I. But I was not well, not well emotionally and not well spiritually and not well sort of mental health wise for a while and, and I treated that in the worst way that you can treat it. So, so friend, I mean, hear my voice and know. I like for you to call me Lee, because I want you to hear me as a person who's been through some stuff and not just a guy who knows the science and prescribing things for you. So we're co. We're co laborers in this journey here.
But I came home and even knowing all the science, I didn't understand what was happening in my brain and I didn't understand why I felt so afraid in places where I was objectively not scary, right?
And I treated that in the worst way possible, which is I didn't talk about it. I took all my stuff from Iraq and put it in a trunk and put it in the garage and went back to work and got out of the Air Force and went move to Alabama where my kids were and tried to put my life back together and eventually met Lisa, who had been married to for 20 years now and. And we blended two families and we. Everything seemed like it was getting better.
And then in 2010, we were sitting in our bedroom one night watching a TV show on HBO called Generation Kill.
I don't know why we were watching that, but it was Iraq war show.
And there was a scene where these guys got blown up in a roadside bomb. And the helicopter landed and the American medics went out there and scooped everybody up. And as they were putting these blown up soldiers on the chopper, one of them said, hey, we're going to fly these guys to the hospital at Balad Air Base. And I turned to Lisa and said, that's where I was. Like, I would be the guy waiting for this helicopter to land. And it's the first time I'd ever talked to her about what happened in Iraq. And that night I had my first real nightmare of the flashback of some of the things I saw and did over there. And then about two weeks later, I was giving a talk at like a Lions Club or a Kiwanis Club or one of those civil civic service organizations. And it was in a restaurant, a deli somewhere in Alabama. And somebody shut that. You know, the big walk in coolers that restaurants have, and they have kind of a vacuum seal, and it makes sort of a kind of sound when they shut that sounds exactly like a mortar round being launched. That.
And when that sound happened, I had a panic attack in that restaurant in front of a million people or however many people were there.
And. And shortly after that, just everything came apart. Like I had a full on PTSD kind of spell that took a long time to work through. And Lisa really was the one that said, hey, I think you should be telling us these stories. You should go out in the garage and open that trunk up. You should tell the kids what you went through. You should start writing about it maybe and listen to her.
I went to a friend who was a psychiatrist and I said, hey, I've got this buddy who's having trouble. And I kind of gave this theoretical story and he saw right through it and he said, you know what? I think you should tell your friend to maybe open that trunk up and maybe write some stuff down, maybe tell some stories. Exactly what Lisa said I should listen to her three weeks early.
But I didn't. And so basically, I wrote my first book, which is called no Place to Hide about that, about the Iraq war. And I just told my stories and I wrote it myself, published it, wrote it for mom and dad and the kids. And then it ultimately got published by Zondervan and turned into my first real book. And the process of writing that helped me sort of get back on my feet. So for the first time in years, then around the time that the book was sold, which was early 2013, I felt like I was okay again. Like I'd found my faith in what really worked and I'd released control and I'd remarried and we had a family that was working and everybody was happy and our business was thriving. We're successful practice in Auburn, Alabama. And then on the night of August 20th of 2013, our 19 year old son Mitch was stabbed to death.
His best friend too, in a crime that was never solved. And I became, for the first time, I'd gone through all these other hard things and never blamed God for them and never really lost my faith.
And I was really mad at God then.
[00:25:22] Speaker B: Justifiably, I think, yeah.
[00:25:24] Speaker A: And I was really questioning and really doubting and really unsure for the first time. And before I'd always known you turned back to the word, that there's going to be something there that's going to help you. And now I just know if I believed it, like all the normal stereotypical things that people do when they're suffering. Right, right. Why has God allowed this? And so the long answer to your question, like, how did this all come about? What happened was our office was on the third floor of a building on Auburn University's campus. And Lisa ran our practice at the time. So we worked together. And on the first floor they were doing this world class functional brain imaging research where they were looking at what people's brains do when they think and feel. Okay, so, so long context here to say we spent about a month after Mitch died and then we had to go back to work. We had 10 employees and we had payroll to make and all that stuff you got to do when you own your own business. And so the accountant said, dude, you got to go back to work. Like, I know you're sad, I know you're grieving, but either close your practice, let all those people go, or you got to go back to work. So we went back to work.
Somebody invited us to a meeting in the research center to watch this brain imaging thing happen.
And so I'm raised as a Christian. I'm trained as a neurosurgeon who. And I never thought about this. I bet most Christians never have either. But neuroscience taught me that my brain is all that I was right? Everything about me was brain, brain activity. But my faith teaches me every Christian believes that there's a part of you that lives after your body dies.
Right? There's a part of you, the you that is made in God's image, that's eternal. The Bible calls it mind, heart, soul. That's not related to your brain because Your brain is going to be in a casket, rotting someday or cremated or something. And so I'd never thought about that until this day. We go down to the scanner, and they put a woman in the scanner, and we're watching in the control room in this monitor. And they said, Mrs. Johnson, think about the worst thing you've ever felt in your life. And I immediately went back to that. So we were standing on the street in Alabama with the cops and the sirens and the two bodies on stretchers, and our son was killed. And I was right there emotionally, and I was watching this woman's brain, and she thought of whatever it was. And then her brain changed. We saw the fear center, the amygdala of her brain light up and get really active on the screen.
And quickly after that, her body reacted. Her blood pressure went up and her heart rate went up and her respiratory rate went up. Her physiology changed. So we saw this clear sequence of mind telling brain to get scared, and then brain telling body to react as if it's scared. So mind to brain to body, we saw that clear. And then they said, okay, Mrs. Johnson, stop thinking about that now. Think about the best thing you've ever felt in your happiest memory. The best day of your whole life. And very quickly, her amygdala calmed back down. Her frontal lobes came online. Different parts of her brain lit up. And then her body changed again. Her blood pressure and heart rate, everything got better, went down.
And Lisa said, I don't know where she got this, but she said, hey, that reminds me of Philippians 4. And I said, what do you mean? She said, well, it says, don't be anxious, be grateful, like, switch. Don't think about this, think about that, and you'll be more peaceful. And I'm telling you, I told you earlier, I was raised in a really kind of fundamentalist thing. And the one rule of fundamentalism, besides don't talk about grace, is don't talk about the Holy Spirit. You just don't talk about the Holy Spirit ever. It's weird. People jump over pews and all that, all that stuff. And we don't do that. We don't talk about that. So I don't go around saying, kristen, I don't go around saying, God said this to me. I don't say that very often. I'm really careful. If I'm going to speak for God, it needs to be real. And that day I heard his voice, and he said, hey, Lee, when you perform brain surgery, you are intentionally making a structural change in somebody's brain for the purpose of improving their life in some way.
Wow. And that's what Mrs. Johnson just did. She changed her mind, which changed her brain, which changed her body and made her feel better. And if you want to feel better after you losing your son, you're going to have to look at that in a different way. You're going to have to change your mind about it because you're thinking all these thoughts about the future. It's desperate, it's dark, it's never going to feel better. It's going to cause trouble in your marriage, it's going to mess your kids up. That's what your brain's telling you right now.
You got to change your perspective on that if you want to feel better. And that's, that's self brain surgery. It's literally the same thing as you just saw and it's what you do in the operating room. And so for the next 13 years up to now, I've been trying to figure out how to unite those two things that I had never thought about before. Like, how does this brain science and the, and the fact that my mind and my brain are not the same thing, how does that work if I'm going to help people feel better, including me and my wife and our kids and all that after they go through something like this?
And so what I've discovered is what I said earlier, like, like when God says this will lead you to flourishing in your life, neuroscience is going to prove it eventually.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: Wow.
Wow. And so that's where the book came from. The Life Changing art of Self Brain surgery.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for sharing all of that.
I can only imagine how painful it is to, as many times as you've told the story, have to kind of relive it in the moment. So thank you. Thank you for, for trusting us with all of that.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: Will you explain? I know you just explained kind of like how you got there and that moment with God. And a lot of our listeners can very much relate to the legalistic. You know, it's a, it's a spectrum. Right. But a lot of my listeners can understand that either we don't talk about grace, don't talk about holy Spirit, we don't talk about fill in the blank, whatever it is.
So I think they too understand this light bulb moment or the first time that they feel like, oh, God reveals something to them and it kind of like changes the way that you see your faith. Right. You see yourself, you see God and all of these things.
Can you explain A little bit more like, basically what the book explains and outlines about how neurologically and spiritually we can reshape our brains to influence our own healing.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: Absolutely.
So it turns out, again, this is something that science has taught us that now science is proving isn't true. It's one of those things. And what it is is that we were taught. I was taught as a. As a neurosurgeon, that the human brain is basically full, fully developed by about 2 years old, and you don't make any more brain cells after that, and that your brain is sort of rigidly structured and doesn't have the ability to adapt or change much. And so that led to this. This idea that the genes that you inherit and the parents who raise you and the circumstances of your life and the traumas and tragedies that you go through can sort of give you a particular type of brain that can be made worse by circumstance, but there's not a whole lot you can do about it. And that's led to this societal thing that we have now of, hey, you know, you need to honor your feelings and honor your heart and live your truth, and your brain is what it is. And if you're anxious, then you just need to manage that. And if you're. If you tend to be depressed, you just need to learn how to manage that. And if you go through the wrong set of adverse childhood experiences and that's going to goof you up, and you need to gather some people around you who can support you in that and live your truth and all that. And we put these things in our Instagram biography, our bios, and we say, this is my Enneagram score, and this is who I am. You need to know what to expect from me. And we believe that that creates our identity.
Okay, but what neuroscience is telling us now, which is what scripture's always said, is that your brain actually is never the same from moment to moment in your life. Your brain makes literal structural changes in the. The way the neurons are connected to one another every second of every day. That process is called neuroplasticity, and it was very clearly proven in the late 1900s and then early 2000s, first with research in animals and then in humans, and then they discovered in early 2000s that human adult brains actually do make new neurons every day. So not only can you reconnect them, you can generate new cells. And so the brain is not stuck and it's not fixed. And it turns out that the thing that drives that neuroplasticity process more than anything else is the stuff you think about all the time. Yeah. And so it's been clearly proved. This is not controversial. So this is not said from a faith based perspective. If you're listening and you're not a believer, like all of the neuroscience, especially people like Jeffrey Schwartz and Jeffrey Newberg at Penn and people like that, respected, internationally known neuroscientists are now saying that the stuff you think about structurally changes your brain in real time. There's a, there's a part of your brain called microtubules, and they're like little girders that guide neurons as they grow and connect to other cells. And those microtubules break down and redeploy within minutes of you changing your perspective on things that you're thinking about. It's literally changing in real time. Which means that the, the idea that you're stuck with the brain that you have has never been true.
But the problem is, if you don't know that, then since your brain changes largely in response to the things you think about, that means that, and there's some interesting research. So there's two, two more pieces of research and then I'll finish the thought. One is that something like two thirds, and some people think as much as 80% of the automatic thoughts and feelings that pop into our heads are either biased towards negativity or frankly, false. Like, so that means that an alarming number of the automatic thoughts and feelings that pop into your head don't turn out to be true.
And so that means then that if the things you repeatedly think about are the things that drive the structural changes in your brain, then continuing to ruminate or think about things that aren't really true creates a brain that's trying to support you in believing things that aren't true.
And so this idea of honor your feelings when most of your automatic feelings aren't true, that's going to lead you to some trouble. The second thing is really good research now says that most of us think about 90% of the time the same set of things that we thought about the day before.
So if you just want to test that, I don't believe that, I think different things all the time. Take a piece of paper and at the end of the day today, just write down the top three things that you remember thinking about bunch of times and then do that again tomorrow and the day after that. And if, if after seven days you disagree with me, write me an email because I'll be shocked. Because 90% of the stuff you thought about today is what you thought about yesterday. And so that. That explains then why we all begin to believe that this is just how I am. Because we think about stuff that isn't true all the time. We react to feelings that aren't true all the time, and we keep thinking the same untrue things every day. And then our brain does what brains do. Neuroplasticity means automates and makes more robust the things that we routinely think about.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:59] Speaker A: And that automation thing, I don't know what, I don't know a good way to. A catchy way to say it, but what your brain basically does constantly is listen for your mental instruction as to what it's supposed to care about and look for, and then try to automate the things that you think about more than once or twice or three times a day so that you don't have to use mental real estate and energy to process those things. This explains why you can drive to work or school without having to think about it. Right.
If you change the location of your office tomorrow, you would have to think about the drive. If it was a new place. Every school crossing, you know, speed trap, every light, every place where there might be heavy traffic, every construction zone, you'd be aware of it, paying attention to it, locked into it. But after about a week or so, you get there and you've been listening to a podcast or you've been on the phone, you've been, you know, hopefully not texting while you're driving, but you've been doing something other than concentrating on the drive, because your brain automated all the stuff that you need to do to make that drive happen. We call it muscle memory. It's really brain memory. But what the reason that works is because of neuroplasticity. Right. And so then, then, then you get over to the place where you say, okay, why do I feel so stuck all the time? It's because you keep thinking about the same things over and over. Yeah. And so if you want your life to be different than it's been, like I found out in the. In the scanner that day when God spoke to me and shook me up, is you've got to think about things from a different perspective.
And what the Bible would say is, is found in Romans 12:1 3 there. Everybody talks about Romans 12:2.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:33] Speaker A: In the context of neuroplasticity, but it's really not correct.
Everybody says Romans 12:2. If you look on Instagram, every neuroscience expert and chiropractor, and everybody's talking about Romans 12:2 right now. Now. And they all say the same thing. Romans 12:2 is about neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is a brain process. It is not a mind process. Romans 12:2 says, don't conform to the pattern of this world. What's the pattern of this world? Follow your heart, honor your feelings, do your thing, live your life, you know, you, be you, all that stuff. Believe what you feel.
That's the pattern of this world. Romans says, don't conform to that. Don't be pressed into the shape of that, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. So you change your mind. It will transform your life, right? But back up to Romans 12:1, that's where neuroplasticity comes in. Romans 12:1 is a brain verse. Romans 12:1 says, hey, present your body, which includes your brain as a living sacrifice to God. It's a reasonable, essential act of worship, is how the voice translation says, I love that it's reasonable and essential worship when you give God your body.
So he's saying, hey, I gave you a brain. I want you to give it back to me. And I want you to use it in a way that makes it better over time. That's Romans 12:2. So I'm going to use the gift of neuroplasticity to make my brain better, which is a way of worshiping God. It's not work, it's worship. And I'm going to do that by renewing my mind. So Romans 12:2 is about your mind. Romans 12:1 is about your brain. And then 12,3 says, why? Like, because then you'll be able to test and approve what God's good, pleasing and perfect will is. So if you're like, hey, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my life. I'm not sure if this is the right thing for me to do or not. God says, renew your mind.
That's going to give you the ability to figure that stuff out. Like, so if you're kind of lost self, brain surgery in the whole of what I'm talking about is contained in those three verses. Romans 12:1 3. There's a lot of other ones. The Bible's full. But that's the, that's the, that's the gist of it. Kristen.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: Okay, I was going to ask you about Romans 12:2 and how this is different than what Christians typically use that verse for. So I'm really glad that you, that you broke all of that down. And you mentioned, I think you mentioned anxiety or feeling anxious and you've talked about feelings A couple times. And there's got to be a both. And in this. Right. Like, people have to feel their feelings. I'm sure when you were going through all of the grief, like, you had to feel the anger and the sadness and all of these things.
[00:39:53] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: So how.
How does the physical body. Because sometimes these feelings do affect our physical bodies as well. Right. So how does that come into play when people are dealing with trauma, anxiety, stress, things that affect them in their physical body?
Do you believe that they can change the way they physically feel by changing the way they think?
[00:40:14] Speaker A: Yes.
And so thank you for saying that. It's crucial to know, like, God gave you a need to grieve, and the Bible says that, you know, grieve with those who grieve and mourn with those who mourn. Like. Like, he doesn't tell us to not feel those things.
But understanding that in the book I gave you what I call the Ten Commandments of Self brain surgery, and the second one is, I must believe that feelings are not facts. They're chemical events in my brain. And what I mean by that is not that you're not feeling something, you are feeling something. But I'll give you an example. Let's say you go to the mailbox later today and get your mail. Okay. Then you pull an envelope out and you look at it and it says Internal Revenue Service on it.
Most of us have some sort of reaction to that letterhead, right?
[00:40:57] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: And you're going to feel, let's say your body sends you some signals and you notice that your heart's racing a little bit and you're. Your skin on the back of your neck, the hair on the back of your neck stands up and your mouth gets dry and your pupils dilate and heart rate speeds up and all that.
I would just ask you, like, is that fear?
Because maybe you cut some corners on your tax return, you're worried about getting audited, or maybe you got to pay a fine or something. Is it fear? Or have you been a little behind on your mortgage and you're anticipating a refund and you're excited because that money's going to be here and you're going to be able to not lose your house like that. But notice, though, that that the physiology is the same. Like your heart's racing, your hair standing up, your mouth dry. All that physiological stuff is the same. What makes one of those things fear and one anticipation or excitement is the story that you're telling yourself about what you're feeling.
Right. The feeling is a chemical Event, the reality of what it means comes from your brain. Your mind and your brain decide the story that you're going to tell yourself about it. Now look at the envelope again, and it's addressed to your neighbor. Like, it wasn't yours. It was a mistake. It shouldn't have been in your mailbox. So neither of those two things were true, even though your body told you that something was happening, Right?
Or you open it and you find out it was just a notice that they're 10 weeks behind on processing your return. And it's neither good nor bad.
Neither was true. Right? So the point of that story is just to say that you feel things in your body and that the reason God gave you feelings and emotions is to be aware that something may be happening, but your brain doesn't know the difference. The human brain does not have the capacity to discern between something that's actually happening and something that you're just imagining or worrying about.
There's no difference. And this is the good example of that is if you, you know, hear a noise at night and it's because an ax murderer just busted through your window and he's in your house with an. With an ax. That's fear. You're gonna. You're gonna react to that with fight or flight. You're not gonna have to process it. You're gonna run away and. And save yourself. But you can also hear a noise at night and have the same physiological terror reaction as if there were an axe murderer. And it's just that the wind blew you up against your house, and your brain is telling you that there's a bad guy in your house, right? But notice that the physiology is the same. The feeling is the same, the reality is based on what your brain is telling you. The story, right? So then what I. What I teach people, then, is as a surgeon, like, I have to deal in data.
Like, if you come in and you say, hey, Doc, I've been having these headaches, you know, and my head's hurting, if the first thing I said was, well, why don't we go to the operating room and I'll cut your head open, look around in there and see what's going on, you'd say, no way. You know, hang on a second. Like, what are you talking about? Don't you want to do a scan or something like that, get some data? Like. Like, surgeons operate on information and facts. We don't operate on basically making decisions based on what might be.
And so that means then if I want to be a good Safe surgeon. I'm asking you to do what I did in the. In the scanner down there. I decided that I can't live and recover after I lose Mitch from the position of being a victim of my emotions and my fears and my automatic thinking. Since it's not usually accurate, I've got to change my perspective and try to find out what's true about my future. Now I've got to switch from being this sort of patient who's trying to figure out some way for somebody to fix it to sort of operating the system as if I'm a surgeon from the perspective of doing what God gave me the ability to do. Right. So if I'm going to ask you to do that, then you have to sort of think about yourself as patient and doctor in this encounter. So if you have a problem, not a headache in my office, but an anxiety, a grief, a pain, something that's happening that you don't. You don't know what to do with or I don't understand it, the worst thing you can do is just react to it as if it's true or as if it's permanent or if it's the only thing that's still true. The worst thing you can do is form the basis of your future actions on something that might not be accurate or true or permanent. Okay. That's the worst thing you can do. Does that mean stop feeling? No. You need to honor your feelings. You need to understand them. You need to spend some time sort of figuring out why you're hurting in the way that you are.
[00:45:12] Speaker B: Right.
[00:45:12] Speaker A: But when it's time, I mean, all wounds have to heal, and when it's time for that wound to heal, you want to orient yourself towards a future that can be built on things that are true and accurate and that you're going to make decisions with the good part of your brain that God gave you that's good at solving problems and not the small part that's good at being afraid and putting you into fight or flight. Right. So get data. Like you would say, hey, let's go get a biopsy of that thing before you decide to give me radiation on my brain or chemotherapy on my brain or radical surgery on my brain. Get some data first. And so I just teach people, hey, if. If 80% or so of the things that we automatically think and feel aren't really accurate, then we need to have a system in place for what we're going to do when those things pop up.
[00:45:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: Like, do I just react or do I think about it? For a second? And do I investigate it? Do I put God's word up against it as a test? Do I challenge the thought instead of just accepting it? All of us have had the experience of. Of your phone buzzes and you look at it, it's a text message from your sister or something. And you just. You read it in a way that irritates you or makes you angry. And you reply like, what are you talking about, you big jerk? You know, like. And then they write back and say, what are you. What are you talking about? That's not what I said. Right.
And then you read it again. You go, oh, gosh, that's not what they said at all. I made an assumption that wasn't correct. And now you're reacting and apologizing and repairing and fixing because you reacted to something that wasn't true, it wasn't accurate. And if you develop this thing, the psychologists call it metacognition, right? This ability that humans have to think about our experience, our thoughts and feelings and situations instead of just reacting to them as if they're true. Like being outside of it instead of inside of it.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:46:51] Speaker A: If you can develop that habit of, say, just take a breath when you have a stimulus, when life throws something at you, take a breath for a second and say, is that thought really true? Is that feeling I'm having, does it really mean something? Or am I telling myself a story because I got hurt in some way, like this one time before or the last time I was in a situation like this, this is what happened. And now I'm imagining that that's what's going to happen this time. Like. Like, just take a second, take a beat. And especially if you're. If you're grieving or you're hurting, you've lost a child, your brain's going to say, hey, the future is going to look just like this for you, buddy. Like, this is how it's always going to be. Your wife's going to not respect you because you couldn't save her son.
Your other kids are going to not believe that you can give them a good advice because you didn't save your kid. All these things that are irrational, you're going to think that and you're going to feel it, and it's going to be really powerful. And that's what you think the future is going to look like. And so you have to say, wait a second. When my heart and my brain tells me that I don't have a future, I need to look at God's word. And God says, hey, I got a plan for you. A plan to give me hope in a future. Right. It needs to say, hey, I'm going to work this out for your good. I know it doesn't feel possible right now, but I'm going to. And so just hang on with me for a second, like grieve. Yes. Don't despair because I'm going to give you a plan. Right. So God, I just, I would just say encourage you to take your feelings with a grain of salt and be curious, maybe cynical about them and investigate them before reacting to them and put them up against the test of God's word before you decide which one of those is more true.
[00:48:18] Speaker B: It takes a lot of intention and self awareness, right. To be able to like recognize what we're thinking and then name it and then realize that it's not true. And I think for a lot of people it's therapy or talking to a counselor that helps them to begin to do the work of being able to take those steps. Is that what the book kind of does too, is help people walk through the practical ways of how they can begin if they've never thought this way before?
[00:48:40] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And let me just say a word about therapy too, because a lot of people say, well, are you saying we don't need help, we don't need professionals and we don't need therapists and all that? Absolutely not.
The point I'm making here, here is if I'm getting you to switch from sort of patient who is experiencing something and you want somebody to fix it to this position of empowered as a surgeon who knows what to do or has a plan or has compassion and wisdom to bring to bear to operate this system that God's given you to make your brain work better for you. If I want you to make that switch, think about what I do. As a neurosurgeon, I'm an expert at how your brain works.
But if I'm about to take you back to surgery and you grab your chest and you have a heart attack in front of me, I'm going to say, gosh, I need to call a cardiologist because I don't know anything about your heart. Like, I remember some stuff from med school, but I am not a cardiologist. And so I'm going to call somebody who has training and expertise that I don't have and I'm going to get them involved in the care of my patient because I love my patient and I care about them and I'm hopefully wise enough to to know that I don't have all the answers for them. And so I want you to think about professional help in that way. Like, it's not that you're going to stop taking care of yourself and somebody else has to come and save you. It's that you need a colleague, another person to come alongside who has training and expertise that you don't have, to arm you with the tools that you need to take care of your patient who is also you. Right. In a way that's safe and healthy and will help you make progress. So that's the role every good therapist, every good psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor, therapist, pastor, anybody in the mental health space, everybody would say the best outcomes are when people get involved in their own care in a way that they choose to engage with it, take responsibility for it, and get an internal locus of control about it. Which means, like, you don't think that the answer is outside of you anymore. You don't think that something's going to come along or somebody's going to change or my husband's going to stop being a jerk, or this is going to happen, or that's going to happen and I'm finally going to be happy and then everything will be okay and magically. Well, you've got to, you got to decide. The locus of change is inside of me and I've got to be in charge of making these decisions and changing my thoughts and doing the work and all of that stuff. Every good therapist is going to say that's the path to healing. It's not. And I'm going to fix you. It's. You're going to fix you with my help, with God's help. It's self help, but it's not self reliance. It's a team. But that's, that's the, that's the switch is I've got to switch my locus of change inside of me and be willing to be responsible for the things I think, feel, believe and do going forward.
[00:51:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for saying that. We're big proponents of therapy and all the things. And yes, true, it is. It's about choosing to participate in our own healing. From however this looks. I know we're quickly running out of time here, but I want to ask you for the person that's listening that maybe is like, this is great, but I'm still exhausted of trying to do all the things. Maybe they're still trying to exert the effort. Maybe they're still trying to perform. They're trying to earn healing or something from God. Even if they feel like they're doing all the things that you're saying, right? They're praying, they're trying to rewiring their brain and seeking help. And the healing still is not coming. What encouragement would you have for them?
[00:51:58] Speaker A: I would say I lost my little boy almost 13 years ago.
And there's not a one aha moment that happens on a journey like that where you say, hey, I'm healed. You know, there's just not one. As much as we want one, there's not one. It's a process. And there's days when I still feel like it just happened yesterday.
But what I know, what I can tell you for sure as being an objective scientist about this process too, because I've always looked at it, that is something I was experiencing, a journey I was on with my family of trying to heal, but also sort of curious about how that process works. That's why I keep writing books about it. And I wrote a book about brain tumors and how people handle that kind of news, and a book about losing my son and the grief and the trauma and the healing, and then this book about how our brains and minds work together to help us overcome whatever. The reason I keep doing that is because I'm curious about the process. And what I can tell you about the process is that it doesn't change dramatically. It changes quietly and steadily and sometimes in a messy sort of back and forth way. Don't get confused by everybody telling you about the stages of grief. Elizabeth Kubler's Ross's famous five stages of grief were not written to explain what happens after somebody's kid dies or spouse dies or something like that. They were written specifically in response to research that she did about how individuals handle the news that they have a terminal diagnosis that was specifically for those people.
And so her five stages, which are widely discounted and essentially discarded now as a way that people grieve, because most people don't grieve that way.
They were never intended to explain what you're going to experience when you're going through something hard.
And so what I've discovered is no two people grieve, even in a marriage. They don't grieve in the same way. They don't heal in the same way. They don't experience development and change over time in the same way. It's like a carousel. Everybody's going the same direction, but they're up and down at different times. And so just be aware that the process never reaches a finish line. And so. So when you say gosh God, it's been two years, and I don't feel a whole lot better. Where are you in this? Like, just. He's there. What I've noticed is that God comes alongside us. He keeps his promises. Psalm 34:18 is close to you. When you're brokenhearted, he really will be. He equips you. And just one little, one little more neuroscience fact I'll give you. Like, all of us think that the happiest life is one that avoids all the hard stuff. But the truth is your brain neurologically requires hard stuff in order for you to get strong enough to go through more hard stuff. All of us go through more than one hard thing. There's a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. It's right in the middle of the brain, and it's the part that gets turned off in people that get stuck in complex grief. Like, people who get to a place and they just can't get better. They just get stuck. It's because the cingulate gets stuck and it turns off, basically.
And there's really good research that shows that if you can make yourself do something that you don't feel like doing a small thing, make your bed, you know, go to work that day, call your sister. When you're hurting, you don't feel like it, make yourself do it anyway. Tell your brain, hey, I'm going to do this anyway. The cingulate gyrus lights up a little bit, and it turns out to be the same area that's involved in willpower and resilience and grit. And what they figured out is that the cingulate gets fired up when you do something hard that you don't want to do. And then it basically reinforces itself. And the next time you need to do a hard thing, any hard thing, it's easier.
And then over time, it gets more and more robust, and it gets easier and easier to motivate yourself. And those people's complex grief gets better. And so turns out the Bible says in Romans 5, 3 through 5, that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And so if you look at that in the context of what we've learned from neuroscience, now you say, wait a minute, I can't get to hope without starting with suffering, because my brain needs suffering to produce endurance, to give me that durable character. And then, then I get to becoming the kind of person who's proven to myself that I can do hard things when I don't feel like it. That gives me character.
And then knowing That I was able to do that before gives me hope that I can do it again. And so neuroscience is again proving it out. So just persist, don't quit. Keep telling your brain who's boss. God has equipped you with everything you need. That's second Peter 1:3. It says, I've given you everything you need for life. It doesn't say, I've given you some of the things that you need for part of your life. It says, I've given you the things that you need. And he means he's giving you the hardware and the system by which your hardware updates itself in response to thinking better thoughts. So Philippians 4:3, 4, 6, 8, Romans 12:1 3, Ephesians 4, 17, 23, and 2nd Peter 1.
Sorry, 2nd Peter 1:3 is, he's giving you everything you need. Those four verses, just look at the transcript and memorize those. That's the stuff you need to be thinking about that will help you find the juice to keep going when it feels like you're not making rapid progress, because you won't.
[00:56:58] Speaker B: Thank you. That's very hopeful.
Last. Last question for you, Lee, is because a lot of this is personal, right? A lot of this is about what we think and how we think and.
But the show, hopefully these conversations and interviews are to help disciple the listeners to make the world around them better, right? To bring a little bit of heaven to earth for people around them. And so because the podcast is called Becoming Church, how can the people listening become the church to the people around them? Maybe if there are other people around them who are, you know, experiencing grief or trauma or need some healing.
[00:57:29] Speaker A: This is my favorite question you've asked me.
So. So it turns out I wrote in the book, there's a thing called the two patient rule. Like, this is never just about you, okay? And so it turns out that God made us to be impactful of other people for two reasons. So impactful of other people in at least three different ways. But there's a thing in your brain called mirror neurons that are in your parietal lobe. And the mirror neurons are why when you jump on camera and I first see your face and you're smiling, I smile, too. Before I think about it, we mirror each other's emotional state. We do that neurologically because the evolutionary biologists think it's a survival thing. Like, if you smile at me, I'm less likely to kill you. Right? But that's not what it is. It's that God aligns our nervous systems because we impact other people. And if somebody's having a hard time, and they see you having less of a hard time, their mood's going to move up towards yours.
Or if you're really negative, it may drive theirs down. So we have to responsibility with this too. That's why you have the Debbie Downer effect. When somebody walks in the room and they're super bad mood, you get in a bad mood too, even if you don't communicate with them. That's not just mirror neurons, but there's this electromagnetic field that your heart puts out that goes to about 15 meters around us. That has been shown even through walls. And people that are unaware that other people are out there. Your vital signs affect other people's heart rate and blood pressure. So that means that you're responsible for carrying yourself in such a way that can impact other people positively or negatively. And so how do we become church? Like when you're carrying something and working through it and getting better and doing the work and progressing, that's going to lift other people who are doing the same thing. And the last one is a really weird phenomenon called quantum entanglement. And this is the way our molecules on a quantum level connect with other people and entangle with them. And this is how you know, you can be at home and you can just know that your husband needs you to call him, right? And you'll make a phone call and he'll go, thank goodness you caught. I was just. I was just thinking about you. I really needed to talk to you right then. And it happens so much that it's not a coincidence. That's quantum entanglement. And so if you entangle yourself with other people in a way that, that. That they begin to be influenced by your spiritual state.
It's not weird quasi metaphysics. It's actually just quantum mechanics that God gave you. You can make other people better and impact them without speaking to them or being close to them. And so those three things together. But the fourth reason, the reason God did all that besides helping you, is that there's this verse in Titus 2:10 that says that we're supposed to adorn the gospel. And that word adorn is translated in the Greek as cosmeo, which is the word that we use for cosmetics and makeup. And so part of our mission is to make the gospel more attractive to other people. And so I would just say that that doesn't have anything to do with getting people to come to your church and give more money and, you know, hire more musicians and all that. It's not about that. It's about showing people that when they're suffering, that there's something about you that's allowing you to navigate your suffering in a way that feels hopeful to them because their suffering is just beating them up and killing them. And they see you getting better and finding hope again and moving forward, forward and finding purpose and mission again and all that stuff. And they say, I want some of that because it's hopeful. Right? And so we have this mission to impact other people, help other people along, and to steward our pain. This verse, Luke 12:48 says, to whom much is given, much is required. And Lisa turned to me one day as we were grieving. She said, I think that includes our pain too. Like, I think we're supposed to use it to help other people. And that's true. And so because when you do that, you give it purpose. And giving something purpose makes it stop feeling like suffering so much. And so doing that allows you to adorn the gospel, to bring people into the church because they find hope there, not because they find entertainment there. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:01:19] Speaker B: To make the gospel attractive is the whole kind of point.
Lee, this has been incredible. I could. Listen, I'm like, I have taken two pages of notes here.
[01:01:28] Speaker A: Good.
[01:01:29] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you so much. We will link up.
I will link up the book in the show notes and all of the things and just encourage people to. I believe you have a YouTube channel, is that right?
[01:01:37] Speaker A: Yep. Yeptolewaram.
[01:01:39] Speaker B: Thank you so much for being here.
[01:01:41] Speaker A: Thank you. It was great to be with you, Kristen.
[01:01:47] Speaker B: Admittedly, I can geek out over psychological things, but I truly found that conversation so fascinating. I hope you heard Lee's heart that this message is not about trying hard, harder, having stronger faith, or getting over what's hard. Medicine, therapy, psychiatry, science and the Holy Spirit can and do all work together. When you decide to join in with your own healing. If you need someone to talk to or you just don't know how to begin, I put a few links in the show notes so you can find someone near you.
Take the courageous step to do the hard thing of picking up the phone. Because you, my friend, have value and you are worthy of all the time and effort and support required to live the free and abundant life God has for you.
Please share this episode with someone that you know who is healing, who deals with anxiety, who is living in the after effects of grief or trauma. It's a great way to let them know that you see them, that you care, that you aren't putting their healing on a timeline and that nothing they are going through is impossible.
Until next time. Thanks so much for listening and keep becoming the church, the people around you.
