Hope is the First Dose | Dr. Lee Warren

as we go along. Find out more at building relationships.us. Gary, you've gone through some hard life events and you've walked through some difficult times with families at your church, right?

and and all of those things through the years. So I'm very excited about our conversation today, and I know that our listeners are going to find this to be helpful.

of numerous high impact medication devices. You got to know that before we talk with him. He and his wife, Lisa, have four adult children, four grandchildren. They live in Nebraska and are featured resource again is Hope is the first dose. You can find out more at building relationships.us.

turns out, um, God had other plans for me. And, um, during my third year of medical school, uh, my son Mitchell decided to be born, and he he kind of wrecked my schedule, and they allowed me to change my schedule so I could take a little time off when Mitch was born, and I ended up having to take a rotation in neurosurgery, which was never on my radar. And after just a day or two on the neurosurgery service, man, there were computers and lasers and brain surgery, and it

was just the coolest thing. And I found my calling because of a schedule change that came about because of my son, Mitch and I had grown up around airplanes. Both my parents were private pilots, and and I just always loved flying and all of that kind of things. So when it got time to figure out how I was going to pay for medical school, I found out about the Air Force scholarship, and I applied for it and was blessed to receive a full scholarship from the

US Air Force. So I went to med school. You paid for it. So thank you for that taxpayer school.

got brought to our hospital. So we operated on on the quote unquote good guys and the bad guys, and we provided the same care for the insurgents that were setting off the bombs, as we did for the military members and civilians who were injured by them. And so there was a a gentleman who was brought in, who was said by the security forces to have been the the guy who set this bomb off. And it was amazing to see how everybody taking care of him was

sort of almost afraid of him. And, you know, just sort of at first or kind of almost begrudgingly taking care of this guy because he was the one who killed all these American servicemen and. As we did our jobs and we took care of them. A few days later, some other soldiers showed up who had been on the scene and they basically said, no, y'all got the wrong guy.

This man was just standing there. He was innocent, and it was amazing to see how everybody's attitudes changed towards this person because we had the right story attached to him. And after that, this was really early in my deployment, and after that, it was amazing how everybody just made this decision that, hey, we don't know the whole story of anybody, and our job is to just take care

of people. And that just really transformed the whole deployment, is that we no longer had this burden that we thought we needed to know whether somebody was good or bad. And it just kind of reminded me of how Jesus takes care of all of us, even though we don't deserve it. So that that kind of was one of the memories that sticks out the most.

victim kind of thing. But we also have this whole group of things that happen to many of us in our lives that that are less easy to define, these emotional wounds that happen to us, um, the death of a dream or the loss of a relationship or things that aren't necessarily classified as traumas or tragedies, but they're equally massive. And so I wanted to give space to the people who are hurting out there with a less traditional definition of their problem. And so for us, you know,

we we lost a son in 2013. I'm sure we'll talk about that. And it was it was the most devastating thing that ever happened to us. And it and it was something that happened to a member of our family. And it was just it was massive. I couldn't find another way to describe it. So I so I just use that as the title to just try to cover all the different ways that humans can feel pain.

you know, hopelessness is really deadlier than cancer. So one of my jobs is to help people find a way to land on some ability to move forward and and find hope no matter what they're facing. And so I started studying the ways that people handle these issues. And I've noticed that there's kind of four different ways that and I think most people are a blend of these things. But there are sort of four different categories. I describe

them in the book with graphs and pictures. But but there's these people that seem to be almost untouchable, right? That they have their faith figured out. They know who they are, they've made their decisions about what they believe. And when something hard happens, it's like it's almost like it doesn't faze them. They just sort of plow through it. And they set a good, good example for everybody. And I'm not one of those people, by the way, but you see them. And then the polar opposite is the

group that I call crashers in the book. And these are the people that would say that they have a faith or they're strong or they're happy or whatever. And then something hard happens and it just wipes them out. And and Gary, the thing I've noticed about these folks is that they crash emotionally and even if they survive their illness, some of these people never make it back to anything that would look like a life again, happiness

or hopefulness again. And you know, this this person is the one that, you know, lost their their wife 30 years ago or, or something bad happened to him 30 years ago. And if you see him on the street today, that's still what they're going to talk about. They're still just identified by this thing that happened to them. And so they're they're crashers. And then there's the I think most of us are what I would call dippers, that something hard happens and it wipes us out for a while.

We're shaking our fist at God. We're not sure what we believe anymore. And somehow we land on something that holds. The bottom holds. And we and we find our feet and we find our faith, and we sort of make it back to some new state that's different but still meaningful. And that's probably most of us. I call them dippers in the book. And the most surprising group. I had a patient named Joey, who I call him a climber.

Joey was this down and out kid who his mom died at birth and his dad was a criminal and never was around. Abandoned them and he. Was a drug addict, and I met Joey when he was a sort of got in a fight with the drug enforcement agent at a crack house that he was running, and got hit in the head with a club and had a skull fracture. I had to do emergency surgery on him, and in the course of that surgery, discovered that Joey had a

brain tumor that had not been previously diagnosed. And so when I told him after surgery, hey, you've got brain cancer, he sort of shrugged his shoulders and kind of said, well, of course, you know, why wouldn't I have brain cancer? Everything else in my life is terrible. And so he had this, this bad life. But over the course of the year in which his cancer was raging and he ended up dying, he found a chaplain, befriended him and showed him about Jesus, and he reconnected with his family.

He just sort of came alive and found hope in the last year of his life. And shortly before he died, Joey told me, this is the best year ever, like I've had the best year of my whole life. And so he he found that adversity for him kind of opened the door for him to come alive for the very first time. And so I just saw this, this host of different ways that people respond to trauma and tragedy and tried to sort out what separates them from each other. Yeah.

It's written by our guest, doctor Lee Warren. Find out more at building relationships.us.

son Mitch has been stabbed to death. Um, it turns out that he and his best friend were both 19. Um, his boys had been best friends for many years, and and, uh, police found them both in this house. Uh, both stabbed to death. Three, three bloody knives in the house. And and, Gary, we never really got the story of what actually happened. There was a lot of speculation. Was it a third party? Was it a murder suicide? Was it, was it what?

And the police never gave us a satisfactory answer. And so we were given this, um, devastating, you know, horrible event in our lives. And it was made worse by the fact that we don't really know what happened.

police wouldn't let us go in, of course. And and it just was this, uh, slowly evolving nightmare that you kept thinking they were going to walk out and say it was all a mistake. You know, that sort of disbelief that you feel.

all out. In fact, the day before he died, this was a one of the things I struggle with God about is the day before Mitch died, he had called me and said, dad, I want to come home. I'm ready to go back to school. You know, you were right. I shouldn't have stepped out of school, and I love you. We had this great conversation for about an hour, and the last thing I heard my son say was, I love you. And the last thing he heard me say was that I loved him. And. And then 24 hours later, he was dead.

way through it. And and what happens is if you find your way through it like we have, it has evolved over time to where it's this weird, simultaneously worst moment in our lives. And at the same time, we've seen the way that God has been faithful and he's kept promises and he's made good things come of it. And and so we've we've found meaning and purpose in our lives despite losing Mitch and in some ways because of losing Mitch, that that ah, like I said, it's

just complex. And anybody that's been through something like that will be able to articulate that. There are ways in which their life has grown. And and I know that I'm a better person now, and I'm and I'm helping people in a different way than I could before. But at the same time, you would if you could snap your fingers and have them back, you would do it in a heartbeat.

It'd be easier. Turns out it's not. It's harder. And those people, in some ways, it'd be easier if we understood exactly what happened. But then when you have when you meet parents who know exactly what happened to their child, it's not easier. So I think that that old saying about how grief expands like a gas to fill up the container that it's in, that means that grief is different for everybody, and we all suffer together, but we grieve alone.

a while. And, um, in that very first week of going back to the office, I received a phone call from the emergency department of our hospital about a little boy who had been hurt on the playground at school and, and had a brain hemorrhage. And I agreed to look at the scan to give some advice. And as soon as I saw the scan, I knew this child was not going to survive long enough for us to fly

him to Birmingham or Atlanta. And I was the only neurosurgeon in Auburn, so that I had to decide that I was going to go back to take care of this kid, or he was going to die. And I just Lisa and I talked about it for a minute, and although I didn't think I had it in me at the same time, I couldn't let this boy die and have another set of parents go through what we had just gone through. So I went and took care of him.

you with it. And so hopelessness turns out to be the thing that the single deadliest thing that can happen to you. Because at that point, it doesn't matter what your disease or what the situation does, you're still not going to recover unless you can find a way towards hope.

gray hair one day. And and just physiologically, my body was breaking down and I felt like that guy in Lamentations that talks about how his God is grinding him to dust, you know, breaking his bones and grinding him to dust. We also know that it creates tremendous neurotransmitter problems in your brain. And so hopelessness creates an avenue that easily becomes crippling anxiety or depression or stuck in

grief states. And and so and physiologically also you can have hypertension, you can develop hormonal issues and imbalances and it can promote illness and reduce immunity. So hopelessness really hurts you all over your body. Mhm.

more grateful and think about better things. So it's clear that what you think about makes your life better. But now we can put somebody in a functional MRI scanner, for example, and we can ask you to think about something negative and we can see what happens to the blood flow and neurotransmitters state in your brain. And then we can ask you to think about something happy, some good memory that you have. And we can watch that

stuff change in real time. Like the the things you think about turn genes on and off in your brain. They influence the transcription of proteins. They influence the levels of neurotransmitters in the production of hormones. And that influences how cells get produced or reproduced in your body. Like

thoughts become things we say. So if you really want to learn how to change your life when you go through something hard, you have to do what Paul talks about in Second Corinthians chapter ten when he says, you have to take your thoughts captive like you have about 40,000 negative thoughts a day. It's been measured in 5 to 1. They're not true feelings and thoughts aren't necessarily true, but they come with such a commanding voice because it sounds like your voice that you think they are true.

And so if you can't learn how to think about what you think about, then you're always reacting to those negative thoughts. And if most of them are false, then you're spending most of your life reacting to something that's never true. And that can't lead you to a good place. So I had to learn. Like, for example, we had to get our thinking under control. And I'll give you a good example of that. Gary, I teach something called the bad thought biopsy just because I'm a brain surgeon.

So if I want to know what something is, if I see a spot on your scan, I want to know what it is. I put a needle in it and take a piece of it and look at it under the microscope, so I can identify what it is. Before I decide that you need chemotherapy or brain surgery or whatever you might need. Right. If I told you we're just going to go to surgery, every time he told me he had a headache, then you'd think I was crazy. So we have to we have to look

at the tissue. And if you do that with your thinking, sometimes you'll find that the thought is negative. And when it is and it's false, and you need to discard that false negative thought and replace it with a true one. But this the tricky thing, and I think this is a work of the enemy. Sometimes it's psychology and sometimes it's spiritual warfare, but sometimes you have a thought that is true. And for the bereaved parent, you'll have a

thought like, well, I've lost a child. I won't ever be able to be happy again, or, or I'm not a good parent, and you'll have those kinds of thoughts, but then you'll say, wait a minute, that is not true, that I'm not a good parent because I've been a good parent to my other kids, and then you can react instead of reacting to that false thought. You can react to the true thought that you are a good parent who's lost a child, right? But then sometimes you'll

have a thought that is true. Like like I've lost a child and I'm always going to be sad about that. And that's true. I'll always be sad about losing Mitch. But then what happens is they throw that sneaky second thought in there like, well, since I can't be happy again, then I might as well just drink until I can't feel anything. And that's not true, right? So you have to watch out for that follow on negative thought and react to the true ones and replace the false ones.

And that's how you can change your mind and change your life.

And we have this, what we call the tomorrow tax. Like, you wake up tomorrow and you got to pay a tax on what you did yesterday and you still have the same problem. And so numbing is a bad choice because you can't feel anything else when you're numb either. You can't selectively numb part of the problem and the

rest of your life is okay. You can't. You just end up numbing your whole life, and then your quality of life becomes defined by which numbing agent you choose instead of the opportunity you have to move forward.

for your children too. And so you, you try to, to buck up under it and make sure you be there for them when you can tell that they're having a hard time. And so we almost have to go in these cycles of, you know, I'm having a hard time and she's going to be strong right now. And, and it seems like we sort of play off each other and try to help each other. So so you have to notice that people have grieving schedules that they're

going to go through that are different than yours. And so I think it's a human nature thing that, you know, somebody that's outside of your family will say weird things like, oh, that happened a year ago. You haven't moved past that yet. You're not okay yet. They like they've got some kind of clock that happens when you're supposed to be grieving. And we have to be really careful not to do that with our loved ones, because everybody's on a different timetable.

And I think, as an aside, I think it's it's almost unfortunate that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross work has been applied so broadly across anybody who's hurting over anything because her, you know, everybody knows the five stages of grief. And they're all taught that in school. And and it's all over the internet. But but Kubler-Ross research was very specifically looking at people who had received news that they were dying, right, that

they had terminal cancer. And it was specifically studying how people react to the news that they have a terminal illness. And it was never she never intended it for a general model of how people grieve and over any type of trauma or stress. And so you'll find if you lose a child or you go through something massive like this, you're not going to proceed through denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and acceptance or depression and acceptance in an orderly way.

It's going to look more like a labyrinth, and you're going to go back and forth, and some days you'll be really angry, and some days you'll be sort of okay, and the next day you'll be denying it again, like it just you're going to move back and forth. And I think we tend to want it to be orderly when other people are experiencing it. And so we tend to sort of say, wow, you haven't moved through that yet.

You should be further along. And we just have to be really cognizant of the fact that we suffer together, but we grieve alone.

between circumstance and our emotional state. And in other words, the people who define whether they're happy or hopeful based on who they're married to, how long they live, what their financial situation is, if they if they tie their emotional sort of fortitude to a set of circumstances that they could potentially lose, then they're in great danger because you will lose those things. And that's what I've noticed. Like there is going to be a massive thing for you.

You are going to go through something hard. And so the more tightly coupled emotion and circumstances are in your life, the more danger you're in of becoming hopeless. When you lose some of those things that you thought you needed to have. And the other sort of sort of corollary to that is if you tie your emotional state to a set of circumstances, then you almost always find that when you achieve the thing that you thought you needed to be happy, the target will change and something else

will become necessary for you to be happy. And you can see this in people who achieve some great things, or famous people, or celebrities or athletes. When they finally get to that place that they thought they were going to be happy, and now they need to win one more award or become the MVP, or, you know, something else needs to happen, or they can't maintain that happiness

or that peace of mind. And so I think circumstances, the real bugaboo here, if you if you tie your joy or your hope to something that cannot be taken from you. And of course, Christians have a whole different definition of hope, right? Our hope is not for something, it's in someone. And so I think that's the secret for me. That's what I think I've noticed the most.

And the promises God did make. If you look at Jesus, he said two things John 1633 and this world, you're going to have trouble and but take heart. I've overcome the world. John 1010 he says, hey, there's a thief, and that thief is going to come to steal and kill and destroy your life. But I've come to give you an abundant life. And he says that in the midst of the story, he didn't say, I've come to zap you up and beam you out of this world and make everything go your way. It doesn't say that.

He says, I'm going to come down in your story with you and help you manage it in a way that you can have hope and real joy and real peace in the midst of that difficulty. And then I'm taking care of the rest of it on the back end. And so I think that's the that's the important piece. We shouldn't apply bad theology to our suffering. And that also plays into things that people say to you when your child dies, when people come along and say, well,

I guess God needed another angel. Yeah, things like that. He doesn't make angels out of people. Folks, that's a bad theology.

of a headache and their incision kind of hurts. And, and they always have a little reminder pain that they

used to have a brain tumor. And she was convinced in her mind, Gary, that she had a brain tumor growing back because she could feel something in her head and she could not believe that she was cured, even though multiple doctors and multiple scans showed her there is no more tumor in your head, and that that belief that she should be pain free, and that that lack of being pain free meant that she still had a tumor, drove her so desperately to her knees that she ended

up taking her own life, like she just could not accept the idea that you could be free of disease and still have pain. She couldn't believe it, and so she ended up killing herself that she couldn't even look at the scan and let me show it to her with her eyes. She she her belief was so powerful that she ended up committing suicide. And lucky Chuck was this guy whose wife had died of cancer a few years before, and she told him something that turned out

to be important and while she was sick. But while they did the biopsy and they hadn't had the results yet, she said, hey, Chuck, you decide. Now before we get these test results, you decide who God is to you. You decide what he means. You hang on to his promises. Because if I'm getting sicker and dying, you don't need to be worrying about whether God is real or not. Then you need to be able to rely on him then. So you make these decisions now before the hard time hits.

And when he later developed, brain cancer was just when I met him. He had already covered all that ground. He knew exactly who God was. He knew exactly what the promises were. And he made a decision. He had this fatal brain tumor, and he didn't want to go through chemotherapy and radiation and all that painful stuff. He just wanted to go home. So he made this informed decision that he was going to just just let God take him home. He didn't undergo all the treatment, and

he ended up passing away from his brain cancer. But he never wavered in his faith because he knew who he was. He knew where he was going, and he knew what God, who God was to him. And so he had something really wrong. But he didn't let it destroy his quality of life because he had hope in Christ. And Tina had nothing really wrong. And she let it ruin her life because she couldn't believe that you could have pain and purpose in the same life. Yeah.

I can if you just come to the hospital, I've got the team ready. We got the operating room ready, and we've got the plan that will put you back on your feet. And we're going to take good care of you. But the morning of surgery, if you wake up and you say, you know what? I don't think those doctors can help me. I really don't think I'm

going to go down to that hospital. You can't get the treatment plan unless you have enough hope in the efficacy of that plan to put yourself in the car and go down to the hospital and sign the consent form and get surgery, right. So hope turns out to be the first dose, like hope is the reason that you can get yourself in the hospital and let the Great Physician take care of you.

I remember the pain I felt in my marriage and the times I thought there was no hope, too. So, you know. Yeah. Which is really a basic way of trying to help them. Uh, go on. My hope for a little while until they can get hope, you know. But but hope really is a choice, right? I mean, it's it's not an emotion. It's it's a choice.

is not the event that happens to you, right? It's what happens inside you in response to that event. And so then you can learn well, if it's not the event that happened, because I can't change that. It's the responses, then I can learn to analyze those responses and change them and I can develop healthier responses. Then I can

really find hope we get to move forward. So I think the role for the therapist there is crucial to help us to break down those internal stories and those voices that we hear in the in the patterns of behavior that we've developed and protected a lot of times. And the therapist is really crucial part of that plan.

babies are starving to death. And then the writer in the third chapter, in the middle of the problem, not not after the problem has happened, but in the middle of it, he finds a way towards hope by remembering what God has done in the past. He goes back in memory and says, wait a minute, I'm not the first person this has ever happened to. God's come through for other people before. He's come through for me before. Like,

I've got to this point in my life and I'm alive. So, so good things that God has been able to do good things out of bad things in the past. And therefore there's a reasonable basis for hope that he'll do it again. And he goes through this thing even gets to the point where he says, I've lost all hope. And then in the next breath he says, but in this I take hope. And then he recounts all those things. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies

never come to an end. All that stuff. And he builds a case for why it's reasonable to take hope, right? And so then he starts moving forward as if those promises are true, because he knows they have been in the past for other people. And that's how he's able to find himself hopeful again, even though the story isn't over yet. And I think in a New Testament theological concept, we have the same idea when Paul says, you know,

forget what's behind strain towards what's ahead. God's got a plan for you, and he's going to help you change your mind. And it's not you never need to give up. It's always hope is always just around the corner is how Romans 1212 is translated in the voice. I love that hope's always just around the corner.

And so that, that put this, that put the, the point on the problem where we couldn't just wallow in our misery because we had her right in front of us, that was depending on us. So, so the first thing is we just loved on her and tried to make sure that we helped her as much as we could to get back on her feet. And then for me, we had our other three kids were scattered around the country, and I felt like, I'm this guy who communicates best through writing. So I started emailing all of them as

a bunch every day. Something hopeful. I just said, I'm going to find some way to encourage my family today. And so Lisa and I would scour things and find scriptures and just and we started emailing and the kids started forwarding that stuff, and before long that turned into a newsletter and a blog and all this stuff that I do today. But it started with this, this burden

that I had to say. I believe God has promises for us that are still valid, even though we've lost a child, and I need to share that with my kids so they don't lose hope too. And so for for me, it was just this daily sort of interaction with the kids that made me. I knew that they weren't going to get up in the morning and decide to lead me, that I they were looking to me to lead them. And so Lisa and I did that, and I'm just grateful that Katelyn was still at home with us.

put some pressure on it and stop the bleeding. You know, get some people around you who are going to comfort you. Find you something that's encouraging some scripture or some some words or some books or some some podcasts or something. When you're ready to just start feeding yourself something hopeful, but don't think that you've got to recover and, you know, get in therapy and sign up for a support group and all that the day it happens. So you're not

going to be ready for that. You got to let the acute phase of the injury settle down a little bit. But there's going to come a time in some period of time it'll be different for everyone. When you know it's time to start moving forward in your life again, you just feel it. You feel like I got to get moving or I'm going to get stuck here. And if you do that, if you feel that, then it's time to start moving. And that might look different for everybody.

For us, there was a day when we said, you know, we really ought to get out of bed today and put our pants on and go check the mail like it was little things like that. There were some days when that's all we had the juice to do. As time goes by, you'll find more and more traction. And if you put good people around you. And that's why I think community and church and things like that are so important. You put some good people around you, people who love you and are going to say, hey, you know,

maybe we ought to take a walk today. Maybe let's go get some lunch. You know, you start moving and moving creates energy. Energy creates optimism, I think, and optimism can create hope. Just pay attention to those little nudges of your spirit that says, hey, it's time to move a little bit. And that's when these bigger ideas, these treatment plans and, and self brain surgery and all those things will start being helpful to you.

want to give a copy of this to. But again, thank you, Doctor Warren, for being with us and sharing your own experience as well as you know, what you have learned through the years in terms of responding to very difficult things in life.