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Hey friend,
I was sitting in my car crying my eyes out. Chris Tomlin’s song Sovereign was playing on the radio and I was making myself sing along, trying to preach to my own soul.
“Sovereign in my greatest joy, sovereign in my deepest cry,” I stuttered between waves of grief and tears.
We’d lost our son only a couple of weeks before, and I was in the parking lot of the local grocery store, trying so hard to find something that felt like faith in that moment, because all I could really feel was pain.
“In your everlasting arms all the pieces of my life from beginning to the end, I can trust you…”
I was singing all the right words: God is good. God is sovereign. God works all things together for good. All true. All correct. And I believed them, but for the first time in my life, that belief was just an intellectual assent, a checklist.
But none of it was touching the knot in my chest, and I didn’t feel anything towards God other than to wonder why, if those things were really true of him, did it feel like I couldn’t trust him anymore?
It wasn’t until I stopped reciting and started remembering, actually remembering specific moments when God had shown up for me before, that the knot loosened. That difference, between reciting true things and remembering a trustworthy person, turns out to be written into the actual Greek of the New Testament, and it’s written into your brain too.
One Greek word, three English words
I had a conversation with my friend, the brilliant author Brant Hansen, the other day, and he said something that finally helped me understand why I’d been struggling so much that day in the Publix parking lot.
Brant pointed out something most people never notice: the New Testament words for “faith,” “belief,” and “trust” are frequently the exact same Greek word. Pistis, the noun. Pisteuō, the verb.
English translators had to split one Greek word-group across three separate English word-families, because that’s what English gives them to work with.
Greek had one concept. We got three words, and one of them, “believe,” has drifted over the centuries into something narrower than what the original word meant. In modern English, “I believe X” usually just means “I hold X to be factually true.” Data. A box checked.
That’s not what pisteuō was built to carry. It’s closer to words like allegiance or fidelity, a decision to trust someone. Which is why James can write one of the more convicting lines in the entire Bible:
“You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe, and shudder.” (James 2:19, ESV)
Read that again. The demons have correct theology. Better than most of ours, honestly. They’re not confused about who God is, they don’t fall for trite reductions of Jesus into a social construct or friendly “He gets us” buddy.
They pisteuō, they believe he’s God. That’s the same word, the same verb. But their response isn’t trust.
It’s dread.
That’s belief with zero trust attached, and Scripture holds it up as a warning, not a model.
Your brain runs two very different modes for this
This is where the neuroscience gets interesting, and it comes from a book that changed how I think, my friend Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. I’ve read McGilchrist’s work closely and had the chance to talk with him directly about it on my podcast, so I want to be precise about what he actually argues, because it’s more specific than “left brain bad, right brain good.”
Both hemispheres of your brain process everything. McGilchrist’s real point is about mode of attention, not which hemisphere owns which topic.
Left-hemisphere attention is narrow. It grasps. It flattens the world into fixed, re-usable data points so you can manipulate and categorize it.
Right-hemisphere attention is broad. It holds context, relationship, the sense of a living story and big picture rather than simply turning everything into an object to be identified and filed.
And here’s the part that matters most: McGilchrist’s title isn’t “Two Equal Partners.” It’s The Master and His Emissary. The right hemisphere is supposed to be master; holding the whole picture, the relationship, the living presence of God. The left hemisphere is supposed to be emissary, a useful servant sent out to analyze and report back. The trouble starts when the servant climbs onto the throne and starts mistaking its narrow, flattened map for the whole territory.
We’ve talked before about the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, in which you mistake the map for the actual ground you’re walking, so that if the map is wrong, you’re going to get lost. That’s what happens when we let the left hemisphere run the show. And in our relationship with God, that can lead to a lot of box-checking our beliefs without any trust we can count on when things get hard.
That’s belief without trust in a single sentence. It’s having correct data sitting on a throne it was never meant to occupy.
The daily discipline of recentering
There’s a prayer I say most mornings, from the Lectio 365 app, that names this problem better than I ever could:
“As I enter prayer now, I pause to be still, to breathe slowly, to recenter my scattered senses on the presence of God.”
Recenter. Not “reload the facts.” Recenter, because the senses scatter, they drift into that left-hemisphere grasping mode day after day and they have to be brought back.
Trust isn’t a fact you file away once and never revisit. It’s built the way trust is built in any real relationship, through repeated, remembered history with a Person who has shown up before.
The Old-Testament prophet Habakkuk understood this. He wrote it down while looking straight at circumstances that gave him no data to work with:
“Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines... yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.” (Habakkuk 3:17-18, ESV)
There’s no data in that verse, but Habakkuk trusts God anyway, built on a track record, not a checklist.
The self-brain surgery of it
Here’s the procedure. When you catch yourself reciting truth at your own anxiety and getting nowhere, that’s usually a sign your left hemisphere emissary is trying to run the operation by itself.
Don’t abandon the facts. You still need the emissary, because correct theology matters. But send it out with an assignment to go retrieve the history. Not, “Is it true that God is good?” Rather, “When, specifically, has He been good to me before?”
Name the date. Name the moment. Let the remembering, not just the reciting, do the work of recentering your scattered senses on a Person you actually know.
That’s the difference between checking a box and building a relationship.
One you can do once. The other you have to keep doing, every day, for the rest of your life. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s what it means to trust someone instead of merely believing a fact about them.
It’s hard and holy work. But your brain was built to do it, one remembered moment at a time.
If this resonated, I’d love it if you’d share it with someone who needs to hear the difference between believing and trusting today. And if you haven’t read it yet, my New York Times bestselling book “The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery” walks through the full framework behind everything I write here.
You can get the training you need to master self-brain surgery in my new book. You can go even deeper in The School of Self-Brain Surgery.
The good news is, you can start today.
Be sure to check out the archive of previous posts if you missed last week’s letter.
Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope),
Lee
II Timothy 1:7, “For you were not given a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind.”
From the banks of the North Platte river on Moon River Ranch in Nebraska, USA
Disclaimer: This letter is for informational purposes only. It contains general information, drawn from my experience, research, and best practices. It is not health care advice, and is not intended to replace the counsel of your health care provider. Consult your provider before starting any new treatments or making changes to your health routine. This message does not constitute a doctor-patient relationship between us.
