Good morning my friend.
I have a confession to make. Sometimes your friend Dr. Warren doesn’t practice what he preaches. This past week was a good example, and perhaps if I shared what I was dealing with, it might help you, if you find yourself in a similar frame of mind.
Note: This letter has many links to articles and podcasts that will help you.
Please take time to use them as needed, and come back here as the week plays out if you need some encouragement.
We’ve been going through a stressful time lately. The details aren’t for me to share right now, but basically its the same stuff you deal with: aging family members and losing people we love, professional stress and uncertainty, feeling stuck (for me, the way I feel every time I start writing a book and have to overcome the huge inertia of NOT writing a book), huge decisions that need to be made, etc.
Like I said, the details aren’t important, but while I constantly tell YOU that you can’t change your life until you change your mind, I actually spent a few days while Lisa and Tata were out of town suffering under a cloud of negative thinking.
Here’s what turned me around: I was on the phone with Lisa and I confessed to her that I wasn’t getting anything done, hadn’t written much while she was away, and was pretty grumpy. She said something like, “Go outside and let God show you something else to think about.”
I’ve learned not to argue with Lisa, so even though it had been raining all afternoon, I stepped outside onto the back porch and had my breath taken away. The sunlight made the riverbank gleam with gold, and a rainbow was touching down just across the channel. It was stunning.
Rainbows always remind me that God is keeping his promises. I remember the double rainbow over the highway we saw on the drive home from Mitch’s funeral in 2013, that told us God hadn’t forgotten us. And last week, it reminded me of the reality that even when things feel hard, there is still so much right and good and beautiful at the same time.
The next morning, I saw an owl standing in the river, which I’d never seen before. I saw a mom pheasant leading her babies across the field, two geese swimming with their goslings, and many other reminders that God is always making beauty and caring for his creation, even when things seem hard.
Then, yesterday morning, I read this post from Ann Voskamp, which reminded me of three neuroscience truths that I’m always telling you (with links to recent podcasts about these things):
Feelings aren’t facts, they are chemical events in your brain (this is one of the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery)
The type and amount of attention we give something makes that thing more real. As Ann put it, “What we focus on is what forms us.”
You can’t be anxious and grateful at the same time. If you feel stressed, remember that gratitude overwhelms overwhelm.
(Ann has been kind enough to share two of my books on her blog, which you can read here and here if you’d like).
And so, spurred on to good works by my lovely and brilliant wife, and the pastoral words of Ann Voskamp, I realized that I didn’t need a brain transplant after all, I just needed to follow my own self-brain surgery advice.
So, let me take you through the operation I performed on myself yesterday, and here’s the Instagram post if you want the pictures:
Feeling: “I’m stuck, overwhelmed, and a little sad that things aren’t going the way I want them to.”
Thought Biopsy (II Corinthians 10:5) result: “While these things are somewhat true, they’re normal parts of life and there are still a lot of things going RIGHT. So the diagnosis is that I have a lousy attitude right now.”
Treatment Plan: I needed to perform a Lousy Attitude Lobotomy. I didn’t need a whole new brain, I just needed to whack that lousy attitude.
When I need to change my mind, I start with scripture. I went back to one of my favorite Biblical self-brain surgeons, the Old Testament Prophet Habakkuk, and remembered the six lessons we can learn from him about how if and when are dangerous thought cancers that steal our joy and can give us lousy attitudes and broken hearts. The thought transplant to replace them with though and yet reliably gets things under control. Check these two episodes out for more.
If you’re feeling sad, stressed, sick, stuck, or just dealing with a lousy attitude like I was, the solution is self-brain surgery. Remember who God is, and that two things can be true at the same time (there can be tears and rainbows, pain and baby pheasants even in the same moment). Remember that you don’t need a new brain, because your mind can renew and restore your brain, when you submit your thoughts and feelings to the Great Physician (Romans 12:2).
You can’t change your life until you change your mind, my friend. And this week, I had to remember that lesson myself.
I needed self-brain surgery, and it worked like a charm. Remember this important fact though: Self-Brain surgery doesn’t magically make all your problems go away. Good luck finding that in the Bible. As Pete Greig said on my podcast last week, “God doesn’t airlift us out of trouble, he parachutes into our problems and helps us deal with them.”
From a neuroscience perspective, the renewing of our minds is all about switching the direction of our response to negative thinking. The default for many of us is automatically responding to a bad thought like, “I’m so overwhelmed right now,” with a quick trip from hippocampus to amygdala and into the physiological reactions that reinforce or initial thought that this feeling of overwhelm should cause fear and means disaster is afoot. That fight-flight-freeze response is unhelpful most of the time (unless a bear is chasing you).
If instead we can pause, biopsy the thought, realize it’s a feeling and not a fact, and then make the switch from hippocampus to frontal lobe where we can get reason and intellect and the ability to listen for God’s voice in play again, we begin to calm down and realize that, while we may still have problems, we are actually equipped and have the help from him to deal with them in a healthy way.
We move from reaction to response, and begin to land on something that feels like hope. (This is what II Timothy 1:7 is about. God didn’t give you a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind. He equipped you with everything you need to change from fear to focus! Also see II Peter 1:3)
What’s going on in your life that you need to change your mind about?
The good news is, you can start today.
Lisa and I are praying for you.
Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope),
Lee
Psalm 71:14 ("As for me, I will always have hope.")
From the banks of the North Platte river on Moon River Ranch in Nebraska, USA
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Yes, will remind myself ... dum spiro spero. Thank you and prayers for you and yours.