Adversity is the Operating Room (S15E20)

The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast

Dr. Lee Warren explores the intersection of neuroscience and theology to argue that adversity is never wasted. Drawing from his experiences

Key takeaways

• Dr. Warren argues that while God does not cause adversity, He uses it for the good of those who love Him as per Romans 8:28.
• The neurological concept of 'learned helplessness' can lead individuals to generalize a lack of control into future situations where agency is actually possible.

Main topics

• Theology of suffering
• Neuroscience of adversity

Notable quotes

Adversity is never wasted, even when it's not explained.

Conclusion

The episode provides a powerful framework for viewing hardship as a to

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I was standing over a patient in the middle of the night in Iraq, another in a series of mass casualties that had kept us operating almost 24 hours a day, for over a week. I was exhausted. I was frustrated. I was so tired of bombs going off and blowing up people, and in this case, trying desperately to save the life of a young American soldier. And I remember looking down and thinking how badly this was all going. Not the particular case, but just the fact that we were at war. And it didn't make sense. Why did people want to kill each other? Why were they blowing each other up? And this poor young man, his brain was swollen. He had a set of devastating injuries. And I just wanted to know why. I remember asking God my famous question. I did a whole video about it recently. was this really necessary? Not about that case, but about the question, is this really necessary, God? And all those times that we find ourselves shaking our fists and wondering why we're dealing with such adversity. And I remember in that moment having this split-second thought, not how do I fix this person or what's going to happen, but why is this happening at all? That's a normal thought, right? Everybody has those thoughts. And I know that you've had this thought before, my friend. All of us have. Everybody that's going to hear this podcast all over the world has had that thought, why is this happening, God? Why is this necessary? Not in an operating room, maybe. Maybe your thought was in a hospital waiting room or standing in a kitchen after a phone call that you didn't want to get or lying awake next to somebody you love wondering if the diagnosis or the layoff or the marriage falling apart, the grief that won't lift, if it means something or if it's just static in a... cold and meaningless universe. We have those kinds of doubts. Is it just bad luck with no signal at all? Or is God turning his back on us? Or is God even alive? Is there really even a God? All those kinds of thoughts that we have and we wonder why it's all necessary. Here's what I've come to believe from the operating room and from the book that I built my worldview around before I ever picked up a scalpel, the Bible. Adversity is never wasted, even when it's not explained. God doesn't cause it. But he will use it. And that's what we're going to talk about today. I want to show you both the neuroscience and the theology behind the claim that I have that adversity is never wasted because it's not just something we say to make hard things feel better. It's something I believe is actually mechanically, spiritually true. That's where we're going today. Let's scrub in and get after it. Speaker 1 (2:36) Hey, it's your friend, Dr. Lee Warren, hopefully your favorite internet brain surgeon. I'm really glad you're back for part two. If you missed part one, the mind is the battlefield. Go back and watch that one. It's on the YouTube channel or on your audio podcast player. We laid the groundwork there for everything we're going to build on today. I just want to remind you where we're going. This is a three-part series of looking at my 10 commandments of self-brain surgery from my... New York Times bestselling book, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery, which you need to read because it's the textbook for everything we do on this podcast. But I'm tying the Ten Commandments to Dr. Charles Stanley's 30 Life Principles. Somebody mentioned them in a YouTube comment not long ago, and I hadn't seen them somehow, so I went and read them. They're amazing. And all credit for Dr. Stanley and his InTouch Ministries for the framework. They're so valuable and so useful. And I put a list of them in the show notes so you can see the whole list and links back to his sermons and his archives. Dr. Stanley, tremendous blessing to the kingdom and to people all over the world. And I just want to tie the commandments to those principles because I think there's some value in looking at how you can come at something from multiple angles, right? You can come at things from a neuroscience angle. You can come at them from physics. You can come at them from theology or philosophy or any other aspect. And you may get to some of the same answers or you may hopefully just get a broader picture of a whole version of the truth. So today's episode is called Adversity is the Operating Room. Not adversity in the operating room. That'd be a whole different conversation. But adversity is the operating room. And we're going to talk about the commandment that I probably get asked about more than any of the others, refusing to participate in our own demise. Now, I said a minute ago, let's scrub in. If you're new here, if you're new to the podcast, we always take a minute to scrub into these procedures, these operations, these episodes. When I do surgery in the regular operating room, I spend about six minutes washing my hands. I stand out at the scrub sink. I'm getting my head clear. I'm not just cleaning the dirt off my hands. so I don't take it into the operating room. I'm also clearing my mind of anything that might distract me or take me away from the mission, which is to take care of my patient. In self-brain surgery, you're the surgeon, but you're also the patient. And so you need to lay aside anything that's distracting you, cast off anything that's holding you back, and just set it aside. We'll come back to it, deal with it later. You're not ignoring it or pretending like there's not real issues to be dealt with. You're just making sure you can focus and get everything clear. So let's scrub in. Before we do that, I just want to remind you, I'm really proud of you for doing this hard and holy work, for showing up. You could be doing anything else in the world right now, but you're here with me, and that's good. Lisa and I pray for you every day, and we are super proud of you. So fist bump, high five, bro hug. Somebody wrote in the other day and said, hey, hugs can be for gals too. Understand when I say bro hug, that's a friendly side hug that I would give you, whether you're a bro or a gal. It's not gender specific. It's just what they call that kind of hug, bro hug. Okay, so. Bro hug, fist bump, high five. Just saying I'm proud of you. Let's go. I want you to know that Dr. Stanley's principle, the 18th one, says this. As a child of a sovereign God, we are never victims of our circumstances. As a child of a sovereign God, we are never victims of our circumstances. That sounds hard and it's countercultural because our culture right now wants you to think that you're a victim of somebody else's malfeasance. You're a victim of your trauma, your tragedy, your massive thing. You're a victim of your diagnosis. You're a victim of your circumstance. You're a victim of the parents that raised you or the poverty level you were raised in or whatever. You're a victim because you were raised in the wrong place at the wrong time in history. Everybody... wants to have a reason for the things that happen, and they don't want it to be about them. Then Dr. Stanley says, if God is sovereign, we're never victims of our circumstances. So