This week, my friend Dr. Lee Warren released his newest book, Hope is the First Dose: A Treatment Plan for Recovering from Trauma, Tragedy, and Other Massive Things. This book brings resolution to a journey of doubt and faith he started in the surgical tents at Joint Base Balad, Iraq,

That story, told in No Place to Hide: A Brain Surgeon’s Long Journey Home From the Iraq War, introduced us to neurosurgeon W. Lee Warren, Pastor Dennis McDonald, who helped provide a framework for knowing God in the middle of doubt and death, and Dennis’s daughter, Lisa. Lee’s life was unraveling even as he arrived in Iraq as the first neurosurgeon deployed in an active warzone. He begins to understand the presence and love of God, and of others, as he faces the physical damage of IEDs and the spiritual and emotional trauma of deployment and reentry. 

In I’ve Seen the End of You: A Neurosurgeon’s Look at Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know, Lee is building his practice as a neurosurgeon in Alabama. As he talks about conversations with patients facing a terminal brain tumor diagnosis, Lee walks us through his own struggles with prayer and trust. Why talk to God when the outcome seems inevitable? And then, with the support of a chaplain (who looks a lot like Dennis), he arrives at a place of trusting God. Until he and Lisa face the sudden death of a family member, and have that trust tested. That book ends with an affirmation of faith. 

Now, in Hope is the First Dose, Lee walks us through the inside of the journey he and Lisa took to understand how to choose to recover hope following the traumatic death of a son and their own career challenges. The details feel desolate, unless you have walked through your own massive loss. For those people, the honesty is oddly comforting, as a reminder that we are not the only ones who feel lost in loss. 

But then, through a process Lee describes as self-brain surgery, we get glimpses of how this family has found ways to slowly and intentionally learn hope. 

By the end of these books, we’ve followed Lee from the desert to a riverbank in Nebraska, from deep questions to deep acceptance. 

Each book is helpful in understanding Lee’s questions. Together they provide a powerful account of the gradual way that God works us and in us through our grief and loss. 

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Lee and I had a great conversation recently about helping people in times of grief.

We talked how infant loss is both the death of a person and of expectations. We talked about how things can be true, but may not be timely in the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years after a loss. We talked about how different personalities respond to loss differently. We talked about ways that some of the things we’ve been taught about God aren’t helpful in times of loss. And we connected some of the conversation to Lee’s new book.

I loved the opportunity to think through some of these things in conversation. I’m not going to suggest that you will enjoy the conversation, but if the ideas in this preview resonate, I think that you may find it helpful. Hope Talks