I've Seen the End of You by W. Lee Warren, MD

A Neurosurgeon's Look at Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know.

Glioblastoma has a 100% mortality rate or does it? There are those few unique cases, but mostly when Dr. Warren sees that tumor, he used to think, "I've seen the end of you." He knows how the disease is going to play out, what is going to happen and the ultimate result of that diagnosis. But now, at the end of the book, he realizes there is more to the story and maybe this is just the beginning.

Dr. Warren is a Christian and a neurosurgeon and so he wrestles. How do you pray for a patient when you know the end result, when you know the prognosis is death? How do you pray with a patient when you know there's no hope? Dr. Warren is wrestling with this and then tragedy strikes him personally and he has another battle to fight.

The stories were fascinating and the struggle was real. Dr. Warren had a chaplain friend he called Pastor Jon (he was an amalgam of hospital chaplains, all represented in one person) who had lost two children had something fascinating to say after Dr. Warren had had a particularly hard day at work.

"I shook my fist at God more days than not. But then, when our son died, it hit me: Knowing the answers isn't my work. Raging against God for putting us into a world full of pain doesn't make the pain stop. My work had to be about learning how to live - and help other people live - in a painful world but still somehow be able to have faith."   "The reason Jesus stopped in the garden to pray, to ask for a different outcome, even though he knew the answer already, was because the purpose of prayer isn't to bend God's will to ours. The purpose of prayer is to bend us to God's will. Jesus was showing us that it's a good thing - in fact, sometimes it's the only thing we have - to stop even when things seem hopeless and remember that it's not hopeless to God. He's got a plan,..."

And later on, "Every life ends. So don't et so caught up in the tragedy that you forget to live while you can. You're here to help make things better. To shine a light."

There's more to our story than the terminal disease we might be fighting or the tough thing we are going through or the grief we are experiencing. Our whole life is a story and what kind of story are we writing?

I don't know if I fully agree with everything Dr. Warren said, I didn't flesh it all out completely, but there were some thought-provoking ideas expressed, plus I found the stories of his patients so interesting. I really enjoyed the book.

I received an advanced review copy from Waterbrook Multnomah and was not required to write a positive review. All opinions expressed are my own.