Brain Ninjas

Our life drastically changed course a week ago. We are the parents of a daughter who has struggled for many years with substance abuse. We dread “the call.”   The call is when you are told that your child has died, and their struggle has ended.

One week ago, our phone rang in the early hours of the morning. A police officer told my husband that our daughter had been found. Alive.

The officer told my husband that our daughter had been brought by ambulance to a local hospital. The officer said, “She has some skin wounds, her arm hurts, and she doesn’t feel good.”

What a profound gift for understatement the officer has. What I expected when I walked through the door of the hospital didn’t prepare me for the horrifying reality that I was presented with quickly thereafter.  

In plain English, a bacterium known as MRSA had been introduced through her skin and has made its way throughout her entire body. This germ acts like a rattlesnake bite. Everywhere the MRSA travels in the body, it begins to infect and destroy. Her heart has a clump of this bacterium lodged within it, and thus it pumps MRSA all throughout her bloodstream. The doctors are trying to counteract this poison with the antidote of antibiotics, but the garbage inside her heart needs to be removed as soon as possible to give the medicine a real chance to work.

Our daughter’s heart, lungs and skin are the most compromised. Hovering over her bedside is quite honestly visually traumatizing. I don’t think any parent is prepared to watch their child in the throes of a systemic infection that is laying waste to their health. 

Within 24 hours, I was a patient in a different hospital. The emotional upheaval, the crying, the lost sleep put me into a tailspin, and I needed medication for a migraine. By the end of the week, my husband was weeping and telling me “I’m not ok.”  I reassured him that it was ok to not be ok.

One week has passed since the police called.  Our daughter was transferred from the first hospital to another and now another.

This morning my husband came home weary from working his twelve-hour shift and said, “Nights are long when you keep thinking. It is like the ever-present brain ninja. I just keep thinking about her and then I ask God, “Please God, let her live.” “Please God, heal her body.”  “Please God, use this experience so she will never use drugs again.””

“It is like the ever-present brain ninja.”   

The ‘it’ in that sentence is the thought of our daughter’s extremely fragile health. The ‘brain ninja’ refers to a skit by comedian Dane Cook where he suggests that one small comment a woman makes during a heated argument with her lover is deployed as a weapon set to detonate in the future. The comment doesn’t explode in the man’s brain right away but is subtle. Dane Cook says this is how women win 99.99% of arguments with men. They use the ‘brain ninja’ remark as a form of “Mental terrorism,” a “Torpedo in the water coming to get you.”  Dane Cook says that women will utter the brain ninja remark in “A subtle whisper – to make you listen.”    

As a woman who has deployed the “brain ninja” maneuver on my poor husband, I can attest to the veracity of Dane Cook’s hilarious observations.

However, this time – it struck me that Satan was playing the part of the brain ninja. My husband was hearing the subtle whisper of The Mental Terrorist. The brain ninja remark that kept detonating was, “Your daughter is going to die.”

There is a scripture in the Bible, and it says, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”   2^nd Corinthians, 10:5

My husband had no idea what a powerful sermon he was preaching to me this morning.  It was so simple, really.  Every time the evil brain ninja entered my husband’s mind to torment him, he intuitively and reflexively took every thought captive by handing it right back to God in prayer.  Faith versus fear.

‘Take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ’ is an imperative sentence, meant to give a command. TAKE every thought. MAKE it obedient.

You don’t have to have a daughter in the hospital to struggle with your thoughts. Maybe it’s not fear but anger or lust or pride that is your brain ninja. Perhaps you believe that you can’t take your thoughts captive, but you can, by praying. God’s power is infinitely greater than Satan’s. Prayer is our greatest weapon.  However, if your thoughts aren’t made obedient to Christ, who do you think those thoughts will be made obedient to? That’s right – The ultimate mental terrorist, the Brain Ninja. Whom do you choose to be obedient to today?

“But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” Joshua 24:15

I choose Jesus.