In her years of medical practice as a trauma surgeon, Dr. Katie Butler has seen it all, and also seen the grace and kindness of God in the midst of terrible medical trauma (thus the subtitle for the book—A Doctor’s Reflections on Faith, Suffering and the Goodness of God). Join Scott and Sean for a fascinating discussion as Katie tells some of these stories of how the love of God peeked through in the ICU and ER.



About our Guest

Dr. Katie Butler, a former trauma and critical care surgeon, has stepped away from medical practice in order to home school her children. She is the author of Between Life and Death and she writes regularly for Christianity Today, Desiring God, and the Gospel Coalition. She previously appeared on the Think Biblically podcast in 2019.

Episode Transcript

Scott Rae: Welcome to Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture, podcast from Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, I'm your host, Scott Rae, Dean of Faculty and Professor of Christian Ethics.

We're here with a guest that we've had on before. In fact, one of the best guests we've had on before. Dr. Katie Butler, who is a trauma and critical care surgeon who has recently left practice ... Don't know if that'll be temporarily or permanently ... Specifically for the purpose of homeschooling her children. But she's written two terrific books. We had her on previously when her book called, Between Life and Death, which was sort of the physician's journey down the road of the end of life with her patients.

Her newest book is called, Glimmers of Grace: The Doctor's Reflection on Faith, Suffering, and the Goodness of God. Katie, you've knocked it out of the park again with this book. There's so many compelling stories about how you saw the grace and the goodness and the love of God amidst a pretty tough medical practice that you've had being a critical care surgeon. So thanks so much for coming on with us. We so appreciate what's you're writing and how you are bringing your experience as a physician to bear on the life issues that all of us eventually will deal with.

Katie Butler: Scott and Sean, just thank you so much for having me on. It's a joy and a privilege to be here.

Scott Rae: You spent a lot of years as a critical care trauma surgeon, needless to say, a super demanding field that I think has probably left casualties along the way. But I think it would be helpful for our listeners to describe how in your early years of practice, how your work as a trauma surgeon affected your soul and sort of shaped the person you became.

Katie Butler: Well, it's interesting because if you look at my experiences in medicine from the standpoint of a career, it's been an arc from a lot of sin and ugliness and despair through redemption by God's grace. I should preface and say that I was not a believer until I was 30. I grew up in a nominal Christian household where Santa Claus featured at center stage at Christmas, and we didn't talk much about Jesus.

I thought being Christian was synonymous with being a good person. But I clearly, as I think we all intrinsically do whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, I knew what sin was. I knew that I was broken, and medicine for me, I went into it because I genuinely wanted to help people. But there was also, to be perfectly candid, a sense of idolatry in it for me to thinking that if I was to devote my time and my life to trying to help others who were sick and injured, that that meant I could earn my right to exist, and that all the ways in which I was fallen and broken and not good enough, I could make up for it somehow.

But the truth, which so many of us I think in medicine face and few talk about, is that we're all sinful, and so we cannot earn our salvation through what we do. In medicine, the toll is especially heavy because we will try and strive to do the best we can for patients, but suture lines still fall apart. We still, in the hours of working so hard throughout the night, still make mistakes. We miss lab values, and the ramifications for our mistakes and our shortcomings are that people get sicker and they die. There's a tremendous sense of guilt that we all shoulder in medicine when we don't understand the way to atonement, meaning Christ.

I loved my work, but I saw it as a way for me to try to prove my right to exist, and in that struggle, I was very unhealthy. I crashed my car on the way to work at 3:00 a.m. one morning because I was so exhausted working 100-hour work weeks.

Thanks be to God there was no one else on the road, but a normal response for someone who had just been in a significant accident would be to get home and nurse your concussion. I hitched a ride with the tow truck driver into the hospital and then proceeded to work.

My husband was out of town so I had no way to get back home because I lived outside of Boston at the time. So I crashed on a friend's couch for the week in her apartment and just went about my work, which was not only stupid because it endangered the people in my care because I was working with a concussion, but just showed how desperate I was that I was so tied to my work to define me. Then on top of that, just there's this terrible grief that comes from realizing that even though you've work your best, you still fail.

I can remember the first time in medical school when I realized that I'd made a bad mistake, and I'd misdiagnosed a patient who had peritonitis. So he had a very bad infection in his belly. I didn't realize it until months later when I was on a surgical rotation and was learning those signs, I realized, "Oh my goodness. I missed this. I didn't tell anybody about it, what happened to him." That kind of guilt, you can't assuage it with words because it's just wrapped up in sin, and I've witnessed it in so many others where they'll have an acute case come in and someone who's bleeding after multiple injuries and they rush to the operating room and there's a bad outcome. You ask yourself, "What did I do? Maybe if I'd done something differently. Maybe if I'd gotten a different operating room table or called for blood earlier," and it haunts you and the names of the people that you failed to save just linger with you and keep you up at night.

So I was incredibly unhealthy, saw my job as my identity and also was riddled with guilt that never left me. While I was successful and loved what I was doing, it also was a source of tremendous grief and remorse.

Sean McDowell: I want to get to your book because it's clear that grace and you call your book, Glimmers of Grace, is going to play into this. But what were those next steps in your journey that helped you come to grips with grace and move beyond just kind of this paralysis of working 100 hours a week motivated a lot by the things you described?

Katie Butler: Yeah. So I actually struggled mightily with the problem of suffering, and I think about Jonah very often. When he was so defiant and running away from God even though God was so merciful. Just running away because he didn't want to give mercy to his enemies. It was only when he was brought to his lowest in the belly of the fish that he finally looked upward and prayed. I can see a mirror and a parallel of that with God's work in my own life.

I was working in the emergency department during my training. My job was to triage everything that came into the emergency department in a 24-hour period that had the potential to need surgery. So it ran the gamut from toe abscesses on up to ruptured aortic aneurysms. It was my job to see those patients and stabilize them initially.

I had one harrowing night when just the depth of human depravity struck me cold. Where I had one gentleman who came in, in his 20s who had been bludgeoned nearly to death with a baseball bat in his sleep. His wife had died in the assault, and his four-year-old son had watched the whole thing. So he came in bleeding into his brain, and I was trying to stabilize him long enough to get him to the operating room with the neurosurgeons. I was struggling to focus as I was working because all I could think about was this poor four-year-old kid who just witnessed his parents be beaten to death. I kept thinking, "What kind of life is this poor child going to have?"

Then while I was doing that, a 15-year-old boy was brought in by paramedics on a stretcher after having been stabbed in the chest. He had lost his pulse in the field as they were bringing him in. So they were doing chest compressions as they wheeled him into the emergency room. I had to leave what I was doing. In this kind of a situation, normally we like to do surgery in very controlled settings in the operating room. But in this case where it literally is on the verge of death, we actually will open the chest right there in the trauma bay. It's a last ditch effort to save life. So I did that and explored his chest and found a hole in his aorta. This poor 14-year-old kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, his whole blood volume, it spilled into his chest. I stumbled back from the stretcher, realizing that we couldn't save him. Feeling numb, then had to change my scrubs, which were covered in blood, and go talk to his family.

The story that they gave me was that he was from Guatemala and the horrible, cruel irony was they'd brought him to the United States to give them a better life, and this is the result.

So as I'm reeling from these two incidents right on top of each other, my trauma pager goes off again. This time it's another 15-year-old kid. This time he was shot in the head. The tenor in the room was so different from the prior two cases because as we brought him in, we just had to look at his eyes and his pupils were fixed and dilated, which told us that he had suffered from brain death. So the bullet had traversed his brain, and his heart was still beating because we had him on a ventilator to give him oxygen, but otherwise he was brain dead. It was one of those scenarios, what can you do? What good can you do in this situation? The only thing I could think of knowing that we couldn't help him, we couldn't save him, was to just suture the head wound closed and cleaned him up so that when his family came in, at least he would look something like the boy that they cherished.

As I was working, some ill-informed staff member brought his mother into the room in the middle of my work when his head was still haloed in blood. I apologize for the graphicness, but I still had brain matter on my hands. She comes in and she just howls and falls to the floor. I just tugged my gloves off and ran from the room and sobbed, and I still had to work eight more hours.

This is the reality. This is just the reality of what it is, but all I kept thinking over and over for the rest of the night was ... My concept of God before then had been very flimsy and just sentimental as I alluded to before. But I kept thinking, "How could all of the assailants in these cases look at someone else and see no worth, and look at a young kid and just take life in that way?" That just to me seemed the root of evil. So the next question my mind is, "If God is good and if he exists, how could he allow this?" It just cut me to my core.

The next day when I should have gone home and slept because I'd been up for 30 hours, I instead ... I was so desperate to try to cling to something good that I drove two hours west of Boston through the Berkshire Mountains. It was one of those beautiful days in October in New England, when just everything is set afire with beautiful color. I stopped at a bridge on the Connecticut River. I stood out in the midst of this gorgeous day where you just see fingerprints of God's love all around you and his creation. I tried to pray, but because I didn't know the Lord, because I'd never read the Bible and didn't know scripture and had nothing to lean into that was true, I couldn't find the words, and I couldn't find any answers to my questions. So I left that bridge deciding that because I couldn't discern any answers, it must be that God didn't exist. So I spent the next year in a severe depression, agnostic, going about work but not really thriving, just existing and struggled with suicidal ideation.

I repeatedly would think on a daily basis on my way home from work about turning down Route 2 and driving out to that bridge and just throwing myself off the railing because without God, without goodness, what was the point of life? So that was a very, very dark time. It was in the setting of that despondency, where I had nowhere else to go, that the Lord then drew me back to himself. Because it was a year later and I was working in the ICU, and I had this gentleman that I was caring for, who was just a very sad case where he'd undergone a surgery and then after the surgery had an event where his heart stopped and he required CPR for a full 25 minutes, which means that he went for a very long period without blood flow to his brain. While we were able to then restart his heart, he had severe brain injury as a result from the lack of oxygen. The prognosis was very poor. This episode happened weeks ago. He'd made no progress.

The neurologist looking at his imaging and the fact that he was older, as well said, "The most that he will recover is to open his eyes and track objects but not to interact with loved ones ever again in any meaningful way." His family was just so dedicated and was by his side every day and would ask when I came in the room and they were so eager and say, "Dr. Butler, do you see any improvement?" It just broke my heart every time because no, no, we didn't, and we didn't think you would improve. But then this one day I heard from across the ICU something you don't usually hear in the ICU, which was his wife belting out 80s tunes at the top of her lungs, which drew my attention.

I walk in the room and she had hung a cross about the size of an avocado from above his bed, and she was wearing one herself. She says to me, "Dr. Butler, I was just praying and praying last night. I woke up this morning, and God told me everything's going to be okay." I looked at her and I just felt such compassion for her, but also pity because I thought number one, the God to whom she's praying I didn't think he existed. Number two, I did not think it was going to be fine for him, as much as I wanted to believe that for her. I just said, "I hope so." Then the next day, his family called me to the bedside really excited because they said that they had should his name and had asked him to move his toe, and he did. I thought, "This is probably just a reflex," because this happens often. The spinal cord will still be intact even if the brain itself has really injured, and you'll see reflexive movements.

They said, "No, that's not what it was. Watch." So they shouted his name and sure enough, he moved his toe. I shouted his name. He did nothing for me. He was probably doing that on purpose. But to make a long story short, the next day he opened his eyes and tracked to their voice. The day after that he started squeezing his hand to their command. Over the next couple of weeks this gentleman, whom by all our understanding of prognosis and the normal course of recovery after this kind of brain injury, he made a full recovery. Being able to talk, joking about putting filet mignon through his feeding tube. It was remarkable. In medicine, we'll look at each other and say, "We're overjoyed," but we consider it an outlier saying, "Oh, well, it's just one of those cases that just defied the odds."

But I couldn't ignore the fact that this was in response to prayer. That it was the Lord showing, in the midst of giving this wonderful gift to this family, also alerting me to the truth that there is a power at work so far beyond our understanding of any protocol or physiology or mechanism that we think we've elucidated in medicine.

So after that point, I started to seek, and I'm ashamed to say that even though I'd seen this healing happen in Jesus's name, I looked to other religions because as a nominal Christian, I thought I knew Christianity. I studied the Quran. I studied the Bhagavad Gita. I looked into Buddhism. Throughout all of it, I just saw this mandate that we had to earn our salvation somehow. That to me seemed impossible because I had seen so much calamity in the emergency room and had seen that no matter what walk of life you came from, you came through those double doors at some point with some severe illness or injury.

I said, "No, there's," I couldn't call it sin because I had no idea or no concept of theology at the time, but that's what I saw. I said, "If we have to earn our own way to heaven, we're doomed. It's just not possible." Then my husband encouraged me to read the gospels and the Book of Romans. I was so awestruck that the God who created the universe and molded the season and mountains so loved us that he would send his son for us.

Then I came to Romans Chapter Five, and I stopped cold at Verses 3 to 8 because Paul talks about the fact that through Christ, we rejoice in the hope we have, but we also can rejoice in our sufferings because our sufferings don't eliminate the hope we have in Christ. In fact, the cross lends meaning to them because Jesus suffered too. So even though we might not in the moment understand why calamities happen and we may never, this side of heaven understand, it's not because God doesn't love us. Through trials and a lot of darkness, God brought me back to himself by his mercy.

Sean McDowell: Katie, I love hearing that you're examining different religions, and it was just reading the scriptures that made God real to you. I'm an apologist. I like to defend the faith and one of the most popular blogs that I wrote that every year, people just find it on Google. It's like the top five books to give a non-Christian. The number one book is just the Gospel of John. There's something about encountering God's word. Now I know the skeptic is going to be hearing this right now and say, "Okay, that person was healed by a miracle, but what about all the times God doesn't heal? What about all the people and probably most cases where he doesn't? If miracles counts for God, doesn't the lack of miracles count against him."

Katie Butler: I think it's easy also to have those kinds of questions even when you're struggling with illness in the hospital. I think one of the main reasons I wrote the book was because I'd seen and witnessed so many just hard anguishing situations that drive us to our knees, whether we're enduring ordeals as a patient or as a loved one or as a healthcare professional. Where we just struggle and say, "God, where are you in this?" But I think what we know from the Bible is that God's thoughts are not ours. His ways are not ours. The ultimate good is actually not our health and our longevity and our healing. When you look at miracles throughout the Bible, he doesn't perform miracles. It's a point of mercy and grace, yeah. But he's also often it to declare who he is and to reveal to others who he is.

Healing is not actually the ultimate good. The most important thing in the Bible is our relationship to him. I love how the Westminster Catechism phrases it, that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Sometimes our sufferings actually allow us to do that. God is at work in them in ways that we maybe cannot perceive. I love John:11, especially Sean, since you mentioned John, because I think it just shows this so beautifully where with Lazarus being ill ... Lazarus, being someone that Jesus loved, and he could have performed a miracle to heal him. But when he receives word of Lazarus being so sick, he delays and he says, "I'm glad I was not there when he dies so that the glory of God could be revealed to you."

That must've been incredibly confusing for the disciples and for Lazarus's sisters, Mary and Martha. "Why didn't you come? If you'd been here, you could've saved him," but it's because there was something far greater planned. That he was going to actually raise Lazarus from the dead and that in doing so in the presence of all the mourners there, it would then cause them to believe, to place their faith, their trust in Christ and to draw near to God. I think it's understanding that just because he can perform a miracle, it may not be within his will to do so.

I think there are a lot of examples throughout the Bible showing that when suffering happens, oftentimes he's at work through it. Think about Genesis 50:20. I love when Joseph talks to his brothers and says after he had been thrown in the well and sold into slavery, and they did all this evil to him and he says, "You meant this for evil, but God meant it for good, for the saving of many lives," because through that God brought Joseph to Egypt and then provided for his chosen people during the famine. So you see from Romans 8:28 that God works through all things for the good of those who love him.

Scott Rae: Yeah. Katie, we often tell patients and their families that God's going to work a great miracle and probably a bigger one than you expect. But the chances are it's going to be on the other side of eternity and not this one, and just to be careful that we don't put too much expectation into what goes on under the sun on this side of eternity as opposed to the grand miracle, when all of our diseases will be healed.

Katie Butler: Amen. Amen.

Scott Rae: One of the things I learned ... I spent a lot of years in bioethics and did consults at the bedside ... One of the things I learned early on is that I didn't have the stomach for the neonatal intensive care unit, partly because my wife and I had had some difficulty with infertility and were so desirous to have children. Then to see some of these basically train wrecks in the neonatal intensive care unit, I realized that's probably just an area that I need to stay out of. But you saw that as a place where you saw these great glimmers of God's love and grace. How did that work? Because that seems to me to be some of the most desperate places in the medical setting. So how did those glimmers of grace come out?

Katie Butler: Yeah. What you're saying resonates with me because there's this sense when you go into a NICU that everything is just turned inside out, that it's all backward. You'll have mothers that are there beside these incubators that look like machines in the middle of the room holding this tiny baby. They've for nine months pined to hold that little one, and now they can't even touch him or her. There's just a sense of loss and, "What do I do in this scenario?" In some ways I agree with you completely, Scott, the neonatal ICU shows us the ugliest sides of sin, that it corrupts what is by nature, beautiful and good: innocent life and new life.

It was the tenderness that I saw between parents and these little babies. There was one image in particular that really just struck with me. I was there as a resident who was rotating through pediatric surgery. So my job was to go and see these little babies and poke them with a glove finger, feeling for a hernia and for a tender belly and that kind of thing. I came into the room of one patient that we'd been following and this little premature baby who was tiny. His dad was a bricklayer and so a huge hulking big man. You get a sense for the dynamics between parents in these situations, too. Some of the fathers are really uncomfortable and you can see they're at the back of the room just unsure what to do. He was one of these ones who very clearly ... His aim and his role as he saw it was to support his family through this catastrophe.

So he was always standing with his arm around his wife whenever we came in the room as if to shield her from any further hurt. I was just so struck one day because I came into the room and this giant 6'5 tall, 250 pound man was squatting near the incubator with his single finger inside the incubator. His premature little baby son had his entire fist wrapped around his single finger. It looked like the most uncomfortable position. I said, "Can I get you a chair?" But what was just so touching and brought me to tears at the moment, as he was talking about his baby and he's like, "He's so strong." He looked at him. He says, "You just keep holding on to me little guy because I'm never letting go of you." I just thought about this infant who from the moment he left the room was in danger and was dependent and flailing.

I thought, what a picture of our father in heaven, caring for us. That we're lost and we can't help ourselves and we're so fragile, and he reaches down and holds onto us through Christ and won't let us go. There are these moments that you see that God is showing us mercy through love that we show one another, love for neighbor, in these situations. While there's harrowing sorrow, very often you also get to see these glimpses where you can praise God and say, "Thank you, Lord, for reminding us of who you are."

Sean McDowell: Katie, I've got somewhat of a practical question for you. As you know as well as anybody that when serious illness or accident hits, a person feels lost, despair, hopeless, like the young man you describe in your book you treated after a skiing accident. I think as Christians, we often feel like we've got to give a verse. We've got to quote Romans 8:28, but that's not always the most helpful response. Having dealt with so many people in that situation, what just practical and biblical advice would you give us to help people who are hurting in that way?

Katie Butler: Absolutely. I think first of all, and I love the point you just made, Sean, about we need to sometimes give a verse. I think that there are definitely times for that, and we should have those verses in our own mind. But we need to be sensitive that not everyone is going to be open to hearing that at every time and to just wait for the right moment. It's critical, I think, during these kinds of catastrophes and ordeals that the body of Christ be present and come alongside those who are hurting. I really think this is crucial because in the hospital we are cut off from our usual spiritual disciplines. The truths that we proclaim in church every Sunday became really hard to grasp when we're in pain and when we're on medicine that fogs our thinking. When the routines we have of reading the Bible or praying or doing our devotions or singing hymns are replaced instead with monitors and vital signs checks and needle sticks and more procedures, and it can really grind you down.

Fellowship with the other believers who love us, I think, is really crucial and can be life-giving. But to your point, I would say that the most important thing first and foremost is just to remember the ministry of presence and to be present for the one you're with without giving advice that's unsolicited because people will be handling these crises in different ways. Some will welcome praying with them and praying for them and talking about the Bible. Others just want to have someone there to sit with them and watch TV. Others will want to talk about things outside the hospital to connect with what matters to them beyond the confines of the hospital room.

I think the more that we are present and we listen and recognize them as unique image bearers of God whom we're called to love, I think is first and foremost, the most important thing. Then yes, of course, praying with them, offer to pray for them while they're there and really just be a presence. Be slow to give advice, quick to give encouragement, but really focusing on that individual as the unique image bearer of God that they are.

Scott Rae: Katie, one final question for you. This book is so full of insight that's so helpful. But part of what you describe is you've had the privilege of ushering people right up to the doorstep of eternity like with your friend David that you described in repeated places throughout the book. But in particular, I think how you cared for him right up until he went to meet the Lord. Tell us a little bit about what that was like and particularly how it impacted your kids.

Katie Butler: Oh gosh, yeah. Having witnessed death on many, many occasions in many settings, I first want to say that I don't ever think that death should be romanticized. That it remains a horror whatever setting it's in. I think sometimes as we're fighting physician-assisted suicide and the right-to-die movement, people tend to glamorize it or use euphemisms for it. Death was never our original plan, and it's always awful to have somebody who's one moment breathing and dreaming and loving and then the next moment completely still. It's always unsettling.

But having seen it in a lot of different contexts, I think when it is most gracious is when it's tied to our reality of who we are in Christ, which I think is really important for we as Christians to consider and to be aware of because, and we've talked about end-of-life care in the past, but those who have high religious coping are less likely to seek hospice services, more likely to seek aggressive care at the end of life and more likely to die in an ICU. More likely to be on a ventilator, having very aggressive things done to them and not able to be in prayer or be with brothers and sisters who can pray over them and considering who they are in Christ, et cetera.

I contrast that with my friend, David, whom you mentioned, who was just such a dear brother in Christ. We had developed a friendship with for many years. His story is that he had struggled with drug abuse and was homeless in the streets in New York City for a decade and came to Christ when a good Samaritan, just a stranger, saw him trying to take his own life. Intervened, brought him to the hospital and told him about the good news of the gospel during the process. He was just overflowing with gratitude for God's work in his life.

He struggled with emphysema, which ultimately claimed his life, and my family and I had the privilege of walking with him through those last days. I make this point about tying your last days to who we are in Christ because I saw in him such a gift where ... He had been headed for a highly medicalized death like I just described because he was kind of shuttled from hospital to rehab and back again. Physicians weren't really being clear with him about what was going on, and no goals of care discussions or advanced directives discussions were being had. I was very concerned that he was going to die alone, cut off from the people he loved, which was his biggest fear.

But God was very gracious, and in his final week of life, he was able to get connected with palliative care and went into hospice. The last day that he was conscious, he spent it working on a letter that he wanted read at his funeral. In that letter, he pointed all of those in hearing to Romans 38 to 39. That nothing, not life or death, nor angels, nor rulers, nor height, nor death, nor anything in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. So he blessed others at the end of his life. Then he fell unconscious the next day, and our family was able to be at his side with our pastor. We sang hymns, and we read his favorite Psalms and we reminisced and held his hand. My kids had the honor of being there with him too because they had loved him so much.

We actually were there, and it amazes me the wisdom of children sometimes. We can get so caught up in our own priorities in our lives. My son, when I'd had a conversation with him about the fact that Mr. David was dying, he said, "Can we please visit him every day before he dies?" I said, "Yeah, honey." So we were by his side because of the heart that a little seven-year-old boy had for this man who'd taught them about Jesus. So it was just such a point of grace and a gift even though death is horrible and even though we miss him. But just so thankful to God for the gift of the peace of having his word proclaimed with him and him being able to reflect upon God's love for him while he still could in his last moments.

Scott Rae: Katie, thank you. That is the sweetest account of how this gentlemen who was just falling apart physically was able to be so spiritually together and impact your family like he has. This has been so helpful, so fun just to have you back on with us. Your experience as a trauma surgeon, I think glimmers might be a bit of an understatement because I think there were some pretty bright lights of grace shining through in a lot of these accounts.

But I want to come in to our listeners your latest book called Glimmers of Grace: A Doctor's Reflection on Faith, Suffering, and the Goodness of God. Just a terrific book. Katie, so appreciative for you coming on with us. Want to wish you all the best as you continue to homeschool your kids and continue to raise up the next generation of folks who will follow Christ faithfully. So thanks so much for coming on with us. It's been a delight to have you back on again.

Katie Butler: Thank you so much. God bless.

Scott Rae: This has been an episode of the podcast, Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. The Think Biblically podcast is brought to you by Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, offering programs in Southern California and online, including those in our Institute for Spiritual Formation. Be sure to visit biola.edu/talbot to learn more about those. If you enjoyed today's conversation with Dr. Katie Butler, give us a rating on your podcast app, and please share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening and remember, think biblically about everything.