Ep. 215: Is Medicine Greater than God?

Kourtney Cromwell:
Welcome to the indoubt Podcast, where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s Word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Hey everyone, it’s Kourtney. I’m so glad you’re joining us for this episode of indoubt. This week’s guest is author and trauma surgeon, Kathryn Butler. And she’s recently written a book on end of life medical care, so that’s what we’ll be talking about. This topic doesn’t come up in everyday conversation, but if I could just to encourage you though and say that it is important, it really is. With personal experience with end of life medical care after losing a loved one to cancer, and in having to come face to face with some of the questions that Isaac asked Kathryn, this is definitely something that we should be talking about, and it is relevant.
For Christians, it’s more than medicine when we reach the end of our lives, no matter when that is. As Isaac states and as Kathryn makes clear in her book, our lives are sacred and should be preserved when possible, but it isn’t just a black and white issue. And some of you like me, may have experience with end of life care, and I will say that as we’re recording this episode, it did catch me off guard for a moment. But Kathryn does such an incredible job at discussing this subject, and like I’ve said, I think this is something we as young adults need to think about, if only to prompt a few questions or one conversation, whether that’s with our parents, our caregivers, our friends or our kids. So, in saying all that, I do hope that you enjoy this episode.

Isaac Dagneau:
Hey, this is Isaac from indoubt. With me today on the show is trauma surgeon and author, Kathryn Butler. Thanks so much for being with us today, Kathryn.

Kathryn Butler:
Isaac, thank you so much for having me on.

Isaac Dagneau:
Like we do with many of our interviewees, could you just share with us just a bit about who you are? And we love to know how different people came to know Jesus as well. So yeah, just kind of share with us your testimony and who you are.

Kathryn Butler:
Sure. So I’ve been blessed with two very different seasons in life. My background is as a trauma and critical care surgeon at Mass General, where I trained. And then was on the staff, and a few years ago I was called away from that to administer to the needs of my family. And so now I homeschool my kids and I’ve fallen into a writing ministry, which was a very unexpected blessing.
And Jesus actually brought me to himself through my work. So I was not raised a Christian, I grew up in a nominally Christian household where Christmas was much more about Santa Claus than Jesus. And I thought basically Christians, to be a Christian just meant you were a good person. I didn’t really ever think deeply about it, I didn’t know the gospel. And then during my training actually, it was being confronted with suffering in such a real and visceral and horrific way in the emergency room. There was one particular night where I had three young men who came into the emergency room who had all been assaulted, and I couldn’t save any of them. And it was really being confronted with the problem of evil and suffering that made me confront how flimsy my faith had been. And I actually struggled with severe depression to the point of suicidality and agnosticism thereafter.
And about a year after I had this crisis, I witnessed in the intensive care unit where I was training during my fellowship, a recovery of a gentleman I could not explain, that our medical advances and our protocols and our knowledge could not neatly tie up. And it occurred immediately after his wife had prayed in Jesus’s name, and just opened my eyes to the fact, the truth, that there is a power so much greater than what we know or can imagine or understand. And it was from then, studying the gospels and the book of Romans, that the Lord just opened my eyes and my heart to the truth of Christ crucified. And knowing that while we might not understand suffering in the moment, when we suffer it’s not because God doesn’t love us, because He sent His son to suffer for us and saved us through that. So God has been so merciful to me, and I’m just so grateful to know Christ and to be a part of his body.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Kathryn. And as you say that, it just makes me ask the question, and obviously you’ve been around lots of various personnel and staff in places like the emergency room and things like that. Do you find that others, nurses and surgeons and doctors, work through some of those same questions? Because I can imagine you share the story with those three men, and I feel like that would affect every everybody. Do you find that some of your coworkers kind of worked through some of these questions, or did you feel kind of alone in that?

Kathryn Butler:
In my particular experience with my part of the world and where I was encountering medicine, I think we all wrestle with the questions, but I don’t think anyone discusses them openly. And that’s probably unique also to where I live and practice, because I’m in New England, which if you were to go to the Midwest part of the United States or the Bible belt, I think people would be much more conversant about it. But I’m in an area where Christianity is a minority faith. And so there’s a lot of silence, I think, about issues of faith. And so, I think we all struggle with these issues. We are all discouraged, we’re all downtrodden, we’re all wrestling. But in my experience personally, there was not a lot of open dialogue about how faith ties into all the suffering that we’re seeing.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah. Well thank you for sharing that with us, that’s good. Kathryn, you’ve recently written a book called, Between Life and Death: A Gospel-Centred Guide to End-of-Life Medical Care. Now that’s a huge endeavour, it seems like, just from that title, what you’re getting there. So anyways, that’s what our conversation is going to be revolved around. So, if you’re listening, that’s kind of what it is about, a gospel-centred guide to end-of-life medical care. And if you are listening, we’re obviously not going to be able to answer all the questions right now in this short time. But hopefully through this conversation and through what Kathryn has to share with us, we’ll learn something to take with us from this.
But anyways Kathryn, as a way to introduce us maybe to what your book is about, could you share with us maybe the issues or the problems, I’m not sure what the right maybe word is, that you do address in your book? What is that thing, that answer or that discussion that you felt needed to have happen?

Kathryn Butler:
Yeah, so I went into ICU care, was really my focus and my area of expertise. And that’s basically my job was to take care of people when they were their sickest, from something that needed surgery to fix, or were recovering from some kind of surgical process or procedure. And were sufficiently ill that they needed ventilators and medication drips, and dialysis and other really intensive invasive machineries, and procedures and techniques to keep them alive. And I went into it for the success stories. I loved partnering and coming alongside people when they were in their greatest need, and being able to, using this technology to usher them back to health and to bring them home and reunite them with their families. It was so incredibly gratifying and a wonderful way to love your neighbour.
However, what I found during my decade of work in the ICU was that these techniques and technologies that I just mentioned have tremendous potential to reunite families and bring people home when they are struggling with an illness or an accident or injury that’s recoverable. But at the same time, what we’ve done with this technology is we’ve placed those who are dying, who are suffering from a disease that’s not recoverable, who are at the end of life, into some horrible situations where we actually prolong death. And we also place their loved ones who are then in the position of making decisions for them such as, do I take them off the ventilator? Do I start dialysis? What’s the right answer? Into some anguishing situations.
And what I observed over time is that appropriately, those of us who are of the faith will turn to our faith and turn to the Bible to try to answer and navigate these hard issues. And we ask ourselves, what would God want? What’s God’s will? What does the Bible tell me in this situation? But as I alluded to this a little bit in my last comment, we clinicians do a really poor job of acknowledging that faith plays a role in these kinds of situations. And there’s actually been a study in Boston that looked at 75 terminally ill patients, that did a survey looking at their spirituality and how it influenced their illness narrative. And what it found was that 86% of people said that spirituality was important to them, and the majority of these people actually identified as Christians, many of them Catholic. But when they asked these patients, “How often has your doctor referred you to chaplaincy?” The answer was 1%.
There’s also further data showing that when patients ask their doctors a question that has to do with faith, meaning how do I navigate this based on my faith? The most common response given is not referring to chaplaincy, not saying, “Let’s see how we can find the answer for you,” not even if they’re the same faith, praying with them, but to say nothing. No follow up, no referral. We just strand people with some really, really hard questions.
And so what I wanted to do with this book was to provide people a look at how do we understand issues of life and death and suffering in our current era where technology is so confusing? And also, to try to tease apart when these technologies help, and when they can hurt. And when using a ventilator will help to preserve life and bring someone home or when it can actually prolong death and suffering. And to try to help give some people some kind of clarity and discernment so they have a set of principles or tools to use when they’re in these situations.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s so good. As I was kind of reading through your introduction and first chapter, I was just thinking, this is such a specific look at a very specific situation. And I’m so thankful for that because as we’ll get to this question a bit later on, I mean, as our listeners are younger people, a lot of us haven’t really thought about some of these things. And it’s so essential that we think about them now, because we could be there tomorrow, or a family member or a friend could be. So, it’s so essential that we do. So thank you for that.
But I want to quote something you wrote in your introduction and then maybe you could elaborate on a little bit. And I know that there will be some overlap, so if you need to just rephrase something that you’ve already said, that’s totally fine too. You say this, “Over the course of that decade,” which you already mentioned, of working training and being in trauma, you said, “I had the privilege of partnering with people during their most vulnerable moments, and I loathed the disconnect between the technical details that I laid out and the pain tearing them apart.” So what do you mean by that disconnect?

Kathryn Butler:
Yeah. It’s just what I said, that people are often wrestling with issues of how does faith come into play when I’m trying to decide whether or not to keep my loved one on a ventilator? Because really, it goes back very much to our faith because it’s dealing with life and death. And we can tend sometimes to cling to one principle from the Bible and say, “Well, the Bible teaches me that I have to preserve life. So I’m going to do everything at all costs.” And I as a clinician can sit down and I can tell you the ins and outs of the statistics and the prognosis and everything, but I really have to understand where is your faith influencing you in your response here? And I think that because we don’t, as clinicians, talk about faith, because we feel that we need to be objective, we then also fail people in not supporting them to understand their narrative and understand the lens through which they’re trying to grapple with these big questions.
So my hope was to try to bridge that disconnect by saying, “Okay, well how do we actually look at this technology from what the Bible teaches us?” About sanctity of life, about the fact that God is sovereign over our life and death, about the fact that we’re called to love one another as Christ loved us. Those principles all come into play. And overarching over all of them is the hope that we have in Christ, which also changes our view of death and gives us a hope that surpasses death. And I think that the technology that we’re dealing with and the terminology is so convoluted and foreign to the layperson, that it is impossible for them to understand it and understand how these principles play into that in the moment, when they’re scared and they’re worried for a mom or a dad or a spouse or sibling that is near death, and they’re grieving, “Well, what do I do?” It’s so hard for them to untangle all of this on their own.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, absolutely. Well let’s, you kind of mentioned the Bible there and some of those questions about God’s sovereignty. So let’s jump into that. I’ll quote two things that you said and then I’ll ask this question. So some of the quotes – you say, “Medical progress over the last 50 years has equipped doctors with technologies that under the right circumstances can save lives, but also transmute death from a finite event into a prolonged and painful process.” You’ve already talked about that a bit. And then you say, “Death now commonly occurs in fits and starts, in a slow, confusing fragmentation of life.” And then you write, “God’s perfect timing seems less distinct when machinery blurs the boundaries of life and death.”
I mean, just thinking about those, there’s a lot to think about in these really well written sentences, Kathryn. So how have you, as a Bible-believing Christian then, who believes in God’s good sovereignty over all things, how do you understand truths throughout the scripture, but I’ll just provide one example. Psalm 139:16 that says, “In Your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me.” So, we’re getting this idea that God knows, and yet here we have these medical machines seem to kind of give us the ability to choose. So how do we work through that?

Kathryn Butler:
I think that ultimately, I know ultimately, it’s still within in God’s hands. God still has sovereignty over our lives, our lives belong to Him. I think what’s happened over the past 50 plus years though, as ICU care has really come to the forefront, is that it’s less obvious to us. So people will be dying, but we can’t tell. And what I mean by this is that if you were to stand at the bedside of someone in the ICU, and you’re a layperson, you cannot tell from the doorway whether or not the person in that bed is on the verge of recovery, or is spiraling towards their death. Because they can both have a ventilator, they’ll both have an IV pole with arrays of pumps and infusions going, they might have a dialysis machine.
And it’s only if you understand the disease process at work, and have someone to guide you through how things are going, meaning is that process getting better or worse? And you only know that by being able to interpret the lab values and the numbers, that you have an understanding of is all this that we’re doing just slowing down the process of dying, but death is still gripping this person? Or is it actually ushering them back to life? And that process there, so God’s sovereign over all of that. So if that person is dying, us having those machines going might delay things for a little while, but they’re still dying. And what’s happened though is that because dying and death is no longer a part of our daily experience, and I say that because you know, a hundred years ago the most common place for people to die was at home. And it was at home among family members and clergy, and death was something that was familiar to families. It was abhorrent, people didn’t like it obviously, but it was familiar.
Now we’re in a situation when the majority of us will actually die in an institution, in a hospital, in a nursing home, even though most of us still want to die at home, only about 25 to 40% depending on the survey actually do. And so, we don’t see it day to day. It’s so far removed us and from our understanding. And then when we actually finally confront it, it’s usually in the setting of making decisions for a loved one. And we see it surrounded by technology we don’t understand, and a vocabulary that defies our comprehension, and we can’t recognize it for what it is. So that’s what I mean in terms of not being able to see that death is at hand. And God’s still sovereign over this, we might not be able to change the trajectory, but oftentimes we can’t see that that’s the case.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, exactly. And I was just reminded earlier, today actually, listening to another podcast. I was just reminded of the harmonious compatibility between the decisions that we make, whether they’re good ones or bad ones, and God’s sovereignty. And this other fellow on the podcast just reminded me by saying that, “You know, the whole idea of God’s sovereignty and our free will, they are friends and you don’t have to try to reconcile them.” And that’s such an essential truth to hold on to, even if we can’t really quite make it make sense in our minds that, we have to believe that. Especially, I would imagine in times when you have to make some big decisions, either as a doctor or as a family member or a friend of someone who’s in those situations. So I do appreciate that, Kathryn.
You say then, here’s the last quote that I’ll quote, I won’t give away your whole book, don’t worry. But another quote I have here is: “To honour God in the bleak setting of the ICU, we must clarify the expanse between life and death that our medical advances have blurred.” So this idea of clarifying, so I don’t know if maybe you’ve already touched on this, when you’re talking about clarifying, are you just saying that you want to help the kind of people that don’t understand any of the machinery or anything that’s going on? Is that what you mean by clarity here?

Kathryn Butler:
Yeah. And specifically, what I would hope for people to understand is that we ask the wrong questions oftentimes when we’re confronted with these situations. Because when we think about, of say a ventilator, I’m using that as the most obvious because that’s what people think of when they think about being on machines. We often think in terms of black and white, yes or no responses, “I want to be on a ventilator,” or, “I never would want to be.” And that’s really the wrong question because what a ventilator does is it often does not cure us, the ventilator buys time until we can fix the underlying problem.
So what do I mean by that? If I have failing lungs from pneumonia, and it’s pneumonia that’s from a common bacterium in the community, I might require the ventilator for a day or two to support my breathing. But they give me antibiotics to treat the pneumonia, the pneumonia is resolved, I’ll come off the ventilator in a few days, and I’m likely to go home. In that scenario that ventilator was a vehicle towards recovery. It helps to preserve life. The situation is going to be very different if I am in my eighties with end stage emphysema, metastatic lung cancer, and then I develop a fungal pneumonia which is much more difficult to treat. In that situation, that mechanical ventilator, that breathing machine, is likely to be a permanent fixture or to just prolong my death.
And so I think when I talk about clarifying these issues, I think it’s important that we just focus on what are these technologies doing? They’re actually not curative. They’re supportive, they’re meant to help us. And the real question we need to ask is, under what circumstances am I okay accepting this? And for the Christian, it usually is that if it’s recoverable, if the underlying illness that’s making me sick is recoverable, “Yeah this is worth me pursuing, oftentimes. If, however, I’m near death and they can’t cure what’s making me sick, then these kinds of technologies have the potential to prolong death and encourage suffering.” And so that’s what I mean in terms of clarity, is that I think oftentimes we’re asking the wrong questions when we consider these end of life issues.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, no, that’s really good. And I think from even what you’re just saying there, it sounds like you’re not going, you haven’t written a book about a black and white answer on what do we do in this situation, you say, “This,” or, “Not this.” It’s a situational thing.
And let me just try to think of an example here. Say I’m much older, say I’m in my seventies or my eighties, and the doctors have been trying to figure out what’s wrong with me, and they put me on some life-preserving technology or medical units to keep me going. But if the doctors say, are unclear as to what exactly is going on, I’m much older, then how would someone like you counsel, let’s say my son or my grandson or someone, or my wife at that time, to think through this? If it just seems foggy, if the doctors don’t quite know, because I’m sure there’s lots of times when, I mean your doctor, maybe I’m wrong, but I would imagine there’s lots of times where things can’t really be seen exactly, clearly what is going on. How do we work through that with our faith?

Kathryn Butler:
Yeah. That’s a great question Isaac, and it brings up some really important points. To try to answer, I’m going to backtrack a little bit and just try to give some overarching principles biblically. There are four main things that I think come into play in end-of-life scenarios. And the first is the fact that our mortal life is sacred, that it’s a gift from God, that we’re to preserve it when possible. And this is the principle that compels us to advocate for the unborn, that prompts us to be opposed to physician-assisted suicide, to preserve life when possible. And in that situation that that principal calls us to, when it’s very clear that recovery is possible, to pursue these kinds of treatments.
Then there’s the other end, which is also a bit more stark, which is saying, as you just said, God is sovereign over our life and death and there will be a time when it’s clear that we have no further cure for an underlying process. And in that kind of situation, these kinds of technologies will only prolong death and suffering without getting people home or getting people recovered. Then it comes this gray area like you’re talking about, where doctors aren’t sure, or maybe there actually is a potential treatment, but it’s not going to bring about full recovery. It’s going to instead bring about some improvement but with disability. Maybe we’ll be able to get people out of the hospital, but they’ll be ventilator-dependent at home.
Maybe we recover, but they are going to be tube-feed dependent for the rest of their lives. Or they’re not going to be able to walk on their own, or they’re going to need the assistance of a family member for the rest of their lives, or they’re going to be on dialysis. And these are the kinds of situations where it gets murky. And really the key question to ask is suffering. Because we do as Christians, as followers of Christ, we’re called to have mercy upon others and to care and be compassionate for those who are afflicted. And so, suffering is something that’s very subjective, and this is where it’s important to talk with loved ones ahead of time. Because we never want to think about these issues, but this is really where it’s so key. Because what is bearable to me might not be to someone else.
And what I can endure, for instance, I’ll give you an example. I had this one woman who had been through just this horrible, horrible course where she was in the ICU for months and months and developed ulcers on her back, she could barely walk. And her family said, “Oh my goodness, she’s suffering.” But when we sat down with her, what mattered to her most, where she felt that she was living the life that God had given her to steward and living it well, was being able to sit with her family and watch TV and talk with them about it. And that was meaningful to her. It didn’t matter to her that she was going through all this pain, that was meaningful.
Others will say, “I can’t imagine having to be dependent because I would be so crushed by that kind of dependency.” It’s going to be different for every person. So it’s really important to try to tease out what would incur too much suffering that would crush us. Because God can refine us through suffering, but He doesn’t demand that we endure suffering for no purpose. And so those are the questions I think that are really important to try to, those conversations to have ahead of time with loved ones, is what is it that makes life meaningful for you? What are the moments that you’ve cherished? What are the things that you’ve needed to be able to fill out your call to serve God, to know Him, to enjoy Him? Is it that you need to be able to read the Bible? Do you need to be able to converse with others? What is essential? I hope that answers the question.

Isaac Dagneau:
No, it does. Yeah, no, that’s very helpful. There’s a lot to think about there, so that’s good, Kathryn. And perhaps some of what you said will also flow into this next question here, but how would you then now counsel Christian young adults, who the last thing on their mind probably is end-of-life medical care, at least if they are totally healthy and totally fine or if there’s no family member or friends around them that are suffering with this. And I even ask, and this might come across as weird, but what can we even do today to prepare our hearts for Christ-like behaviour in this area of end-of-life medical care?

Kathryn Butler:
Absolutely. I would say the key and most important thing to realize, is that we are going to be confronting this first and foremost as advocates for those we love. Because we found that only 25% of people across, I’m speaking in US terms, I’m sorry to Canada, but in the US, have an advanced directive. So, an advanced directive is a document stating what you will or will not accept in the hospital, if you can’t speak for yourself. However, 75% of people require someone to make decisions for them at the end of life, because they’re incapacitated. Either because disease has made them delirious and they’re not able to think clearly, or because they’re on a breathing machine and they’re not able to speak. So there’s a huge burden on loved ones, next of kin, who are often then in the position if there is no advanced directive, or even if there is, to try to figure out what a loved one would want.
And these decisions are really hard to make if you have not had a discussion with a loved one ahead of time. They’re hard to make even if you have had these discussions, but if you have no guidance whatsoever, we actually have data to back this up, saying that people who make decisions for loved ones in the ICU at the end of their lives, suffer higher rates of depression afterwards, higher rates of complicated grief, even post-traumatic stress disorder. It is a very heavy burden. And if we at least have the conversations with those we love, we have the peace to say, “This was horrible, I miss him or her, but at least I know that she would have been okay with what I decided.” And so it’s really crucial, as much as we don’t want to think about this, it is a huge source of solace for you as the one making the decisions.
And it’s also incredibly honouring for the one you’re making decisions for, that you’re acknowledging that as an image bearer of God, they’re the stewards of their own lives and you’re trying to honour what they would say when they no longer have a voice. That’s an incredibly rich way to love your neighbour in a time of need. And so, I would say as much as we don’t want to talk about this, we don’t think it’s relevant, it will come upon all of us. And it’s really crucial I think, to have those hard discussions, to talk to your mom or dad, ask them to go through a living will with you and say, “What would you have me do? And how can I honour you when the time comes?”

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s so good. And that’s so practical as well. I love that, so thank you Kathryn. The last question that about this conversation, how does the gospel play a role in end-of-life medical care? So obviously that’s right in your title. So how do we kind of think about the gospel in terms of this?

Kathryn Butler:
Yeah, I think that the gospel is really what provides us hope to buoy us through. Because these kinds of scenarios can be so crushing, and you can deal with such remorse and guilt and uncertainty. But the one hope that we have is knowing that this is not the end, that whatever the outcome, through Christ, we are all healed. That He has triumphed over death. And the title for the book was actually inspired by Romans 8, verses 38 to 39, “Because neither life nor death, nor angels, nor rulers nor anything,” not even a ventilator, not even dialysis, “Can wrench us from God’s love for us in Christ Jesus.” And if we keep that and cling to that, I think it can give us a well of solace from which to draw during these horrific situations.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, no, that’s so good, Kathryn. As we finish this conversation, just sort of shift the conversation a little bit from what we’ve talked about, because I think this is important to take advantage of a Christian surgeon, a Christian doctor talking to us, would you just take a moment to speak to those listening who are committed Christians and they’re interested in, maybe they’re even in school for a medical profession? I’m just wondering if you could just give some wisdom and encouragement to them. Because they’re going to be going into a career that, it’s going to be lots of different beliefs, lots of different faiths, and you’re going to be right up against death and life. So anyways, what’s some wisdom and some advice you can give to Christians looking into this?

Kathryn Butler:
Yeah, I would say first off, thank you. Because when you really think about it, medicine is just such a beautiful way to live out our call to be Christ’s disciples, because it’s a way to love one another as He loved us, and to serve and to have mercy upon others, all of which encapsulates what Christ has done for us. What I would caution or encourage, I’m not sure which the right word is, after having spoken over the past few years to many who are also trying to pursue this vocation but finding significant challenges as a believer in the field. I would just encourage you to try to maintain the practices that you need to uphold to remain in close communion with the Lord.
And what do I mean by that? Just as you said, Isaac, there are moments when you’ll be challenged. And there are many moments when you’ll be challenged, because you’ll be encountering or seeing things that are upsetting and bring you face to face with life and death. You’ll be a witness to suffering. You’re also going to be steeped in a system that is secular. Sometimes the values will conflict with your own. Very often it will challenge your own values, because the medical profession is so cutthroat and so competitive, that oftentimes it prioritizes you placing yourself above others and being the best. And being the best not to be a good steward of God’s gifts but being the best for your own sense of idolatry. And it’s a really hard line to tow, between excellence because you want to be a good steward of God’s gifts, and excellence because you feel the need to be the best, to be competitive.
So I would say, and it’s very hard too, because there’s very little time oftentimes, to attend church, to engage in the usual spiritual disciplines that help to keep you uplifted in your faith. So, I would say pick one or two very key things. Because you’re not going to be able to attend church every Sunday, but if it’s that you pray every morning when you get up, and you give your first hours to God, and you read a passage from the Bible, do it and don’t give that up. Just choose something that will keep you nourished, and your eyes still set heavenward, while you’re mired in something that can be very, very challenging.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, no, that’s so good. So thank you, Kathryn, for adding that on there. We really appreciate that. So anyways, that wraps up our conversation. So let me just say thank you, and I’m sure our listeners are thanking you as well for taking the time to talk with us about this important subject. Thanks, Kathryn.

Kathryn Butler:
Thank you so much.

Kourtney Cromwell:
For me, I think this was a really good time to reflect on the questions that Kathryn gave towards the end. What would incur too much suffering? What is meaningful to me? And what is essential in my relationship to God? For some, this is a difficult conversation, but trust me when I say that it’s worth it. If you’d like to read or buy Kathryn’s book, we’ll have the link available on our website.
Check back with us next week for a brand-new episode where we’ll be talking to Andy Steiger about the future of apologetics.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes and Spotify, or visit us online at indoubt.ca, or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.