Stewarding Your Life Season

Dannah Gresh: Kathryn Butler was an ER Trauma surgeon. She remembers telling her supervisor that she decided to stay home with her children.

Kathryn Butler: It was about walking faithfully with the Lord, where I felt He was calling me—not where He calls all women, but where He was calling me specifically. And so I told him that was what I think I needed to do for me to honor the Lord in the way I think I’m being called to. I need to leave.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Heaven Rules, for May 5, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Our theme this month is all about how God can use unremarkable people to accomplish remarkable things for Him if they simply make themselves available and surrender to His will.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And, Dannah, surrendering to God’s will can and often does come at a cost. But you and I both know that the rewards—His rewards—are so worth whatever we may have to sacrifice.

Well, today we’re going to hear from a woman who can testify to that from her own experience.

Kathryn Butler was a trauma surgeon at Mass General Hospital in Boston. She was good at it—the chaos, the adrenaline, being able to help hurting people and save lives. She viewed it as a God-given calling. It was her mission field. She was living out Colossians 3:17, “Whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

But there came a point when Kathryn was sensing the Lord calling her to step up to a different, and in some ways more challenging, calling.

Dannah: Yes. Not too long ago our friend at Revive Our Hearts and advisory board member, Bob Lepine, took some time to talk to Kathryn about the choice she made to leave behind her career as a surgeon, at least for a season. Let’s listen together.

Bob Lepine: I want you to go back and take us through the thinking and the time when you had the idea, “I think, in spite of the fact that I’m a trained trauma surgeon, I’m going to go home and home school my children.” When that thought flashed through your mind, just take us through how you unpacked that, how you prayed about that, how you considered all of that.

Kathryn: Yes. It was a process. I should mention from the start and in full disclosure, that my work was an idol for me. I can see that in retrospect. I didn’t see it at the time. Every woman’s situation is going to be different.

I’m always reticent to say that my way was the way that all women should go because it’s obviously not true. But in my case, it was the Lord doing many things, but one of them was also taking me away from what I was putting in His place and sanctifying me and softening my heart.

I loved my work. I found incredible fulfillment from being able to walk alongside people in their worst moments and in their scariest moments and to usher them back to health. But it was also all consuming. I was working seventy hours a week as an attending physician, so that’s after I’d done my training.

Some people are very good at leaving work at work. I was not. I had a really hard time maintaining margins and would struggle with thinking about my patients, worrying about them, obsessing about them, checking labs on them well into the night.

And so when I had children, that became a real conflict. Medicine and having a family are not incompatible, but you need to be of the temperament that can keep work at work and come home and make sure that your focus is on your family, as it needs to be.

I was so arrogant that I thought, My husband is going to take care of the kids, and I’m going to be the career woman,” which some women can do, but they do it with humility. I did not. I really thought I was going to be this superwoman, and I could do it . . . and I was a fool.

The Lord very early pointed out that I was going to be a fool because my very first day back from maternity leave turned out to be the Boston Marathon bombings. This created a huge conflict for me because . . . I actually missed the event because my colleagues had told me to take one more day of maternity leave because Patriot Day in Boston is a holiday and so there were no surgical cases scheduled. They said, “Spend one more day at home with your little one.”

So I found out hours after it happened, when it happened. I looked at my pager that there was this chaotic, awful event. All of my colleagues—who we all depended on each other—were working and mobilizing to try and help these poor victims, and I was home holding my newborn. So that immediately turned up all these feelings of guilt and conflict and, “What do I do?”

Thereafter, I threw myself into helping to care for the survivors. I was in the intensive care unit that week when I came back, so I was doing bronchoscopies to look for inhalation injuries after the blast. I was removing shrapnel from limbs. I was there working all hours.

And then Boston went on lock down as they were searching for the surviving bomber. I couldn’t go home, which meant that I couldn’t nurse my baby. It was God’s way, really, of pointing out, “This is not going to go as you think, and you are not in control.”

It was still another couple of years that I tried to stick it out and had the harrowing moments that anyone who’s a working mom has struggled with, where you’re wrestling between these two callings that are so vital.

I can remember my husband calling me when I was in the operating room, scrubbing for a case, because my son had a fever and his breathing pattern looked off to him. He was on FaceTime while I was scrubbed in, trying to show me my baby son and saying, “Should I take him to the hospital or not?”

Our family wound up just being pitched into turmoil by my constant absence. Finally, it came at a time when I was studying Deuteronomy. I came to Deuteronomy 6:6–7, where it teaches us that we’re to infuse our kids’ days with God’s Word, that teaching them about God on Sundays isn’t enough. But it should be all day long, “when they rise, when they walk in the way, when they lie down to sleep.” God’s Word should just be woven into their days. 

And the reality was I could not do that when I was never home and when my mind was still always at the hospital.

So after a long time of prayer and conversations with my husband, I decided that for the sake of my family and for the sake of this very clear calling to my family, that I had to step away from practice.

Bob: So, tell me about the conversation you had with the folks at the hospital when you said, “I’m going home.”

Kathryn: Yes. I burst into tears when I told my mentor and my boss. They were very surprised. They were also grieved. But I told them that it was very clear that I had a responsibility that was God given to cherish and to nourish these kids that the Lord had given me. Some women could do it, but I clearly could not because my heart was not focused on the Lord. It was too focused on my own work and my own success.

And so I actually was very vocal about that. I work in Boston. It is not a place where we talk openly about faith. But I had to, because for me, that’s what it was. It was about walking faithfully with the Lord where I felt He was calling me—not where He calls all women—but for where He was calling me specifically.

So I told them that. I said, “I think for me to honor the Lord in the way I think I’m being called to, I need to leave.”

They tried to offer part-time work. They were so gracious. They were so supportive because they knew that I was so dedicated to my job that this would have to be something very significant for me to step away. But I knew my own temperament so much that I needed to step back completely.

Since then, though, the Lord has just shown me how much my work had supplanted His place in my heart because, to give you an example of the degree of obsession I had with the job:

It was so much my identity that one time when I was in training, I was driving into the hospital at three in the morning, and I was exhausted (because it was three in the morning). I slid on black ice on the highway, and my car careened around and smashed into a barrier. The airbag deployed. Thank the Lord, by His mercy, nobody else was on the road, which is unusual in the Boston area even at three in the morning.

I had a concussion. I had a cut on my head, and I felt foggy. Instead of going home—my husband was out of town—and nursing my concussion, I got a lift with the tow-truck driver. He wouldn’t drive me all the way to the hospital. He dropped me off two miles away. I walked, literally, through the snow, in my scrubs, to then put in a full day at work because it was not acceptable in my mind that I miss a day of work.

That is how errant and wrong-headed and obsessed I was. I was not trusting in God’s goodness and not finding my identity in the fact that God gave His Son for me and had redeemed me and washed me clean of my sins—that I can’t do it myself, and His grace is sufficient. I am the one who is weak.

But I couldn’t accept that reality, and so it really was, I think, the Lord intervening in His grace and in His kindness to say, “No. You need to rely upon Me, not upon the work of your own hands.”

Bob: I have a friend who left a successful business career to go into full-time ministry. When he went to tell his boss what he was doing, his boss reached in the drawer and pulled out a card for a psychiatrist and said, “Here. This is a phase. You’ll be through this.”

Kathryn: Yes.

Bob: Did you have people who said anything like that to you?

Kathryn: Yes. The chairman of my department initially didn’t accept the resignation letter. My division chief was wonderful and very supportive, but said, “I think we’ll see you in two years.”

And they followed up. I had people call me and say, “Are you interested in coming back?”

I don’t regret at all having gone into medicine because what I’ve seen is that the Lord has used that experience in ways I would never have anticipated.

When I stepped away, that was when I was able to start writing about the things that I’d observed but never had the margins to really put into words about faith and medicine. It’s allowed this whole ministry to flourish that I wasn’t seeking, that really, I think, by the Lord’s kindness, that I never ever would have anticipated happening.

It’s been an important lesson to know that God can use all of our moments for His glory—including our experiences. Our job is just to walk in the works that He’s set for us ahead of time.

Bob: Did you have in the first few weeks or months of being home bad days when you went, “What am I doing?”

Kathryn: Absolutely! It is a dramatic change to go from rounding on twenty patients in the intensive care unit and making decisions that seem weighty to potty training (laughter) and cleaning the house and wiping spit-up for the fifth time. It was a dramatic change, and it was very, very humbling.

I struggled probably for about a good year or two with my identity. It really took leaning into God’s Word. I read the entire Bible over the course of that next year and focused especially on the psalms. I was able to say for the first time just how astray I’d been. It took leaning into God’s Word to really see that He had been gracious to me to steer me away, and to see that those experiences that I’d had were something I could still steward. He would work with them for good even if it wasn’t clinical medicine. But it was a process for sure! It took a while.

Bob: There had to be people, and maybe it was just your own voice, saying, “How many years did you spend trying to be a doctor? How much money did you spend trying to be a doctor?”

Kathryn: Yes. Yes. That I wasted it.

Bob: Stewardship of that. I mean, how did you process that?

Kathryn: That was plain guilt on my part, too, and one of the things I wrestled with for a while.

But looking now, just to see the fruit that’s come from being able to talk with people about end-of-life care, having written a book about it, having written a book about suffering in the hospital, having been able to dialog with so many who are hurting, who’ve said, “I’ve derived a lot of comfort from you pointing to God’s Word in the midst of these kinds of crises.”

Even what you see is that part of stewardship is walking in whatever calling God is drawing us to in the moment and that there are seasons. It helped to reflect a lot on the fact that Moses and Abraham were not called to walk with God until they were eighty. There are specific seasons and times for things.

I see it that He called me to medicine, clinical medicine, for a time. He’s still reaping and bearing fruit from that time, even though I’m not still in the hospital. So any good that comes of it is by His glory, and my role is just to be obedient, to be faithful where He’s leading me.

Bob: What about the times you’ve had since leaving when you thought, This is why I left. Times with your kids.

Kathryn: Yes.

I actually went back to work when the Pandemic first hit. Early 2020 when COVID first started surging in Boston, the case numbers were so high that the number of I.C.U. beds needed in our hospital doubled, which is saying a lot. We usually have 100 beds in our I.C.U. We needed 200, and they were just patients of COVID.

So the governor had asked those who were in retirement to consider coming back out of retirement. I reached out to my colleagues. They said, “Yes, we could use you.”

I was just sticking my finger in the dike. I was not one of the healthcare workers who’s been laboring over the months and years with this. But it was so destructive to our family.

I worked nights to try to minimize that disruption. I’d be with my kids during the day, and then I’d go overnight. I did it for three nights in a row. It was just clear that at this season, my children need me more than the hospital does. They can find someone else to do my work, but my kids only have one mom.

And what I’ve seen, too . . . I didn’t talk about in terms of the family situation before I left practice. My son when he was very young struggled with sensory processing disorders. And so just the daily activities of living would throw him into a panic.

He couldn’t handle crowds. He could not handle loud noises. He needed noise-canceling headphones just for church, just to get through church. He would have meltdowns on a daily basis just because he was so overwhelmed with the stuff of living.

It was when I was able to come home and was able to observe him more carefully that I began to realize there was something very wrong. We got him into therapy for the next two years, which I needed to be home to do. He’s thriving now. He’s not having any of the struggles that he once did. We’ve now just joined a home school co-op.

So there’s that piece of it where we see God was so gracious to us. And then also, to see my kids flourish in knowing the Lord because it’s part of our daily lives and our daily rhythm. We do our devotions every morning, but also as we’re studying different subjects, we can point to the fact that God’s made us all in His image, that He calls us to care for the poor and the destitute. It just comes up in conversation.

During COVID my son started to express some doubts about God’s goodness because he wondered, How could God be good if He would allow this to happen? It was partly because he was scared with me being back in the hospital and was worried that I would get sick.

But it was because the Lord drew me away that I was able to do an in-depth study of Job with him and help him to see that suffering is part of this fallen world, but the Lord is at work through it in ways that we can’t discern. His name remains blessed even when calamity strikes.

Since then, he’s accepted Christ as his Savior. I can’t look at that and say, “Oh, I should be back at the hospital.” This is my little boy’s salvation I’m talking about. It’s because of God’s kindness in steering me away that I’ve been able to help disciple him that way.

Bob: Have you started thinking about a season in the future when you might go back? Do you have a desire to go back?

Kathryn: I am probably less apt than others to commit to any kind of future plans, based on experience. I mean that I really take it moment by moment, and it’ll be as the Lord wills.

Do I foresee going back? I don’t see how it would be possible. My children are only seven and nine. And for the foreseeable future, we plan to home school them, for a number of reasons. It just proves to be a wonderful choice to our family and a rich way to disciple them.

So I don’t foresee that being feasible because it means that I will have been out of practice for fifteen years before I try to enter back in. That would mean trying to get my license again and get boarded again and spend a lot of money to try to do those things. But the Lord may call me to that at some point. So, am I anticipating it? No. Would I be adverse to it if that’s clearly what He’s calling me to do? Of course not. My role is to go where He’s leading me.

Bob: Do you miss the adrenaline?

Kathryn: I did for a while. I don’t anymore. Actually, what I missed most was the people. I missed the camaraderie with my colleagues—the nurses and my partners.

The adrenaline—I need to correct that statement. I don’t miss the adrenaline at all because the adrenaline was often caught up with a lot of fear and anguish. There was always the joy of helping someone, but there was a lot of witnessing of death and suffering and also feeling like you had a responsibility to stop it, and very often we can’t stop it. Those moments linger with you and haunt you for a very long time. So, no, I don’t miss the adrenaline because there was a lot of hurt going along with it.

Bob: If you were still doing trauma surgery, you couldn’t write young adult fantasy fiction.

Kathryn: (laughing) No.

Bob: That feels like it comes from another person. How does a trauma surgeon write young adult fantasy? Put that together for me.

Kathryn: It was actually during the Pandemic. I mentioned that my son was scared and reading through Job was a liferaft to him, but we also had wonderful moments at that time.

At the height of it, when he was very scared that I was going to get sick with COVID myself, and we didn’t know a lot about COVID at this time (I should emphasis). So, it was very early. We didn’t know its communicability. We didn’t understand how lethal it was. We just knew it was getting people very sick, very quickly.

We were so ignorant that I had a bucket of bleach in my garage. When I’d come home, I would literally douse myself in bleach so that I wouldn’t pass anything on to my family.

But the other thing that guided us through those days was that we were reading “The Return of the King.” There’s this exquisite scene, and I read it with my kids with them on either side of me on the couch, snuggled in to me, between my shifts. I would come home after a night shift, sleep for a few hours, and get up with them and then go back in.

And it’s when Minas Tirith is being sieged, and it’s this moment of gloom and despair, and all looks like it’s been lost. And then their kinsman comes sweeping down the plain to their aid. And Tolkien's language is so beautiful because he describes it as the wind changing. “And there was a wind that swept in from over the sea and dawn broke, and the morning had come again.

And I started to cry, and my son got tearful.

I said, “Are you okay?”

He said, “It’s just so beautiful.”

And I said, “Well, do you know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the fact that we have hope, even now, because Jesus has promised He will make all things new and that hope endures.”

So, it was reflecting upon that, upon the power of a story that had Christian themes embedded in it to bring to life for our kids the truth of God’s goodness and of Christ. And that got me thinking. I would get stupid, silly ideas in my head all the time.

And so when all of a sudden an image of a girl stumbling upon a dragon in her kitchen came to mind, instead of dismissing it, I started to ask questions about it. “Well, who is this girl?” And, “Why is there a dragon?”

It just continued, and so I wrote the book. I said, “Okay, what do I do with this?” I reached out to my publisher. It was just one of those things where I was just more alert to the power of stories to guide young minds to Christ if we can pick up on those themes and walk with them.

And it’s just been a real joy since then to be able to write something that’s been fun and imaginative but that will hopefully generate discussions between parents and kids.

Bob: If you were having lunch today with a young woman who’s a surgeon, who’s six-months pregnant, and she’s going, “I’m planning to come back.” What would you say to her?

Kathryn: Oh my goodness. I had a lot of those conversations, but not with women who were six-months pregnant. That’s a different type of weight.

To just remain prayerful and seek out supporters as best as she can, honestly, because it’s going to depend upon her support system, the type of surgery she’s in, her own temperament, what it is that drives her, her ability to delegate and create margins.

I would tell her that no matter what, it’s going to be hard and exhausting, but to listen every day and try to remain in prayer and remain in God’s Word, and just remain attentive to where God’s guiding her and to try and get as much support as she can around her to help her through those long nights. 

Bob: Would you try to nudge her in a particular direction?

Kathryn: I wouldn’t. That’s the thing I really want to make clear: the Lord gives us children that are unique and different from others and pairs them with parents who are uniquely suited to them.

I’m loathe to say that my way is how it should be or that women can’t do surgery and have families. For me, it was an idol, and I very clearly couldn’t. But, no, I would be very reticent or hesitant to tell her or nudge her either way. I would just urge her, most importantly, to remain in God’s Word and to remain prayerful. I think that is the most important thing, no matter what.

Dannah: What an encouraging perspective from Kathryn Butler, who left behind her medical career to be able to spend more time with her children. She was talking to Bob Lepine, recorded not long ago at True Woman ’22.

And, Nancy, as Kathryn mentioned several times, she’s not saying this is something all moms need to do.

Nancy: That’s right, Dannah. The Lord leads different women in different ways in different seasons of their lives. But in Kathryn’s case, she and her husband felt God nudging her toward the high calling of Kathryn being able to be home more with her children.

And with Mother’s Day just around the corner, we want to celebrate the sacrifices that so many Christian moms make to invest in the lives of their children.

Dannah: Well, if you’d like more information on Kathryn Butler’s books, you’ll find a link to them within the transcript of this program. She’s also been a guest on our weekly videocast, Grounded.

Nancy: You know, Dannah, Kathryn’s a wonderful example of someone who made a choice to set aside the glamor and excitement of her career and spend her time and energy in ways that many would consider unremarkable or unrewarding. But any time we follow God’s lead into what He’s calling us to do, it’s neither unremarkable nor unrewarded.

This month in appreciation of your donation to Revive Our Hearts, we want to send you a copy of Unremarkable: Ten Ordinary Women Who Impacted Their world for Christ.

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Dannah: Well, as we heard today, Kathryn Butler believes the way she stewards her time in this season of time of life should be an act of worship.

Next week we’ll hear from two more moms who agree and live out the truth of the gospel in their homes in their own unique ways. Lora Wifler and Emily Jensen join us to talk about what they refer to as “risen motherhood.”

Have a great weekend, and then please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to help you steward your life season and find freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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