She Walked Away From: Faith & Work for Christian Leaders

Katherine Alsdorf spent 20 years running from God while rising to become a Silicon Valley CEO.

Her stunning journey back — and the groundbreaking book she co-wrote with Tim Keller — is reshaping how Christians think about faith, work, and purpose.

The Woman Who Didn’t Want It to Be True She knew it was true.

Katherine Alsdorf would sit in a church in New York City — a city she had moved to chasing ambition and a corner office — and listen to a young pastor named Tim Keller preach.

Nevertheless, she would get up, leave before anyone could talk to her, and walk out into the Manhattan air still angry at what she’d heard.

“I would stomp out,” she told Bob Varney on the Intersection Faith, Work and Life podcast.

“I would leave not wanting to talk to anyone the whole time and just be angry at what I was hearing.

And yet, in my deepest heart, I think I knew it was true.

I just didn’t want it to be true.” That tension — knowing something to be real but desperately not wanting it — is one of the most honest things a person can say about coming to faith.

Furthermore, it’s exactly why Katherine Alsdorf’s story matters so much to every Christian leader who has ever felt the weight of two worlds: the board room and the pew, the quarterly report and the Sunday sermon, the resume and the soul.

Because Katherine eventually surrendered.

As a result, what happened next changed not just her life, but the faith and work landscape for hundreds of thousands of believers worldwide.

A Free-Range Kid Who Would One Day Run Companies Long before she was co-authoring books with Tim Keller, Katherine Leary was a kid in rural New Jersey, growing up in a home full of church attendance, Sunday school perfect-attendance pins, and a family helping plant new congregations in the suburbs.

She was the oldest of four, and she took her faith seriously — until she was seventeen.

That’s when she decided she’d been “brainwashed” and needed to test God.

Not in anger, not in crisis — just in the cool, rational confidence of a young woman who had better things to do.

Meanwhile, her three younger brothers became born-again Christians, and then her parents followed.

Consequently, she would go home for visits and sneak out to the back porch to smoke cigarettes while the rest of her family prayed at the dinner table.

Climbing the Corporate Ladder While Running From God In those two decades, Katherine climbed relentlessly.

She earned an MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia and rose through the tech sector — consulting, sales, marketing.

She became President of Private Satellite Network in New York City, then CEO of One Touch Systems, then CEO of Pensare, Inc., an online management education company in Silicon Valley.

Sharp, credible, driven — she impressed by any professional measure.

But something lingered underneath all of it.

“It was not until my late 30s,” she told Bob, “that I think the combination of not being married and having a job that just took all of my life… I thought, God’s sort of my last chance.

Praying is my last chance.” In other words, she came back to God for utilitarian reasons.

Lonely and overworked, she had simply run out of options.

“God is quite wide in his embrace of prayers,” she says with the quiet humor of someone who has been lovingly outmaneuvered.

“While I was seeking just to make my life better, God made my life better — but it was a totally entirely different track than I was looking for.” The Surrender That Didn’t Feel Like Joy Here is something Katherine says that the Church rarely says out loud, and it’s worth stopping on.

She did not experience a lightning-bolt conversion.

No tears of joy, no flood of peace, no dramatic moment of blinding certainty.

“I viewed it as succumbing or surrendering,” she said.

“Not some miraculous see the light — but a surrender.