Nursing

For many years, nursing was my calling and my classroom. Long before I wrote a single book, I learned to read people — their pain, their fear, the things they could not say aloud. A bedside is a holy place. I did not know it at the time, but some of my most important ministry happened in a uniform, with tired feet and a full heart.

Nursing taught me that every life has value. The newborn taking her first breath and the elderly man taking his last — both image-bearers of a God who numbers our days. I learned to hold a hand when there was nothing else to hold. I learned that presence is sometimes the most powerful medicine we can offer.

There were nights I came home so tired I could not speak. Nights when a patient I had grown to love did not make it. Nights when the weight of human suffering felt too heavy to carry. And yet, in the middle of all of it, I kept meeting God. In the quiet courage of a family saying goodbye. In the unexpected smile of a patient in pain. In the simple privilege of being present at the most sacred moments of a person's life.

Nursing also taught me something I carry into everything I do now: that serving people is never a lesser calling. Jesus washed feet. He touched the untouchable. He noticed the ones everyone else walked past. Every time I bent over a bedside, I was, in some small way, learning to be more like Him.

I do not wear the uniform anymore, but the lessons of those years still shape me. Compassion is not a job. It is a way of life. And the God who saw me through every shift is the same God who sustains me in every season since.