People always assume the hardest part of nursing is the medical side: the emergencies, the alarms, and the long shifts. But for me, the hardest moments are the quiet ones. The hours when the hallways are dim, families have gone home, and patients are left alone with their fear.
Those are the hours when I feel Jesus asking me to show up the most.
Years ago, I worked the overnight shift when a teenage boy was admitted after a severe depressive episode. He looked so fragile, curled up on his side, eyes red from crying. He wouldn’t talk to anyone. When I checked his vitals, he whispered, “Does it get better?”
No textbook prepares you for that kind of question.
I pulled up a chair next to his bed and told him the truth.
“Yes. Not all at once. But yes. God stays with you even when you can’t feel Him.”
I surprised myself with how honest I was. I told him how I had gone through my own valley years earlier: panic attacks, hopelessness, and nights where I begged God to just make the pain stop. I told him how God didn’t fix everything immediately, but He never left. And eventually, the light came back.
We talked quietly for almost an hour. I didn’t preach. I didn’t try to say the perfect thing. I just sat with him, the way Jesus has sat with me so many times.
When I left the room, I prayed, “Lord, hold him through the night.”
I didn’t see him again after he was transferred, but last year, I got a letter at the hospital. It was from him.
He told me he was doing well, studying counseling, and wanted to help other young people who felt alone. At the bottom, he wrote: “You were the first person who made me believe God wasn’t done with me.”
I cried right there at the nurse’s station.
My job is to measure blood pressure and administer meds but my calling–the way I show the love of Jesus–is to sit in the darkness with people until they remember the light still exists.
Some nights, all I do is hold a hand or listen. But I’ve learned that sometimes, that’s exactly how God heals.
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