witness

Hi Friend,

I can’t very well write a blog based upon faith and how it’s changed every fiber of my life without starting at the beginning. So here it goes…my testimony.

I’ve never doubted God’s existence. That being said, never doubting God’s existence does not mean we’ve always had a stellar relationship. Far from it, actually.  

Growing up Evangelical Presbyterian, my earliest childhood memories of church are attending Sunday School and going to Vacation Bible School a week every summer (side note: Can we agree that was just free daycare for our parents? Where was the vacation for us?). Eventually I grew tired of coloring pictures of Jesus performing miracles and watching VeggieTales, and spent Sundays in service with my mom. But as I got older, life got busier. Being on a competitive dance company, conventions kept me traveling most weekends, which made church on Sundays less of a priority. And I’ve found that when you let anything slide down your priority list, it becomes pretty easy to forget altogether.

Missing one Sunday service turned into months of missed services, and being preoccupied with sports and school, my faith fell by the wayside. For the majority of my young adult life, I had what I like to call a boomerang relationship with God. I would go off into the world, but come back around to God if/when I needed something; round and round we went. Mainly superficial in nature, I would pray to either say thank you for my blessings or to ask for something I wanted. I’d heard that God was wonderful and had plans for my life, but I didn’t put much effort into finding out who He was or what He had planned for me. It wasn’t until the fall of 2017 that I boomeranged on back to ask God for help in turning my life around.

At the time I was working nightshift at my first travel nursing assignment, and I loathed it. Full of negative nurses and patronizing doctors, it was the most toxic environment I’ve ever experienced. More toxic than the image Britney Spears portrayed to young girls in the “Toxic” music video (yes, I did proceed to go watch that music video after writing that sentence. It’s so bad, it’s good). Back to the point…With a new career, renewed relationship, new city, essentially a whole new chapter, I was already struggling mentally with all the change. I didn’t notice at the time just how malleable my mind was, but being surrounded by the additional negative energy at work was just adding fuel to the fire. It was inevitable that I would soon combust.

I began to spend my nights off work sobbing on the floor of my guest room closest. It seemed like the logical place to ugly-cry, as it put three walls between me and my significant other sleeping in our bedroom. Plus, it had carpet, and I’d already discovered that having breakdowns on the bathroom tile just hurt my knees (Who’s been there? Anyone? Bueller?).

And so, this pattern went on for months, unbeknownst to anyone. Because, of course, I had convinced myself that I couldn’t tell anyone I was struggling. I was Haley, I always had it together. And I desperately wanted to maintain that image. It got to the point where it was such a usual activity for me, I can’t even tell you what I was crying for or about. I was just incredibly unhappy. Unhappy with my job. Unhappy with my choices. Unhappy with my actions. Unhappy because I had every reason to be happy and wasn’t. Going through the motions every day pretending that I was okay was starting to wear on me. And so, it was on a tear-filled night in the guest room closet that God spoke to me for the first time.

I was sitting on the floor, hunched over with my arm across my stomach, physically trying to hold myself together. I’d had enough. I was so incredibly exhausted of putting on a pretty face by day and smearing mascara all over it by night. The pattern had to change; I knew I had to change. But where to start, I had no idea… so I prayed out of desperation. On my knees, I folded my hands and prayed to God, begging Him to show me where to start. And when I stopped to catch my breath I heard a voice that simply said, “You’re thinking about it all wrong.”

Now, I had heard people say that God speaks to them, but I’d never understood exactly what that meant. I’d always imagined God’s voice like the voice of Zeus in Disney’s Hercules. You know, when Hercules goes to the temple of Zeus and the statue comes to life and Zeus is like “MY BOY!” in that big, booming, voice of his. I thought if God ever spoke to me it would be loud and powerful, so I’d know it was God. But it wasn’t like that at all.

At the time it happened, I wasn’t even sure what to call it. It wasn’t until several months later when I was reading Eat, Pray, Loveby Elizabeth Gilbert that I found an accurate description of the voice I heard that night. She writes, “It was merely my own voice speaking from within my own self. But this was my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate.”

It was my own voice that spoke that night in the closet. However, it was innately evident to me that although it sounded like my voice, it was not my own. It was, surprisingly, exactly as she described it. It was God speaking to me, through me.

After I heard, “You’re thinking about it all wrong,” my mind instantaneously jumped to several images of patients I had cared for over the last several weeks. The voice spoke again saying, “It’s not about you. It’s about them.”

And that was it. That’s all that was said. There was no bright light, no ground shaking. A few simple sentences were what completely changed my life. Because it was in that moment that I realized how misled in my way of thinking I had become. How selfish and prideful I had become. It was all about me. I’d never even considered He had given me a passion for travel and nursing to send me to places where people needed me.

Turning my life around didn’t happen all in one night, that took time. But I walked into work the next day thinking differently. Instead of thinking, “This place is terrible, what am I – a well-educated, well-trained certified nurse – doing here,” I thought, “This place is terrible, maybe I’m supposed to be here with my education and training to make a difference in a place that desperately needs it.” And suddenly, my life had purpose.

That night in the closet was my “rock-bottom” moment; my starting point. It was then that I chose to put my faith in God’s plan for me, not my plans for myself. As a result, over the last year and a half, there have been radical changes in my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health that have led me to a place of happiness and contentment with my life.

Are you struggling with something? Are you looking to change the negative mentality rut you may be in? Are you looking to expand your faith?

Follow along as I delve into how I got to where I am today by making my relationship with God a priority. And how through that relationship, I learned how to better nurse others back to health and how to nurse myself back to happiness.