Today's post comes from Elaine S. Marshall - dean of brigham young university college of nursing. She gave this devotional address on october 8, 2002 at BYU.
I remember the first day I set out to practice healing. I could hardly sleep the night before I began working as a qualified nurse. Two conflicting feelings left my heart pounding. First, I felt courage and COULDN'T wait to perform my first procedure. On the other hand, I was afraid that by sheer inexperience I would violate my promise to “do no harm.” I carefully pulled on my support hose, white nylon dress, and ugly prescription shoes. My crowning glory was the starched white cap that held my long hair tucked tightly beneath. I COULDN'T wait. I wanted to cure; I wanted to care; I wanted to heal.
Today's post comes from Elaine S. Marshall - dean of brigham young university college of nursing. She gave this devotional address on october 8, 2002 at BYU.
I remember the first day I set out to practice healing. I could hardly sleep the night before I began working as a qualified nurse. Two conflicting feelings left my heart pounding. First, I felt courage and COULDN'T wait to perform my first procedure. On the other hand, I was afraid that by sheer inexperience I would violate my promise to “do no harm.” I carefully pulled on my support hose, white nylon dress, and ugly prescription shoes. My crowning glory was the starched white cap that held my long hair tucked tightly beneath. I COULDN'T wait. I wanted to cure; I wanted to care; I wanted to heal.
I have learned a lot about healing since that day. I have learned that healing is a process of restoring and becoming whole. And I have come to realize that the process involved in physical healing mirrors in many ways the spiritual healing we all require at difficult times in our lives. Through caring for my patients and enduring my own heartaches, I have learned six lessons about “the healer’s art.” 1
Healing Hurts
First, healing hurts. When I was a young nurse in the hospital, hardly a day went by that a patient did not ask, “Will it hurt?” If I had been truthful, the whispered answer would nearly always have been, “Yes, it will hurt.” I have learned that healing hurts. Life hurts. Healing really begins only when we face the hurt in its full force and then grow through it with all the strength of our soul. For every reward of learning and growing, some degree of pain is always the price. Author M. Scott Peck suggests that if you do not want love or pain, you “must do without many things.” 2 I think you would do without friendship, dating, working, getting married, or having children.
Sometime in your life you will know a crashing crisis or heavy heartache that will threaten all sense of logic or hope or certainty, from which, no matter how you emerge, nothing will ever be the same. Hurts come as unique losses, unwelcome surprises, fading hope, or grief.
We can partake of the healing offered through the Atonement of our Savior, who promised, “I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee” (2 Kgs. 20:5; see also 3 Ne. 18:32).
Healing Is Active
My second lesson is that healing is active—you have to participate. Your friend, your husband or wife, your mother cannot do it for you. You have to face the problem and the pain. To begin healing, you must acknowledge and feel the hurt. Only those who don’t feel, those without conscience, cannot heal.
My mother told me of an experience she had one winter morning as she drove to check the cattle in the lower pasture. She noticed a car off the side of the road. Inside she recognized a young mother and three children. When my mother asked if they needed help, the woman tearfully reminded her that this was the place of the accident that killed her husband two weeks earlier. She said, “We are just here to feel the hurt.”
On that first day as a nurse, I assumed cure and healing to be synonymous. I have learned they are not necessarily the same. Cure is clean, quick, and done—often under anesthesia. The antibiotic kills the pathogen; the scalpel cuts out the malignancy; the medication resolves the distorted chemistry. But healing may involve a lifelong process of recovery and growth in spite of—perhaps because of—enduring physical, emotional, or spiritual assault. It often requires time. We may pray for cure when we really need healing. Whether for cell reconstruction, for nerve and muscle rehabilitation, for emotional recovery, or for spiritual forgiveness, healing can require work and time and energy.
Healing Is Private
My third lesson is that healing is private. The hymn “Lord, I Would Follow Thee” describes “hidden sorrow” in a “quiet heart.” 4 Saint-Exupéry wrote, “It is such a secret place, the land of tears.” 5
Private healing is not healing by abandonment. Healing is not only private, it is sacred. There is something so sacred about partaking of the power of the Atonement to overcome suffering, disappointment, or sin that it happens in the privacy of that special relationship between the mortal and the divine. Healing involves a private, personal communion with the Savior, the Master Healer. It inspires a very personal reverence and awe. While on the earth, Jesus often began the healing process in private and then departed. He often charged, “See thou tell no man; but go thy way” (Matt. 8:4; see also Luke 8:56).
To say that healing is private is not to diminish the marvelous power that comes from the help and compassion of others. Indeed, private healing often may not happen without the help of others. Nevertheless, much of the work of healing is done alone, inside the heart, in the company of the Spirit of the Lord.
Such secret healing is not a single event. It happens as a process of living. You cannot simply take a day off and return healed. It happens quietly, while you face the pain, and over time as you live, work, study, and give to others.
Healing Teaches Us
The fourth lesson of the healer’s art is that healing teaches us. When we have a terrible loss or pain, we may seek to get back to normal or to the way things were before, but they will never be the same. Pain changes us but not in the same way healing teaches us. Healing can help us become more sensitive and more awake to life. Healing inspires repentance and obedience. Healing invites gifts of humility and faith. It opens our hearts to the profound complexities of truth, beauty, divinity, and grace.
We Must Help Others Heal
The fifth lesson of learning the healer’s art is the obligation and great gift it is to help others heal.
Every day someone in your path is hurting, someone is afraid, someone feels inadequate, or someone needs a friend. Someone needs you to notice, to reach out, and to help him or her to heal. You may not know who that is at the time, but you can give encouragement and hope. You can help heal wounds of misunderstanding and contention. You can serve “in the cause of the Master Healer.” 9
Healing Is a Divine Gift
The last and greatest lesson of healing is that it is a divine gift always available from a loving Heavenly Father. If you have a pain or sorrow or disappointment or sin or just a grudge that needs healing, the Savior simply says, “Come unto me.”
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