The Transformation of a Purse

When I graduated from Brigham Young University’s School of Nursing, I learned far more than how to care for a patient. I was trained in the Healer’s Art—the sacred privilege of seeing another human being not simply as a diagnosis, a disease, or a circumstance, but as a beloved child of God worthy of compassion, dignity, and hope.

At the time, I could not have imagined how many places that lesson would take me.

After graduating from BYU, I served an LDS mission in Colombia, South America. Colombia became much more than a place on a map to me. It became a place where I learned to love people whose language, culture, circumstances, and life experiences were different from my own. I left Colombia carrying a piece of its people in my heart, and I made myself a promise: someday I would return, and I would bring nursing students with me.

Years later, after working as a nurse and eventually as a nurse practitioner, I was given the opportunity to do exactly that.

Through my non-profit organization Bridges for Health, I returned to Colombia and other countries alongside nursing students and healthcare professionals. We provided care in communities where resources were limited, but where I quickly learned that the people we served often gave us far more than we could ever give them.

One woman in Colombia especially touched my heart. When I first met her, she was working in the sex industry. She was trying to find a different path for her life and was being trained to make beautiful leather purses. I remember recognizing something in her that perhaps she could not yet fully see in herself—a desire for something different, something better, something that would allow her to build a new life with dignity.

Each year when I returned, I looked for her. And each year, I noticed something different.

Her countenance seemed brighter. There was a growing confidence in her eyes. There was hope where I had once seen shame. Little by little, she was creating a new life for herself. She was learning a skill, developing a way to support herself, and most importantly, discovering that her past did not have to determine her future.

I watched her transition out of the sex-worker industry and into a life where she could use her own hands to create something beautiful.

I will never forget watching that transformation. The leather purses she was learning to make became, to me, a symbol of her life. Something beautiful was being created from something that had once seemed impossible to change.

Every year, when I saw her, I could see more light in her face. I began to understand that perhaps this was the real meaning of the Healer’s Art.

Sometimes healing is not found in a medication, a procedure, or a clinical intervention. Sometimes healing begins when someone looks at another human being and communicates, I see you. You matter. Your life has value. Your story is not over.

That is the light I first encountered at BYU. The light came full circle.

I began as a young nursing student at BYU, learning how to care for others. I then served as a missionary in Colombia, where I learned to love and serve people from another culture. I became a nurse and later a nurse practitioner, carrying those lessons into my professional practice. Eventually, I returned to Colombia—not alone, but with students of my own.

Now I have the privilege of standing beside the next generation of nurses as they discover what it means to care for people whose lives may look very different from their own.

I have watched nursing students arrive in another country thinking they are going to give something away— their knowledge, their skills, their time, their compassion. But somewhere along the way, they discover that service changes the giver as much as the receiver.

They begin to see people differently. They begin to listen differently.

They begin to understand that every culture has something to teach us and that every person has a story worth knowing. And sometimes, if we are fortunate, we get to witness a life transformed.

I think about that woman with the leather purses. I think about the first time I met her, and then the times I returned and watched her countenance become brighter. I think about the courage it took for her to leave one life behind and begin creating another.

And I realize that the light I saw in her was never really mine to give her.

Perhaps my role was simply to help her recognize the light that was already within her.

That realization has changed the way I understand nursing.

The light isn't meant to be kept to oneself. It becomes brighter as it is shared.

The light I received at BYU traveled with me to Colombia. Colombia brought it back into my heart. My nursing career gave me opportunities to share it with patients. My work as a nurse practitioner allowed me to share it through healing and education. And now, through global health service, I have the privilege of sharing it with students who will carry that light into places I may never go.

Perhaps that is the most beautiful part of a life in nursing: the light keeps moving.

One nurse inspires another. One act of compassion gives someone courage to begin again.

And one generation teaches the next that healing is not simply something we do for people—it is something we share with them.

I am grateful that my journey began at BYU.

I am grateful for the people of Colombia who taught me to see beyond language and culture.

I am grateful for the woman whose life became a living testimony to hope and renewal.

And I am especially grateful that what began as a lesson in the Healer’s Art has become a lifelong invitation to carry the light wherever I go—and to help others discover that they have light of their own.

What began with a young nursing graduate at BYU has come full circle.

And I have learned that when we share our light, we never have less of it, but more.

We simply make the world a little brighter.