At City Church, we love to remind each other of God's story of creation, fall, redemption, & renewal. We also strive to remind each other that God's story intersects with our own personal journey. Each Tuesday for the next 8 weeks, a City Church attender will be sharing a piece of their story on our blog of a time when this intersection was especially evident for them. Today's story comes from Kristina Pansa.
Last year, I quit my job and entered nursing school. While there are many things I am excited about in my pending career and many things I am grateful for throughout this process (like having the option to quit my job and go to school full-time), it has also been an emotionally challenging and spiritually draining process.
The job I quit was something I stumbled into, when I was desperately in need of a job. But, I ended up being really good at it, and I found purpose in the work I was doing. It was engaging, challenging, and impactful to the world around me. When I quit, I left it behind. The first few months of nursing school were a combination of academic classes and practical learning. I learned that despite being 30, I apparently didn’t know how to make a bed. In my first patient’s room, it took me more than 5 minutes to move a table…that had wheels. I felt clumsy; out of my element. Suddenly, I wasn’t good at anything.
It was during this time that I realized how much value I placed on being good at things. And, while I had always considered myself up for a good challenge, I realized that by-in-large, the challenges I’ve selected for myself over the years were mostly things I would be good at on the first try---no one would ever see me fail. Even that last job I’d had: I could edit and proofread my work a hundred times before passing it along, ensuring no one saw the ugly first drafts.
In nursing, everything you do is supervised and critiqued. And shockingly, the first time you put on sterile gloves, or move a patient, or give medications, you probably aren’t going to get it right. Beyond that, there are a hundred non-procedural things you are supposed to remember. And you know how you get better at those things; at integrating classroom knowledge with practice? By trying, over and over and over and failing, publicly. I’ve jokingly told people who ask that nursing school is one big slice of ‘humble pie,’ but my laughter hides the truth: It sucks. Not school, not the job—that’s awesome. But the process: it sucks to be bad at something and to have your faults on display.
Sometimes I fall into the comparison trap-- If I look at my 30-year-old peers, many have graduate degrees; some are practicing doctors; some have been nurses for 10 years already. Some are lawyers; some have large families. So many days, I feel like a total failure-I’m still a student, not even proficient in basic nursing skills. Over the past 1.5 years, I have struggled to remember that my value is not in how well I perform academically or clinically. It’s not in what I’ve ever accomplished, or what I ever will accomplish. I can’t tell you how many days I’ve forgotten this.
Jesus reminds us over and over that we belong to Him. That our worth is found in Him. That our redemption is found in Him. He tells us: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6); Paul reminds us that the cross was a bloody ordeal, offensive to Jews and Gentiles alike, but their salvation nonetheless: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (I Corinthians 1:18, 22-25).
Through Jesus’ blood (read: not my best efforts at perfection), I am sanctified and claimed. Through the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, I am spiritually renewed outside of my own effort. These are the truths I cling to in my moments of doubt and unbelief. Like the man who asked Jesus to heal his son of an unclean spirit, I pray: “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).