For nearly forty-five years, I sat beside people on some of the hardest days of their lives.

I met people receiving devastating diagnoses, families facing impossible decisions, and folks living with chronic pain, grief, uncertainty, and loss. 

My nursing education gave me plenty to work with — anatomy, physiology, pharmacology — and I used all of it. I spent years just sitting with people, helping them make sense of what was happening to their bodies.

In my faith communities, I did something similar from a different angle. I brought meals, visited the sick, sat with people in their pain of loss. There is a real give-and-take there, when I need it, too; all grounded in the guidance of Scripture and the simple fact of showing up for each other. 

What puzzles me at this stage of my life is that nobody ever handed any of us an owner’s manual for the mind. 

When I encountered the Three Principles, it felt like someone switched on a light; the owners manual appeared. 

So much of what I discovered echoed things I’d already seen at the bedside and things I’d already learned walking with God. For years I thought these were three separate conversations.

Healthcare was about the body.
Faith was about the spirit and community.
Psychology was about the mind.

But over time I kept seeing the same themes surface in all three places. People recovered perspective. Peace returned, sometimes from nowhere. Insight quietly appeared. It started to feel like life was doing more on our behalf than we usually give it credit for.

So if you asked me over coffee what nursing, faith, and the Three Principles have taught me about being human, here’s what I’d tell you.

The Body Is Always Trying to Help

One of the first things nursing teaches you is that the body works on your behalf constantly; innately designed that way. Healing begins almost immediately. Repairs happen while you sleep. Underneath every diagnosis, something in the body is already trying to restore balance.

I’ve sat with patients who were convinced their bodies had betrayed them, when healing was already underway right there in the room, at that very moment.

Later I started noticing something similar happening psychologically. People feel anxious or discouraged and assume something is wrong with them by just feeling those feelings. 

But I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched someone’s perspective return on its own, with no real effort behind it.

I used to think clarity was something we had to manufacture. I know better. It is something we naturally return to, the way our breathing returns to normal after a run or a stairclimb.

Symptoms Are Information, Not Failures

Scripture never told me to fear my own warning signs – physical or emotional. It told me to bring everything into the light. No need to treat it as proof that something had gone wrong with me… “let’s handle it” is the message.

Nurses learn something similar. A fever or a stab of pain is usually the body telling you something by way of symptoms. Your body is not betraying you. 

For years, though, I treated the feeling of anxiety the opposite way — both in my patients and in myself — as a problem to be solved rather than information to be read.

The Three Principles gave me the missing piece: what if a feeling is information rather than evidence that something is broken? That one shift changed a lot for me and my patients. I stopped fighting uncomfortable feelings quite so hard. 

A check-oil light isn’t an emergency. It’s just a light asking you to look a little closer.

We Scare Ourselves More Than Life Does

The Three Principles taught me something I didn’t expect: we’re mostly experiencing our thinking about life, not life itself. 

That doesn’t make fear disappear — I still feel it. Everyone does. But a scary thought and present reality are not always the same thing, even when the thought is loud enough to convince you otherwise. I am so grateful to have that awareness now.

I’ve watched this play out at the bedside more times than I can count. People waiting on biopsy results mentally plan their own funerals. Then they laugh about it afterward, because the actual moment was nothing like the one they’d rehearsed.

We’ve all done some version of this. We’ve dreaded conversations that never happened. We’ve grieved outcomes that never came.

Birds, Lilies, and a Mind Made New

There’s a passage in Matthew I’ve leaned on more than almost any other. Jesus tells the crowd not to worry about their lives, pointing to birds that don’t plant or harvest and yet are fed, and wildflowers that don’t spin thread and are clothed better than royalty.

The point isn’t that effort doesn’t matter. It’s that worry was never required. This seems to be how God designed us to live, not driven by anxious striving, but carried.

For years I admired that passage without quite living inside it. It sounded beautiful. It didn’t feel operational.

Then there’s Romans 12:2, which speaks of being transformed by the renewing of our minds. I used to think that meant working harder to think better thoughts. Now I think it’s closer to what I’ve witnessed at bedsides and in my own life: the mind settles, and from that settled place, we see differently. Not because we force new thoughts in, but because anxious ones loosen their grip, making room for fresh insight.

Turns out the Bible has been part of my owner’s manual all along. I just didn’t recognize the cover.

Clouds Pass Over the Always-Blue Sky

There’s a memory I come back to often. I was an adolescent and I’d done something I was deeply ashamed of — nothing that touched my family directly, but something I carried alone for years, the kind of secret that sits in your chest like a stone.

My father was nearing the end of his life many years ago when I finally couldn’t carry it any longer. 

I knelt at his bedside and told him everything, crying through most of it. When I finished, he didn’t say much. He just put his hand on my head, patted it gently, and said, “You were a kid. We all make mistakes. Let it go, Wendy.”

He wasn’t a pastor. He wasn’t trying to absolve me of anything in a theological sense. But I walked out of that room cleansed in a way I still don’t fully have words for. My mind settled. Years of weight lifted in the time it took to say those few words.

I’ve thought about that moment through every lens I have. 

As a nurse, I recognize it as one of those instances where something bigger than medicine or technique is clearly at work in the room. 

As a woman of faith, I recognize it as grace — unearned, unasked for… given anyway. 

And through the Three Principles, I understand it a little differently now, too. The weight I’d carried for years was never the actual event. It was the thinking I kept generating about it; storm clouds I mistook for the sky itself. The sky had been clear and blue the whole time, underneath all that weather. A few wise words from someone who loved me was enough to let the clouds pass.

My Dad was one in a million. I’m still grateful for that conversation every time it crosses my mind.

Understanding Can Change Things

Some of my favorite moments as a nurse happened when a patient finally understood what was going on in their own body. They’d soften. Relax. Take a nap they badly needed. Nothing outside them had changed, and yet they were in a much more peaceful state.

I’ve watched the same thing happen with the Three Principles. People stop fighting every thought and treating every feeling like a code blue. 

Once they understand how this inside-out system actually works, something opens up. And from that open space, fresh thinking tends to show up — usually on its own, usually when they’ve stopped chasing it.

Wisdom Has Interesting Timing

Have you ever wrestled with a problem for days, only to have the answer show up out of nowhere, with no warning at all?

I have. My own introduction to the Three Principles came during a hard season of uncertainty and insecurity. Late one night, while aimlessly watching  YouTube videos, I stumbled onto the Three Principles. Something shifted in one moment, and the inside-out nature of experience suddenly clicked into place. I feel really blessed that I got it right away.

I’ve come to trust that insight does things effort cannot. And wisdom, in my experience, has interesting timing — it tends to show up while we’re doing something else entirely, half paying attention, rather than while we’re hunting for it; like maybe a late night YouTube rabbit hole session.

We Weren’t Meant to Carry Tomorrow

Not everything gets solved by more thinking. Some things simply have to be lived through — waiting on results, grieving a loss, adjusting to a new normal, sitting with uncertainty that won’t resolve on your schedule.

I’ve learned how exhausting it is to try carrying tomorrow before tomorrow has even arrived. There’s real relief in letting today be today, and letting next week wait its turn until it’s actually here.

That biblical owner’s manual shares more guidance from the book of Matthew: “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”

Yup.

Learning to Notice

Nursing, faith, and the Three Principles now feel less like three separate conversations and more like old friends speaking with different accents about the same thing.

Nursing teaches me the body is always trying to return to well-being. 

Faith teaches me that peace and grace are closer than I usually believe, sometimes close enough to arrive in one sentence at a bedside confession. 

The Three Principles helps me understand why my own experience can look entirely different from one moment to the next, with nothing on the outside having moved at all.

Put together, they bring me to something simple: we’re not nearly as fragile as we think we are, and life is doing far more on our behalf than we usually notice. 

Learning to see that — learning to notice it in the moment instead of only in hindsight — has been one of the best realizations of my life… personally and professionally.

Wendy L. Williams, BSN, M.Ed.

Speaker, Teacher, Author – Still Waters Within: Finding Peace of Mind Through the Inside-Out Lens [link]

If you would like to spend time with speakers like this in person and hear them share their wisdom and experience in a beautiful setting in Albir, Spain in November each year, you can find tickets here www.thevivaevent.com/registration