Nurse teaches art of healing in Devotional

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    By Jared Jones

    Learning the healer”s art through the master healer was highlighted by Elaine S. Marshall in her Devotional address Tuesday, Oct. 8.

    “This university has a unique mission for all of us to come to know the master healer and to learn the healer”s art,” said Marshall, dean of BYU”s College of Nursing. “I have learned that healing is a process of restoring and becoming whole.”

    Marshall shared six lessons she has personally learned about the healer”s art.

    One lesson was that healing hurts.

    “Life hurts,” said Marshall. “Healing really only begins when we face the hurt in its full force and then grow through it with all the strength of our soul.”

    Marshall said the rewards of learning and growing are always accompanied by pain.

    Lesson two: healing is an active experience.

    Marshall said as she began her nursing career she assumed cure and healing were synonymous. She said she has since learned that a cure is clean, quick, and often done under anesthesia. Healing is a life-long process of enduring physical, emotional or spiritual assault.

    “Cure is passive, as you submit your body to the practitioner,” Marshall said. “Healing is active. It requires all the energy of your entire being. You have to be there, fully aware, awake and participating when it happens.”

    Lesson three: healing is private and 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,” she said.

    Lesson four: pain teaches, but healing teaches most effectively.

    Marshall said healing can teach people to be more sensitive, to repent, to be obedient and to be more awake to life.

    “Healing invites gifts of humility and faith,” said Marshall. “It opens our hearts to the profound complexities of truth, beauty, and divinity and grace.”

    Lesson five: learning the healer”s art and administering it to those in need is an obligation directed to all people.

    “Everyday, someone in your path is hurting,” Marshall said. “Someone needs you to notice, to reach out and to help him or her to heal. You can serve in the cause of the Master Healer.”

    Lesson six: healing is a divine gift from a loving Heavenly Father

    “If you have pain or sorrow or disappointment or sin or just a grudge that needs healing, the Savior simply says, ”Come unto me,”” Marshall said.

    She said BYU”s College of Nursing has adopted the theme of “I Would Learn the Healer”s Art.” This phrase comes from a line in the third verse of the Latter-day Saint hymn “Lord, I would follow thee.”

    Marshall said it has been a great privilege and blessing in her life to learn the healer”s art as a nurse and now serve as dean of the College of Nursing.

    “It is an honor to serve among faculty and students with such heritage, who temper their fascination with science with a devotion to the Lord; who understand that it is the Savior, Jesus Christ, who is the source of all healing,” she said.

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