My life’s work has unfolded at the intersection of service and compassion. I spent my career in the healthcare field, serving as a nurse, consultant, compliance officer, hospice specialist, legal nurse consultant, coding specialist, educator, and supervisor. In every role, I bore witness to the fragility and resilience of the human spirit. Beyond my profession, I have remained devoted to community service, volunteering in blood drives, community health fairs, and home-care initiatives where care is not merely given, but shared.

Writing entered my life when I was eight years old and never truly left. What began as a quiet inclination became a lifelong calling one that grew alongside experience, loss, faith, and love. Over the years, I have written hundreds of poems, crafted personal greeting cards, prepared legal and clinical narratives, authored policies, and contributed professional magazine articles. Writing became both refuge and testimony: a way to make sense of the world and to give voice to what is often left unspoken.

A defining influence in my journey as a writer came during my senior year at Waite High School, where a demanding, college-level literature teacher shaped my discipline and sharpened my voice. Her rigor taught me that words matter that clarity, honesty, and courage are essential to prose that endures.

My poetry has been published in the National Library of Poetry. I share my life with my husband, John, and together we are blessed with five children and fourteen grandchildren each one a living reminder that love multiplies when it is given freely.

I am a local author whose work spans multiple genres, rooted in family, faith, service, and lived experience. Whatever the future holds, I intend to remain faithful to the work of reflection and creation, just as I have throughout my career and well into retirement. I write because it is how I listen. I write because it is how I remember. And, by grace, I will keep writing.

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Welcome to 12-Minute Converse with Jesus Believers.

God chose first to have a conversation with us, His creation.

Our prayer is that this listening space brings growth and transforms your life forever.

Praise God for you, Nancy.

It's a great pleasure to connect with you.

What part of the world are you in today?

I'm in Iowa Lake, Michigan, and it's beautiful here.

We have two acres.

It's a beautiful day, really hot, but I love it.

Does nature contribute to the creativity side of you being a writer?

Yes, everything that I see, it seems to go into a file in my heart and in my soul and in my head.

And I just had a squirrel coming up here.

It's Sammy, and I'm going to write a little children's book about him because he thinks he's our pet.

So he comes up every time I'm on the computer and says hello to me.

How long have you been writing?

My first actual writing was a poem from my mother when I was seven years old, and I learned how to read when I was about four or five.

We had a really difficult young childhood, and that's part of my four-part moments when God changed me when I was a little girl.

So I was born in Jersey, and we didn't have any money that we could spend.

And my father had an anger problem only in our home.

Outside of that, he was very professional, amazing, loved by the community.

So there was a lot of confusion in my life.

And in my playpen, I had one doll, and then they would throw books and newspapers and magazines in there and let me look at the pictures.

Sometimes I ate them.

Sometimes I tore them up.

But I noticed these things that always looked the same.

They were letters.

My little childhood, I was like two or three, and I would put them together with things in the newspaper that had all those letters in them.

Then I'd ask my mother, what is that?

And she'd give me the word.

So somehow that stuck in my brain.

And by the time I was four, I was starting to read.

Anything I could find in the paper, couldn't pronounce it well, but I learned to do that.

And it gave me a, I think God gave me a peace with that.

It was something I could focus on rather than the things that are going around me that frightened me.

And once I got out of the playpen, I used to, when my father became aggressive to my mother, I would hide in the closet.

There was a little tiny closet.

We lived above a store.

So we only had two rooms, three rooms, really.

And so I would hide.

And I'd always take something with me to read, to look at, so that I could not hear what was going on.

And then I decided, God said to me, no, you're not going to hide in a closet all the rest of your life.

So he decided that I would be the caretaker.

I'd run in and trying to save my mother.

I'd run in to try and get peace happening, even when I was a little girl.

So when I was seven or eight, I had learned how to write print by then.

And I gave my mother a poem for Mother's Day.

And that was the first actual writing that I did.

And then I was in Catholic school.

We did have a religious background.

It was so convoluted.

The things that I was taught, and even my parents taught me to be kind to everyone else, all of that.

The things I was taught in Catholic school just didn't come back into our home all the time.

So I was very confused.

PTSD, abandonment issues, my mother would have to leave for days or weeks.

So all of that built me into this caretaking fixer.

I just had to do that.

And I didn't really feel like I was a whole person, that people liked me, children didn't like me.

So I'd always ask the nuns if I could go to the board, so I didn't have to look at the other kids, thinking that they were making fun of me.

And I'd always write on the board, anything they wanted me to do.

So all of that, all of the ability to write things down became very important to me.

And as I went through school, I had wonderful teachers.

I had a couple professors in high school that made literature and writing and listening and being able to journal, being able to put down your thoughts.

They really helped me to build that amazing part of me that loved to write, loved to read, just gobbled up that sort of thing.

And it became very important to me to be able to listen.

Ooh, tell me about that.

There's a big difference between hearing and listening.

I'm hearing the leaves, I'm hearing you talk, I'm hearing all kinds of things.

But I need to hear, I need to listen for the modulation in your voice, how I'm speaking with you, am I interrupting?

Are you asking me a question?

I can't see your face, but I already have a picture of what I think you look like.

And so it's so important in listening, active listening means that you're taking in the whole scene and actually what someone is trying to say to you.

When we hear it, we have to ask questions to see if we've really gotten the message correctly.

And then don't offer advice or your side of it, unless you get permission from that person to do that.

And I usually say, my kids tell me, no advice, mom, just listen.

And I listen.

And I say, seems like that's something that I went through.

Would you like me to share that?

And they'll say yes or no.

And I have to honor what they say.

So that's a big difference, I think.

Did it take a lifetime to get to this place or was it something that came easily to you, understanding that you would have to ask permission?

Because I, I eventually, I would try out for anything.

I wanted to take a risk.

I wanted people to see me.

So I would try to risk going, trying out for a play, reading in front of a group, being the run for secretary at school.

And so that took a while to get that ability to kind of form who I was going to be and a lot of parts of that.

So I believe toward the end of high school, when I tried out for med school and I got a scholarship to go to Ohio University, by that time, I think I had built who I was going to be for the rest of my life, which a lot of things occurred in between there, that put pauses in my life that were very difficult to work with.

And thank God for giving me the ability to take risks, the ability to listen.

I never had it perfected, believe me, because I always think I have something, some input there, but I've learned so much more over time in, in the good and bad things that have happened to me over time.

And I'll share them with the group because I want people to know that you can survive most anything.

If you have a power that you believe in, that's big enough to hold you, to lead you, to guide you, to comfort you, all of that.

One of the biggest things I believe in life is to learn how to forgive.

Even if it's someone has injured you badly, I think we have to learn to forgive because we can't undo that.

But we don't want to hang that albatross around our neck all life, hanging on to resentments about something that you can't change.

Just learn from it, put it in the box somewhere, lock it up if you have to, bring it out when you need to for counseling or all of those things with support.

That's a big part of growing yourself the way and depending on.

I depend on Jesus.

He was always my friend.

He was by my side.

Even when I was frightened, I hung on to him.

I lost him for a period of time in my twenties and thirties.

And if you want me to tell you about that, I will, I'll share it with people.

So go for it.

Okay, I'll go for it.

I was married.

I married a man who was an only child, very strongly like my father, very demanding.

And in the fifties and sixties, you were the woman, took care of the house.

He said, no, you're not going to work.

I had left med school to take care of my mother.

She was very ill and I lost my scholarship.

So I went into nurses training and I thought, I'll be a nurse, earn money, go back to being a doctor.

And then I'll understand nurses.

Well, I loved it.

I became a nurse.

What a better place to be a fixer and a caretaker and the things that I had built myself that made me feel whole.

So that, that has been amazing.

So I've had that career for 64 years and I've loved it.

And once a nurse, always a nurse.

So he, my husband said, no, you will take care of the children.

You will take care of our home.

And he was very popular.

He was president of pharmacy and all of those things, very intelligent and they introduced me to alcohol.

I think God allowed that to happen.

Or he said, that's not the path you should take.

But I did.

And there, I have that disease and what it did to me for six years was lost my children, lost my home, lost my marriage.

The only thing I had left was my job, how I did my job.

I was a supervisor on the neural floor at a hospital, big hospital, how I did.

I was losing weight.

I was drinking perfume before I went to work.

So they wouldn't smell any alcohol, how he kept me responsible for patients and everything that happened on that unit.

He had to be with me every minute of every day.

And I thought I lost him.

I thought I was such a bad person.

I was so sick that I thought God left me.

He never did.

He was closer to me than ever.

The Jesus and the God that I believe in, everyone has a force.

You just have to find it.

And whatever way you do it in your religion is wonderful, but please get something, a support group, anything to keep you through those times.

I had gotten an apartment.

My two girls were with me.

My son wasn't, he had left me and to stay with his father.

I still had my job, thank God.

And what happened was my kidneys were failing and I couldn't drink anymore.

I became very ill when I ever touched it.

And I remembered this, I'll never forget those moments when God whispers to you, I was praying on my knees for God to let me drink because I was so miserable and I didn't know what to do.

And all of a sudden I heard, no, that's what I heard.

I don't know whether I was hallucinating or whether it actually was God saying no.

And I met someone who was in a program, a support program that helped me get, believe God was there, helped me keep my job, helped me get my children back, helped me find a relationship where I was a part of it instead of trying to form the other person.

God took that and kept me alive because many times I tried to end it and he said, no, no.

So listen, because I believe the force or God or whoever you believe in whispers to you, guides you on paths that you have to think about.

That's why I journal.

If the back of my room looks really nice when I do a video, but this front of where I am around my computer are journals and papers and sticky notes and sayings and all kinds of things.

Because when I have a thought in my head and I write it down, sometimes it looks very different.

So even if you aren't going to be an author, you don't tend to do anything, you just want to write something down and all of a sudden it gives you that moment where you might have to listen and get a message that can change your life.

So my life changes have been as a child, being able to read, learning to write, becoming, getting out of a closet and not running and trying to be a caretaker, becoming a nurse.

All of those things, I think God had a plan for me.

I don't think God wants you to hurt, but if you choose those paths and you get hurt, he'll come back and take care of you if you allow him.

So that's my story right now.

I had a terrible accident once.

If I had not stopped my car in a turn, a young man ran the red light.

He and I would not be here.

I heard that voice again say, white, stop.

He had a white car.

I didn't see him.

He ran the red light in a turn lane, heading and left for about a mile away.

My car was, the whole front of my car was taken off.

I was being injured quite badly in my back.

And if I had not heard that, if I had not stepped on the brake at that point in time, there was no reason for me to because I had the green light.

If I had not done that, I wouldn't be here either.

So he keeps saving me for some reason.

And maybe it's to do a podcast once in a while or write another book.

Five years from today, if you're listening to this conversation, what's a message you'd leave for future you?

Look in the mirror every morning.

Look at that person and say, I love you.

Don't look at any defects.

I love you.

I'm going to have a good day.

God made you and you can have that.

Always have forgiveness.

Pray if you can.

And that's important.

And have some peace.

Have time with yourself and whoever you believe your force is.

That's really important.

But forgiveness is very prime.

You need to do that.

And to your pleasure, I treasure.

Thank you for being on What is Inspired by 12 Minute Converse.