The Night Shift Nurse Who Started Over

Maria Gonzalez spent fourteen years as a corporate attorney in Chicago, climbing every rung, collecting every accolade. Partner by forty-one. Corner office on the thirty-second floor. Yet every Sunday morning she sat in the back pew at St. Matthew's feeling hollow, like a woman wearing someone else's life.

At forty-three, she enrolled in nursing school. Her colleagues thought she had lost her mind. Her mother wept. "You worked so hard for this," they said, as if the life she had built was a cathedral too sacred to leave.

But Maria understood something Nicodemus was only beginning to grasp when he climbed those stairs in the dark to find Jesus. You cannot renovate your way to new life. You cannot add an addition onto a foundation that was never meant to hold it. Sometimes the Almighty asks you to start over entirely — not because the old life was wicked, but because it was never the life He breathed into being for you.

Nicodemus was no sinner slinking through shadows. He was a Pharisee, a ruler, a man who had done everything right. And Jesus looked at this accomplished, respected leader and said, "You must be born again."

Maria works the night shift now at Rush University Medical Center, holding the hands of patients who are frightened and alone. She will tell you she has never been more awake.

That is what being born of the Spirit looks like — not a renovation, but a resurrection.