Part One: The License Plate
I was driving through Indiana, which is not a sentence I ever expected to define a turning point in my life. But Indiana itself was a divine detour — one of those seasons that looks like what the heck am I doing here until suddenly you realize it had to be. There I was, joystalking¹ my way through Whitestown, attending church in nearby Carmel, asking God the kind of question you only ask when you’re genuinely, completely unsure of your next step but supremely confident in the One who got you where you are:
Should I be a nurse?
Not a dramatic question, maybe. But for me it was everything. I’d just come from visiting Peace Haven, a beautiful spiritual care facility in St. Louis, and something in me was genuinely considering it — this life of hands-on, dedicated healing work. I wanted to be about my Father’s business.² I just wasn’t sure what department that would be.
So I drove. And I prayed. And I watched Indiana slide past the windows the way Indiana does — flat and wide and quietly insistent that you pay attention to what’s in front of you.
The license plate on the car ahead of me drew my attention and the frame around it said: BE A NURSE.
Now. I want you to understand something about the way God talks to me. It’s rarely a burning bush.³ It’s more like… the world suddenly winks. A word lights up. A detail that should be wallpaper becomes a spotlight. And in that moment, that license plate frame — from Indiana University, emblazoned with the Trident, that three-pronged symbol that keeps showing up everywhere from ancient seas to the Holy Trinity itself⁴ —
lit up.
I burst out laughing. I may have said something undignified out loud to the ceiling of my car.
Okay. Fine. Message received.
Except — it wasn’t that simple. Because when I began to pray about practical next steps, I heard something else entirely. Clear and quiet and a little bit playful, the way the best guidance often is. That still small voice⁵ — the one I had always known somewhere beneath the noise, the kind of knowing that lives in your bones long before your brain catches up, way before I ever read those words in the Bible — said:
“I want you to BE a nurse. Not get a job as one.”
I sat with that for a while.
Then came the next instruction — a phrase God had used with me before, one I’d come to recognize like a familiar knock at the door: the two made one. Don’t read the message as one word. Read it as two. Let them find each other.
NUR. SINGH.
And the divine detour went gloriously deeper.
Part Two: The Two Made One
NUR.
I looked it up the way you do when God hands you a word and you’re not entirely sure what language it’s in. And what I found stopped me cold — in the best possible way.
NUR comes from the Arabic root N-W-R — the root of light, illumination, and radiance. It can refer to physical brightness, but it carries equally strong spiritual meaning. In the Islamic tradition, Al-Nur — The Light — is one of the names of God. The word appears forty-nine times in the Quran, always in contrast with zulumat, darkness, always describing that movement: from darkness into light, from ignorance into faith.
I was baptized Catholic, and I have joystalked my way through enough traditions to know: whatever house you grew up in, this kind of truth doesn’t belong to any one of them. I had always known it somewhere beneath the noise — that still small voice again — the sense that darkness isn’t a power. It’s simply the absence of something that already exists everywhere. And here was a word, dropped into my Indiana afternoon from a license plate, that meant — across an ocean of culture and history, in a tradition I hadn’t grown up in — exactly the same thing my bones had always known.
One truth. Many voices. Same Light.⁶
SINGH.
This one made me laugh out loud all over again, because of course it did.
The word Singh is derived from the Sanskrit simha, meaning lion — hero, eminent person. In 1699, Guru Gobind Singh gave every Sikh man this name as a deliberate act of abolishing the caste system — creating one casteless brotherhood, each man equal, each carrying the identity of the lion, each called to live as a saint-soldier: embodying courage, justice, and a commitment to serving humanity.
Let me say that again in plain English: a spiritual teacher looked at a world divided by who your family was, what rank you were born into, what you could and couldn’t become — and he said: No. You are all lions. Every single one of you.
That landed somewhere deep. Because that is also the gospel.
And then I put them together.
NUR SINGH.
The Light of the Lion.
Or, if you want to feel it the other direction: The Lion who is Light.
The Lion of Judah is the symbol of the tribe of Judah in the Hebrew Bible — and in the book of Revelation, it is used explicitly as a title for Jesus of Nazareth, the one described as having triumphed, the one worthy to open the scroll and its seven seals.⁷ Yet it is not His fierceness or force that makes Him worthy. The Lion triumphed because He became a Lamb.
A Lion who conquers through love. A Light that darkness cannot touch. A name whispered to me from a license plate in Indiana, assembled from Arabic and Sanskrit, pointing straight back to the Love I had always known in my bones — just wearing new clothes, so I could see it fresh.
The two made one.
And then — because God apparently wasn’t finished — I remembered something.
My own name.
Jessica. Jessie.
From the ancient Hebrew Yiskah — meaning “vision,” or “sight.” In religious contexts, this connects the bearer to the idea of prophecy, or divine attention. According to rabbinical tradition, Iscah was believed to be an alternate name for Sarah herself — regarded as a prophetess.
And the biblical Jesse — father of David, of the tribe of Judah, grandfather in the lineage of the Lion himself — was not a king or a prophet. He was an ordinary man from a small clan in Bethlehem, the root from which everything grew. The prophet Isaiah foretold the Messiah using his name: “A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom.”⁸ New life from old roots. From what looks dead, the most living thing.
She Who Beholds.
Standing in a long line of women who heard things, saw things, said things that sounded impractical and turned out to be true.
I wasn’t being called to get a job as a nurse.
I was being called to be one — in every room I walk into, with every word I speak, in every life I touch. To carry the Light. To walk with the courage of the Lion. To behold the truth of who people really are and speak it over them until they can see it too.⁹ About my Father’s business. Always.
Part Three: Deep healing of the fear of dentistry
I was sitting with all of this — pondering NUR SINGH, joystalking my way through Arabic and Sanskrit and the tribe of Judah and the stump of Jesse and my own name meaning She Who Beholds — when the whole magnificent tapestry suddenly pointed somewhere very specific.
I have a root canal scheduled for next week.
Discovered through an X-ray during a deep cleaning. No pain. Completely asymptomatic.
And I burst out laughing, alone in my room, the way you laugh when God has clearly been planning this punchline for longer than you have been paying attention.
Because here is what a root canal actually is, beneath all the fear we’ve been taught to feel about it: it is going into the root. Cleaning out what has died or become infected at the deepest level. And allowing the tooth — the visible, functioning, speaking part — to remain standing and useful.
That is ancestral healing in one dental procedure.
I spent years believing I came from a race of broken, fallen, mostly destructive humans. I packed and unpacked that belief up and down the east coast like a family heirloom nobody wanted but everybody kept opening. Every house, every fresh start, every season of beginning again — I was performing root canals without knowing it. Going to the root. Cleaning out the infection of the belief in brokenness. Leaving each place a little lighter, a little more like what it actually was underneath all along.
There was only ever the Light.
The darkness was never a power. It was just the absence of something that was already there. The infection was only ever a belief in brokenness, passed down like a family heirloom nobody wanted but everybody kept unpacking. And Jessie — She Who Beholds — looked beneath the surface through an X-ray and said: I see what’s actually there. And what’s actually there is the stump of Jesse, ready to shoot.
NUR. SINGH.
The Light of the Lion. Love is the Lion who triumphs by becoming the Lamb. And Jessie — echo of the prophetess line, feminine root of the man whose household sent the Lion into the world — she didn’t need to get a job as a nurse.
She just needed to be one. With every breath. With every word. With every room she walks into and leaves a little more luminous than she found it.
My calling — the voice for glorifying God — lives in my mouth. And next week, that instrument is being taken to the root. Cleaned. Cleared. Made whole. Purified and ready to serve.
It didn’t even hurt. But I did have to PAIN — Pay Attention, Integrate Now — so that there would be no more suffering or loss. Only gain.¹⁰
That is a God of Love.
And you will know them by their fruits.
It makes sense to come to the logical conclusion, those roots were never broken, always pure. Not for a single day apart from God, but One with all that is Good, Pure, Right and Just.
Happy May Fourth BeLove(d)s wherever you are on this wonderful journey!
May the Force be with you,
Jessie
May 4th, 2026 ★ Enchanted Rant
— FOOTNOTES —
¹ Joystalking: following Love’s breadcrumbs with delight and discovery as a lifestyle.
² Luke 2:49 — the twelve-year-old Jesus, already at it. “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?”
³ Exodus 3 — though honestly, a burning bush would also have worked.
⁴ The Trident: three-pronged symbol appearing everywhere from Poseidon’s ocean to Neptune’s realm to the Christian Trinity — Father, Son, Holy Spirit. That it appeared on the very plate delivering a message about the Light of the Lion is, to use the technical theological term, not a coincidence.
⁵ 1 Kings 19:12 — after the wind, after the earthquake, after the fire: a still small voice. Elijah heard it at the mouth of his cave. Some of us hear it in Indiana. The cave story is coming in a future installment — stay tuned.
⁶ 1 John 1:5: “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” Also: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” — John 1:5
⁷ Revelation 5:5–6: “See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed.” And then, in the very next breath, John sees not a lion but a Lamb. The triumph and the tenderness are the same thing.
⁸ Isaiah 11:1 — one of the great Advent prophecies. New life from old roots. A shoot from a stump. God’s favorite kind of plot twist.
⁹ This is what prophets have always done. Not fixing people, but seeing them as Love already sees them. Whole. Noble. Lit from within. About their Father’s business whether they know it yet or not.
¹⁰ PAIN = Pay Attention, Integrate Now. You’re welcome. No charge.
Behold the lioness of the tribe of Judah.
Free and fearless, she roams in the forest and rests beside still waters.