This Is Where It Starts
This Is Where It Starts: Why I'm Here, What I've Been Through, and Why This Space Is for You
By Sarah Waycaster
I've started this post in my head more times than I can count.
I've written the opening sentence on a sticky note, deleted a draft, and closed the laptop more than once, because how do you compress years of breaking and becoming into a few paragraphs? How do you explain that the thing you nearly didn't survive is the exact thing that prepared you for everything God is now asking you to do?
You just start. So here I am.
The Woman Before the Breaking
I've been a nurse for most of my adult life. I became a wife. A homeschooling mom to four. A woman who showed up, held it together, and kept moving, because that's what you do. That's what strong women do.
For a long time, I thought strength looked like endurance. I thought healing was for people who had time for it. I thought if I kept praying and kept going, everything would stay manageable.
Then came the season that changed everything.
A Line-of-Duty Shooting and the Weight That Followed
As a wife of a law enforcement officer, I knew the risks were real. What no training or preparation could have told me was what it feels like to have the reality land suddenly, personally, in your own home and your own heart.
The aftermath of my husband’s line of duty shooting changed me. Something in me shifted. I held it together in the way that wives and mothers and nurses do. I showed up. I kept going. I felt like I didn’t have a choice.
But inside, I was unraveling.
I won't unpack all of that in this first post. A story for another day, and I'll share more as we go. But what I will tell you is this: trauma doesn't wait for a convenient time to catch up with you. It waits until you slow down, or until your body makes you slow down.
For me, it was my body that finally said enough.
When My Body Stopped
Stress, grief, and years of carrying too much eventually took a physical toll I couldn't outrun. My body began to shut down. For nearly a year, I could not walk.
Let that sink in. A nurse, a mother, now breaking. Someone who had spent years in motion, suddenly still.
That stillness is where God met me.
"He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul." Psalm 23:2–3
I used to read that verse and think of it as comfort. Now I read it as testimony. Because sometimes God doesn't lead us to the still waters. Sometimes He lets everything fall apart so completely that stillness is the only place left, and it's in that place that He does the restoring.
In that season of physical limitation, God began to do something I hadn't known I needed: He got to the root. Not just of my body, but of how I saw myself, what I believed I had to carry, and why I had been so determined to keep going even when everything inside me was screaming to stop.
Healing Is Not What I Thought It Was
I thought healing was about fixing the body. As a nurse, that made sense. You identify the problem. You treat the problem. You move on.
But what I discovered through years of functional medicine, deep faith work, and honest reckoning is that healing is not just reckonizing symptoms, but a whole person experience.
Your nervous system remembers what your mind tries to forget. Your hormones respond to every season of stress you've ever carried. Your gut, your sleep, your immune response are not separate from your story. They are your story, written in the language of the body.
And your soul? Your soul needs truth as much as your body needs nutrients.
I became a Board-Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner, a Certified Functional Nutrition Counselor, and eventually founded NourishWell, not because I had it all figured out, but because I had been to the bottom and found that God was already there. And I wanted to help other women find their way to the same kind of wholeness.
Why I Built This Space
This blog exists because I know there is a woman reading this who:
Has been told her labs look "normal" but she feels anything but.
Is exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix.
Loves Jesus deeply and still feels stuck, disconnected, or behind.
Has survived something, a trauma, a loss, a season of crisis, and is still carrying it in her body, even years later.
She’s moved on, but is breaking down..
That woman is why I'm here.
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too." 2 Corinthians 1:3-5
This is exactly what that verse looks like in practice. The years of unraveling. The inability to walk. The functional medicine journey. The faith that held me when nothing else could. God didn't waste any of it. He is using all of it to help me walk alongside women like you.
What You Can Expect Here
In this space, I'll write about:
Functional medicine — what it is, how it works, and why it matters for women navigating chronic symptoms, hormonal shifts, and exhaustion
Trauma and the body — the real, physical impact of stress and trauma, and what healing actually requires
Faith-anchored identity — because before you can heal from anything, you need to know who God says you are
Practical tools — labs, nutrition, nervous system regulation, sleep, and more
Honest testimony — because I refuse to teach what I haven't lived
This is not a space for perfection. It's a space for the real, the hard, the hopeful and the women willing to believe that God still restores. I pray through my story, you will see more of His glory.
You Are in the Right Place
If no one has told you lately, what you're carrying is real. The exhaustion is real. The desire for more is not selfishness; it is the Spirit in you recognizing that you were made for wholeness.
You don't have to keep outrunning your own story. There is healing on the other side of the things you've been through. And there is a God who has been in the middle of all of it, using every broken piece to build something only He could design.
I can't wait to walk this with you.
With love and hope, Sarah
