Alumna of the Year finds stronger faith from tragedy
Avondale Alumni’s Alumna of the Year for 2016 not only believes education is vital to making positive life changes but, through modelling Christian values in her casual academic role in clinical support, seeks those changes in her students.
Jean Gersbach encourages nurses in training to offer “person-centred care” and to develop meaningful relationships with their patients. She’s demonstrated this over 20 years of nursing at Sydney Adventist Hospital, as Director of Nursing at Sopas Adventist Hospital (Wabag, PNG), as a nurse educator at Atoifi Adventist Hospital (Malaita, SI) and at The University of Newcastle, where she has taught since 2001.
Parents Allan and Ruth Tilley served as missionaries on Malaita in the late 1940s, so Gersbach with husband Lance and children Louise and Anita looked forward to serving there. “We spent many months praying that God would lead us,” says Gersbach. But the beheading of Lance on May 18, 2003 “changed our lives.” “I was no longer satisfied with token Christianity—either God was real or He was not.” While the murder significantly challenged her faith, Gersbach believes God is in control even when “life makes no sense at all. He’s used so many people to bring encouragement to our family, it’s helped strengthen my faith in His provision and love for us.”
Gersbach’s daughters, both alumna of Avondale, seems to share their mother’s values. Louise is a registered nurse at Sydney Adventist Hospital and Anita is a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Teaching graduand.
Those values were shaped volunteering with an Australian medical team in refugee camps on the Thai–Cambodian border in the early 1980s. An orphaned young man who’d lost his lower right leg after triggering a land mine urgently needed blood. Pathology didn’t have his blood type. Gersbach did. After the transfusion, she carried her own blood pack to the operating theatre. The man asked to see her the following day. “‘You’ve given me your blood,’ he told me. ‘This means we’re now family.’”
Avondale Alumni honours Jean Gersbach for her commitment to demonstrating through practice and theory care for others and faith in God.
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