Farewell Dear Mentor: Good-bye to Dr. Purvis

Dr. Karyn Purvis.  Her name is mentioned in our home as often as the name of our children's grandparents and with as much fondness.

When I decided to call Zimbabwe home, I knew that I would need help honing my skills.  Yes, I was a social worker.  Yes, I was a therapist.  Yes, I worked with kids who struggled deeply with their addictions and emotions.  But Zimbabwe was new territory for me.  The losses that the kiddos here had faced was not new territory for me personally but it certainly was professionally.

When I emailed some former professors and mentors about what to read and who to let shape my work, one name was consistently first on their lists: Dr. Karyn Purvis.

In 2007, I picked up that first brand new copy of The Connected Child and highlighted every page.  Within a couple of years living in Vic Falls, it was tinged with red soil, highlighted in several different colors and dog eared.  That book passed through countless homes, huts and offices from Monde (a small village about 13km from Victoria Falls) to Kadoma (a small town about 130km from Harare.)

As I sit here early this morning, mourning the loss of Dr. Purvis, who is with Jesus after a long battle with breast cancer, I know that I am not the only parent or professional who is grieving today.

Almost exactly eight years after my feet touched the red dust roads of Zimbabwe for the first time, I was blessed to spend a week learning and being trained by Dr. Purvis and her team.    A few years before I had attended an empowered to connect conference and after a brief conversation with Dr. Purvis and a few emails I knew that I needed to carve out the time to be trained in TBRI.

In God's perfect timing, Nyasha and I got married 6 days before that training was to begin.  Less than two weeks before we had been trained by the Monroe's, who are deeply impacted by Dr. Purvis.  We were trained in Empowered to Connect at Tapestry and the hopped in the car to drive from Texas to California to get there JUST in time for our Tuesday night wedding!  I will never forget Dr. Purvis's sweet acknowledgement that I was spending my honeymoon in a room full of practitioners, all wanting the same thing: to offer healing to the kiddos from hard places.

Before Nyasha and I headed back to Zimbabwe, my feet touching Zimbabwean soil for the first time as a wife, she pulled me into a strong but gentle hug and affirmed me in a way I will never forget.  That hug, did what Dr. Purvis did best: it healed.  She said several things that I have tucked away in my heart and then as she let me go, with tears in her eyes she said, "Baby girl, this speaks volumes about your marriage.  The sacrifices you both have made will shape your family's legacy."

Honestly, as much as we would have enjoyed a longer honeymoon... our family needed what she was teaching.  We cling to her wisdom and truth like a life raft in the difficult days.  "I've never met a child who can't come to deep levels of healing if you understand what they need." Those words from Dr. Purvis encourage us to set aside disappointment and frustration in those moments and to keep trying to understand.

Today, we say good-bye to Dr. Purvis.  Today we lose the earthly presence of a mentor, who will be recognized in the cadence of a mother's voice, the bend of a father's knee as he crouches to make eye contact with his kiddo and in the healing sessions of thousands of practitioners around the world that she tirelessly poured into.  Her influence is magnificent, God has blessed her with a legacy of hope.

Today, Dr. Karyn Purvis went home. To Jesus.  To a place where all of us "kids from hard places" experience complete healing.

I will miss you. I am grateful for this life you have lived.  You have taught me so much about being a child of God, a mom, and about being a trusted adult. More importantly, about always pursuing my own healing journey.  Thank you for sharing your heart and wisdom with the world.

Wise words from our beloved Dr. Purvis:

"Tell your children 'you are precious, you are valuable, and nobody else is created like you.'"

"You cannot lead a child to a place of healing if you do not know the way yourself."