How Playing Cosette on Broadway Helped Sandra Turley See Jesus Christ in a Whole New Way

The audience wept, the way it did most nights. On the stage of the original Broadway production of Les Miserables stood a young woman playing Cosette, the child Jean Valjean sweeps out of misery and carries toward a life she had not earned. Sandra Turley sang that rescue for years. What she could not have known at the start was how completely the role would become a mirror. On this week's episode of Why We Believe, Sandra tells Nathan Gwilliam how playing Cosette taught her to see Jesus Christ in a whole new way, and how that view of the Savior carried her through an adoption that ended in goodbye and a night when her only prayer was one word.

A Faith She Chose Early

Sandra grew up in Connecticut, where religion was mostly kept private and hardly anyone at school shared her faith. Instead of shrinking, she found strength in the difference. Middle school and high school became the years she decided she was willing to follow God while looking unlike most people around her, and that decision made her faith personal rather than inherited.

The surprise came at BYU, where suddenly she prayed like everyone else, sang like everyone else, and looked like everyone else. Losing her sense of being different unsettled her, and it pushed her to learn who the Savior was for her personally, not for her community or even her family. That personal ownership of testimony became the foundation the rest of her life would test.

The Spirit Said Cosette

When the Les Miserables tour held an open call in Salt Lake City, Sandra planned to audition for Eponine, the role with the better song and the audience's sympathy. In her small Utah apartment, the Spirit told her otherwise: audition for Cosette. She listened, sang the high C other hopefuls could not, and months later got the phone call at a BYU library. She and her new husband moved to New York, where she understudied the role for a year and then played Cosette for two and a half years, staying with the company through the original production's closing night.

Sandra describes the Spirit's voice as a settled, purifying breath, the feeling that comes after finishing something hard. Sometimes words come, but usually it is peace. A friend gave her a rule she still uses: if a thought is smarter than anything she could think, it is the Spirit.

Playing Cosette gave her more than a Broadway credit. Night after night she lived inside a story of rescue, watching Valjean sweep a child out of misery and carry her while asking only for trust. Sandra came to see her own relationship with Jesus Christ in that role: carried, provided for, and sometimes told with love that the explanations would come later. Like Cosette pressing her father for answers, she has learned to push back with questions, then keep following.

The parallel runs deeper still. Valjean built Cosette's life on sacrifices she knew nothing about, and Sandra sees our lives the same way, resting on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and on the unseen gifts of parents, leaders, and saints who came before. Her response is a chain she names simply: curiosity about the stories around us, then compassion, then charity. It is, she says, how we learn to love the way He loves.

Broadway itself became a mission field of sorts. As the only member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the company at the time, she fielded questions about her beliefs almost daily from castmates who finally felt comfortable asking. When she did not know an answer, she went home, opened her scriptures, called her dad, and returned to report. She arrived a 20-year-old performer and left a student of her own faith.

Five Weeks with Eden

Years of infertility followed Broadway. During one treatment, her husband Josh gave her a priesthood blessing promising a child within nine months. The pregnancy that followed ended in miscarriage, and the promise seemed to close. Nine months later, an adoption agency called: a birth mother had chosen them. They named the five-pound baby girl Eden, and for five weeks Sandra hardly set her down, singing to her day and night.

Then the calls changed. The birth mother was reconsidering, and under New York law she had 45 days to decide. Around day 38, the phone rang with her answer. Sandra expected the moment to end like Abraham on the mountain, with God staying the sacrifice at the last second. Instead, they placed Eden in her birth mother's arms, drove home, and sat in an apartment emptier than anything they had known.

What happened next is the reason Sandra tells the story. On their knees in Manhattan, she and Josh begged for the pain to be lifted by the Spirit and by the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Healing came slowly, and with it came something she says was taught to her by Jesus Christ Himself: love for Eden's birth mother. She still feels connected to both of them and expects a reunion in the heavens. Nathan, who spent two decades leading Adoption.com, told her he had not heard a failed adoption taught as a symbol of the Atonement before.

Thanking God for the Dark

Motherhood eventually came, four children of it, along with performing, recording, and speaking. It also brought anxiety that grew after big performances, and about five summers ago, the panic attack that would not stop. That season produced the one-word prayer, and something more: she felt the presence of Christ in the room, close behind her, letting her know He knew her and she would reach the other side.

There was no instant miracle. Recovery took months and years of prayer, therapy, medicine, and steady work, with Josh learning to be what she calls her safest place. He began the journey asking why she could not simply be happy, and a decade at her side turned him into the presence that made her feel safe. A life coach's simple thought, that she is not for everyone, helped loosen the pressure she carried after performances. Sandra is clear about why she would not erase any of it. In her words, God allowed the darkness so she could reach for His light and learn to want to be near Him. Wanting Him that badly, she says, required feeling that far away.

Because She Wants To

Asked at the end of the episode why she believes, Sandra needs four words: because I want to. She wants to believe, has to believe, and gets to believe in her Savior, Jesus Christ, even on days that hand her new questions to wrestle. Believing, for her, is a daily and deliberate choice.

Key takeaways from Sandra's conversation: the Savior stands close in our darkest hours, even when our whole prayer is His name. God can allow the dark so we reach for His light and learn to want Him near. Only Jesus Christ can teach us to love the one whose choice emptied our arms. The Spirit often speaks as settled peace, a quiet breath that puts us where God needs us. And faith in Jesus Christ is a daily choice: one we want to, have to, and get to make.

Thank you for reading this week's blog post inspired by the Why We Believe show. If you are interested in more stories like this, you can check out our other blog posts and episodes at WhyWeBelieve.com, or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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