To Live and Love Life - Florence Nightingale
1820–1910
Her name is synonymous with helping the sick and injured. Even today, someone who nurses people back to health is sometimes called a “Florence Nightingale.”
Against her family’s wishes, the original Florence Nightingale dedicated her life to nursing when she could have had a life of privilege. Hearing the voice of God when she was seventeen, she confidently claimed her calling: to help others.
Florence was educated and talented. She chose not to marry so she could devote her attention to her ministry. Although her family and friends had plenty, she saw hunger, poverty, and sickness around her in England. Wanting to relieve this suffering, she became a nurse in London.
You might say she gave up the good life to be a nurse, but Florence felt she gained a good life by becoming a nurse. For her, this service to God was a way to live and love life, so she gladly threw herself into her work.
It was mostly her work with soldiers during the Crimean War that made her famous. Traveling to Crimea to supervise volunteer nurses, she found a bad situation—a hospital severely neglected and poorly managed. Florence worked patiently to improve conditions and to comfort patients, becoming known as “the Lady with the Lamp” because she made rounds after hours to talk and pray with ailing soldiers. After discovering that many of them died from illnesses they picked up in the hospital, she became an advocate for more sanitary medical practices.
When she returned to England, she continued in nursing and also began to write. Her first book, Notes on Nursing, was written as curriculum for a nursing school she founded. It sold well to the public and helped to change the way patients in all hospitals were taken care of. She spent the rest of her career promoting and improving nursing, and she inspired generations of others to enter the profession.
Following God’s call may take us out of our comfort zone, and it may mystify the people who are in that comfort zone. Could you, like Florence, give up “the good life” for a truly good life?
“But whoever has this world's goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:17)