Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) wrote in her diary on February 7, 1837, “God spoke to me and called me into his service.” She was not yet seventeen, living on a luxurious 1,300-acre estate in England. Years later, it became clear that her calling was to nurse the sick. Her family was horrified since nursing was unskilled work, and a woman of her stature was expected to marry and raise a family. She shunned marriage proposals, suspecting it might interfere with God’s plans, and persisted in the call. In her diary in 1850, she wrote, “God called in the morning and asked me would I do for Him, for Him alone, without the reputation.” On her birthday a few months later, she entered, “Today, I am thirty—the age Christ began his mission. No more childish things…Lord, let me think only of Thy will, what Thou wills me to do.” She studied nursing in Germany with a Lutheran order of deaconesses who were running a hospital. When the Crimean War broke out in 1853, she was sent to care for the wounded and was appalled at the unsanitary conditions. More soldiers were dying of infection than from battle wounds. She became known as “the Lady with a Lamp” for her nighttime vigil for injured soldiers. She returned home after the war as a celebrity, but shunned attention, retreating to a convent and asking God for further direction. She lobbied Parliament to secure the resources needed to drastically improve hospital sanitary conditions and wrote the first manual on nursing.
When a trusted colleague died, and she lodged a protest to God, the thought came to her, “You are here to carry out my program. I am not here to carry out yours.” She wrote in her diary, “I must remember that God is not my personal secretary.” One of her cherished Bible verses was Mary’s acceptance of the angelic message in Luke 1.38, “May we all answer the angel as Mary did—Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it according to Thy word,” she wrote. She viewed herself as God’s handmaid and prayer as cooperating with God, the union of what we do for God and what God supplies us. She was faithful to the call. A prayer from her diary in 1893: