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It is fortunate that Florence Nightingale had a clear and unwavering conviction that Almighty God had called her to be a nurse, because she was an awful preacher. Although she never delivered a sermon, "The Lady with the Lamp" wrote her first one at the age of nine, and apparently had recourse to this practice throughout much of her adult life. Only a few of her sermons have survived, but these are enough to confirm that she did not have the gift. One of the most eminent liberal clergymen of the 19th century, Benjamin Jowett, solicited her homiletic manuscripts and intimated that he would preach them himself, perhaps even in Westminster Abbey. One can hope he was only being polite.
Perhaps if the Church of England in Nightingale's day would have allowed women to occupy the pulpit, she might have grown into the role. As it was, her preaching was, well, too preachy. She continually berates her imagined congregation for not knowing what she knows and thinking like she thinks—a classic amateur's mistake. Her wince-worthy catch phrase is "no one," meaning no one but her, as in "no one" (but me) is bothering to study "the character of God."
Nightingale was raised in a wealthy, well-connected Victorian family, and she chafed against the expectations for what her life should be in such a milieu. Not for her the endless idle talk with fashionable ladies in the drawing room of her father's grand house. She viewed marriage equally unfavorably as a permanent perpetuation of this tedious existence. For the rest of her life she marked the anniversary of February 7, 1837, the day when God had called her—a 16-year old girl—to an active life of service for him.
She soon discerned that nursing was the concrete form of this call, but she had many years of family opposition ahead. Not even her only sister or her favorite aunt approved of her chosen vocation, let alone her parents. Nightingale found encouragement in her Bible, however: "Christ's whole life was a war against the family. From a child, he said he must be about his Father's business." Nursing at that time was largely the province of poor, unfortunate souls—deserted wives, "fallen" women, and drunkards. It was generally agreed to be an occupation unfit for a lady—and Nightingale was indisputably a lady. Nevertheless, her parents finally consented to let her pursue nursing. She began her chosen life in 1853 at the age of 33.
Now Nightingale's birthright of élite social connections proved itself capable of dramatically speeding her down her God-given path. After only a year of nursing, the secretary at war asked her to form a unit of nurses to go out to help the men fighting in the Crimea. There were a lot of soldiers who needed medical attention, and Nightingale became a heroic ministering angel. The war effort was hampered by poor planning, red tape, rank incompetence, and sheer foolishness, and Nightingale stepped into the gap as a whirlwind of organization and an influential voice for commonsense reforms.
After the war, she was a central force, not only in founding modern nursing and reorganizing the army medical service, but in a range of other reforming tasks that only government could tackle adequately. At the height of her influence, no newly appointed viceroy for India would dare to begin without first consulting Nightingale, who would duly barrage him with detailed irrigation and sanitation schemes for improving health on the subcontinent. Along the way, her example also helped to inspire the founding of the Red Cross and the drafting of the Geneva Convention. Finding favor with both God and man, Florence Nightingale was the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit, and her commemoration in the Church of England calendar (on August 13), makes her as close as a Protestant can get to being officially recognized as a saint.
