Florence Nightingale and the Voice She Could Not Name

On February 7, 1837, a sixteen-year-old girl sitting in the garden of her family's estate in Embley Park, Hampshire, recorded four words in her diary that would alter the course of modern medicine: "God spoke to me and called me to His service."

Florence Nightingale heard the voice clearly. But like young Samuel lying in the temple at Shiloh, she had no framework for what she was hearing. Her wealthy Anglican family expected her to marry well and manage a household. No one around her could imagine that the Almighty was calling a teenager toward the bedsides of the sick and dying. For nearly seven years, Florence struggled to discern what the call meant. She heard it again at age twenty, and again at twenty-five — each time more urgent, each time clearer.

It was not until she found mentors who could do for her what Eli did for Samuel — name the voice and teach her to respond — that she finally understood. A German pastor at the Kaiserswerth Deaconess Institute helped her see that nursing was not beneath her station but was, in fact, the very thing God had been whispering about since that afternoon in the garden.

Samuel needed Eli to say, "It is the Lord." Florence needed Kaiserswerth to say the same. Most of us do not lack a calling. We lack an Eli — someone who helps us recognize that the restless stirring we cannot silence is the voice of God, waiting for us to answer, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."