Florence Nightingale's Lamp in the Darkness

When Florence Nightingale arrived at the British military hospital in Scutari, Turkey, in 1854, she found soldiers dying not from their wounds but from the building itself. Sewage ran beneath the floors. Rats scurried across patients. The mortality rate was a staggering 42 percent. The military establishment told her the conditions were acceptable — the men were just soldiers, after all.

Nightingale refused to accept this. She believed every human body carried inherent dignity, not because of rank or usefulness, but because each person was fearfully made. She scrubbed floors on her hands and knees. She requisitioned clean linens with her own money. She walked the wards each night, lamp in hand, checking on men that others had written off. Within months, the death rate dropped to 2 percent.

Her conviction was simple and radical: the body is not disposable. It is not merely a container to be used up and discarded. It matters — profoundly.

Paul pressed this same truth into the hearts of the Corinthian believers. "Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?" he asked. The God of the universe has taken up residence in your very flesh. You are not your own — you were bought at an extraordinary price. Just as Nightingale refused to let those soldiers be treated as expendable, how much more should we honor what the Almighty Himself has chosen to inhabit? Glorify God in your body, for it belongs to Him.