“I would have given her [the Church] my head, my hand, my heart. She would not have them. She did not know what to do with them. She told me to go back and do crochet in my mother’s drawing-room; or if I were tired of that, to marry and look well at the head of my husband’s table. ‘You may go to the Sunday School if you like it,’ she said. But she gave me no training even for that. She gave me neither work to do for her, nor education for it.” Florence Nightingale in a letter to Dean Stanley, 1852.
Florence Nightingale, “the Lady with the Lamp,” was the founder of modern nursing.
The world was the richer for her decision to devote her life to serving others through the nursing profession, but the church was undoubtedly the poorer.
The church misses out when women are not allowed to use their God-given gifts.
Photo Credit: Lawrence OP via Compfight cc
2 replies on “Learning from Florence Nightingale”
so she became part of the Kingdom coming – seeking first the kingdom,
not seeking first the Church, which is good and right, even though she
tried (like many of us in the past), to fit in and be used by God within the structure of The Church, as that is what we thought we had to do.
I see it differently now – God wants us more in the world, loving the world, to see the Kingdom (love, principles etc), come
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