CSN - LightWing Messages - Sunday - 3/26/2023
Woes to Scribes and Pharisees
Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to His disciples: “The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So practice and observe everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
All their deeds are done for men to see. They broaden their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels. They love the places of honor at banquets, the chief seats in synagogues, the greetings in the marketplaces, and the title of ‘Rabbi’ by which they are addressed.
But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth your father, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let in those who wish to enter.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You traverse land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are. Matthew 23:1-15 (NIV)
This week begins the last week of the month of March and the last opportunity to acknowledge Women’s History Month. If one thinks back to the beginning of this month, LightWing Messages focused on Esther’s faith and her act of courage and assertiveness to serve her people at the risk of her life.. In the previous week, we offered words of St. Patrick who served as a pioneer in bringing the message of Jesus Christ to those who never heard of him. Esther lived around 400 years before the time of Jesus‘ coming. St. Patrick lived approximately 400 years after Jesus’ Advent. In this edition, we are focusing upon another woman who truly made a significant impact on the world in the 1800s. Their stories demonstrate the timelessness of God’s Will.
Today’s edition features two messages focusing on Florence Nightingale, a woman who showed real courage in her day to challenge the status quo and the way of the world as it existed before she arrived on the scene. She is remembered primarily as a pioneer and an innovator in nursing and hospital sanitation. Yet, not many realize that she took up her mission because she deeply felt called to action by God. The secular world does not like to give credit to those who have any relationship with God for their significant achievements or substantial advancements to human development. Even those within the Christian community do not know well the deeper story of this Christian woman and the genuine impact she made in the realm of the healthcare field.
Similar to last week, today’s LightWing Messages offers a background article coupled with the words from the individual focused upon. The words of Florence Nightingale provide her own testimony of the serious and sincere faith that inspired her pathway of service. Her words are offered in a series of relevant quotations compiled by one of her biographers, Lynn MacDonald. It is long and meant to be a point of reference for readers. Additionally, I offer an article written about Florence Nightingale for Communities Digital News in 2018. Before Women’s History Month comes to a close, and before Easter, we hope readers are able to view Nightingale as a true woman of God, even though her mission field was healthcare.
Today, the topic of good health can no longer be taken for granted. With the COVID pandemic of recent years, Nightingales’s struggle for honesty and integrity in the medical field in her time is truly significant in relation to now. Today, everyone’s sustained good health is of the utmost concern, and doctors with high ethical standards and genuine integrity to ensure such good health are of great value. With this understanding, readers today can use experiences of today to better appraise the story of a woman who chose to serve humanity in a practical, meaningful manner as the way to offer her life in service to God and Christ.
As always, we hope our readers would consider all the messages in this edition as having some relevance or meaning, and if readers know others who might also value the messages, we pray they would consider becoming LightWing messengers and kindly pass our newsletters on to those who would welcome them – or simply, please receive them yourselves.
Also, our LightWing Messages now have a history via our Zoom calls. Our Zoom discussions are held each Wednesday evening. We leave it up to our readers: if you would like to discuss today’s messages on Florence Nightingale more fully and learn more about her efforts to blend faith and action, please reach out. If readers are interested in receiving the Zoom link to the call, please send a brief email request to this address: d.jamzon@gmail.com
May God bless all of our readers and all of their loved ones. May God bless America!
May we humble ourselves, seek the knowledge of His Heart and His Mind and His Will. May we also repent, and turn from our spiritual apathy or our actively wicked ways - even if that may mean to become more serious about serving others as Jesus admonished us – that those who would be great, would be the ones who served our brothers and sisters.
A time to remember Florence Nightingale who gave of herself as a servant
By Dennis Jamison The following article can no longer be accessed online where it was originally published (the Communities Digital News) because that site is no longer active – it died like many small independent news sources that were not supported by Google or other search engines. The article is long, but it is now the only place it can be read in entirety. I would hope it would be well worth the read.
SAN JOSE, CA, March 28, 2018 – As Good Friday and Easter weekend is fast approaching, Christians throughout the United States will likely choose to attend Easter services, especially on Sunday, and remind themselves of the sacrifice of Jesus, and to renew their relationship to Jesus Christ.
Since Easter comes upon the heels of Women’s History Month this year, it is fitting to focus upon Florence Nightingale, who became one of the most devoted women in history to put into practice Jesus Christ’s message of service to humanity. Sadly, it is unlikely that many Christians throughout the world would make such a connection between Florence Nightingale and Jesus Christ because her life is rarely described as one in which she had been inspired by Heaven.
For Americans who are unfamiliar with Florence Nightingale, she is respected as an English social reformer and the founder of modern nursing. But, even for those who are familiar with Nightingale, she was more than just a woman who became famous as a nurse during a horrible war, and went on to become a hospital administrator, and provocative writer. What may have been lost about Nightingale is that she did have a genuine relationship with God and became divinely inspired to serve humanity in her best possible manner.
Personally, Florence Nightingale described four “calls” from God beginning in 1837 when she was 17 years old. She sincerely believed she was called by God for a divine purpose, specifically to focus on nursing as her calling. She wrote in her diary, “God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for Him alone without reputation.”
Florence Nightingale was from a very privileged background, and her parents, especially her mother, did not share her inspiration. They were concerned about their daughter’s reputation, as well as the reputation of their affluent family. Nightingale’s story was not an easy one despite her privileged background.
Florence Nightingale lived at a tumultuous time in human history, from 1820 – 1910, Yet, the main conflict in Ms. Nightingale’s early life was the clash of wills between the young lady and her parents. Florence Nightingale was born into a very wealthy and prominent British family that belonged to elite social circles with very high social standing in England. Her father, a wealthy landowner, took it upon himself to provide Florence and her older sister with a classical education, including studies in German, French and Italian. Yet, her parents, like many protective parents of daughters during the Victorian Era, expected her to follow the societal norms established for young women of such social stature.
Nightingale’s well-to-do parents expected her to find a nice wealthy gentleman, and get married and raise a family. They essentially forbade her to pursue her dream of nursing, what was viewed as lowly menial labor and spurned by the upper class. But, Florence rebelled and when she was 24 years old, she turned down a serious marriage proposal from a fine young man named Richard Monckton Milnes. To Florence’s parents, rejection of such a marriage proposal was a significant blow, and they felt her youthful dream to pursue nursing was basically nonsense, and blocked her path to pursue her divine calling.
To be fair, the parents strongly opposed Florence Nightingale’s desire to become a nurse because the nursing profession in the 1840s in England, was considered lowly employment and few qualifications or little training was required, and nurses mainly received on the job training. In addition, public perception regarded it as the kind of job women took when they were not able to find a good husband to care for them. Also, it certainly was not considered a career for young women of the upper class. Nevertheless, for Ms. Nightingale’s parents, it is likely they were more concerned about how their high society friends might react.
Yet, Florence Nightingale was a strong-willed young lady and managed to persuade her parents to let her study in Germany at a Lutheran facility called The Institution of Deaconesses at Kaiserwerth, which was a working hospital offering formal training for nurse. And, after a long struggle, Nightingale eventually freed herself from her family entanglements.
One of her diary entries in this period revealed an important resolution during this time of struggle: “I am thirty, the age at which Christ began his mission. Now no more childish things, no more vain things, no more love, no more marriage. Now Lord, let me only think of Thy will.”
From the time of her first vision until she turned 32, Florence Nightingale struggled with her identity as a person to serve others, and with her womanhood with regard to the proper Victorian and feminine ideal of a woman growing to marry and become a wife and a mother. In the course of her struggles, Florence Nightingale fortified her genuine relationship with God, and this gave her the strength and the courage to fight against the “normal” expectations for women of Victorian England.
Nightingale’s desire for additional education in the medical field and for practical training seemed insatiable. She eventually received formal training in Paris with the Catholic Sisters of Charity at the Maison de la Providence (even though she was not a nun and not Catholic). She continued to study, and was offered the position of superintendent of the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London, and served in this position from August 1853 until October 1854.
Within this same time period, the British government had entered the Crimean War, and had deployed thousands of men and boys to the front lines in Turkey. Although relatively unknown in the U.S., it was the first major war in which women served as military nurses. This international conflict also happened to be the first world war that was covered by newspaper correspondents and recorded by photography. Sadly, well over a half a million men and boys died in this war.
By 1854, at least 18,000 soldiers had been admitted to field hospitals, which had become overwhelmed with the wounded and dying. Back in England, news of such hospitals being understaffed, unsanitary, and inhumane, generated public uproar.
Florence Nightingale became involved when a good friend, Sir Sidney Herbert, who just happened to be the British Secretary of War, presented her with the opportunity to organize a corps of nurses to deploy to the war zone and tend to sick and wounded soldiers. Nightingale had shared her vision of nursing with Herbert years before, and gave her the offer to put her dream into action.
This opportunity not only changed Nightingale’s life, but it changed the history of medical care as this little lady went on to become one of the most famous women in Europe - even more famous than most of the combatant generals.
Ms. Nightingale rose to the occasion by quickly by assembling a volunteer team of 38 women nurses from a variety of religious orders, and sailed with them to the city of Constantinople. They were deployed to Scutari, and arrived in early November of 1854 at the main British camp and base hospital.
The horrendous conditions in the theater of war were worse than what Nightingale and her nurses could imagine, and they were not totally prepared for the reality the soldiers had to endure in the overcrowded hospital. Nightingale and her nurses found bugs and rodents scurrying across filthy floors, but they were not deterred in their efforts to care for the soldiers who kept crowding into the understaffed hospital daily.
Sadly, the reality was that more soldiers were dying from infectious diseases like typhoid and cholera than from the injuries they sustained on the battlefield. Mass infections were common and many of them became fatal.
Nightingale quickly set to work with her nurses to scrub the inside of the hospital from ceiling to floor. And, as Nightingale began focusing on care of the soldiers, she was one of the first to rise in the morning and one of the last to rest in the evenings. During their time in the hospital, the soldiers began calling Florence Nightingale ”the Lady with the Lamp” as she moved through the dark aisles late into the night, carrying her lamp as she made her rounds from one bedside to another looking after patients. The soldiers were sincerely moved by her seemingly endless supply of energy and comforted by her genuine compassion.
More importantly, through her valiant efforts, Florence Nightingale improved the sanitary conditions of the field hospitals and lowered the mortality rate in the process. And due to the bravery and determination of Florence Nightingale, the British Army deployed more female nurses to their field hospitals.
After the war, the British public collected quite a bit of money for Nightingale to establish a formal nursing school at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, which was the first secular nursing school in the world. It still exists as part of King’s College in London.
Florence Nightingale gave so much of herself throughout her life that she left an indelible imprint in her day and became an inspiration to future generations. She truly viewed her life as a fulfillment of her dream, and near the end of her life she wrote to a friend, “God has blessed me with the fulfillment of my heart’s longings, I only hope I may see Him soon to thank Him for all the gifts He has given me.”
Nightingale’s Spiritual Journey
Except for the introductory material from the Niagara Anglican, excerpts are taken from Florence Nightingale's words from a presentation by Lynn McDonald, PhD, who has edited several volumes and written extensively on the “Lady with the Lamp.” The majority of the material here was presented as a Keynote Address by Dr. McDonald for the 7th Annual Conference Canadian Association for Parish Nursing Ministry in Toronto, Canada on May 27, 2005. (A full transcript can be found by using the link at the end of this entry)
This introductory material is from Niagara Anglican from May 1999 on “The Faith of Florence Nightingale” –
Nightingale’s religious philosophy underlay all her work as a social activist, notably in the promotion of nursing as a trained profession and the establishment of a public health care system. She believed in God as the Creator of the world, who ran it by laws. We were not to pray to be delivered from “plague, pestilence and famine,” as the litany has it. No good God (and Nightingale’s God was perfect in love, mercy, wisdom etc.) would wish plague, pestilence and famine on us anyway. Rather we were to study the operations of the world, both natural and social, to learn its (God’s) laws. We could then intervene for good, thereby becoming God’s co-workers. Nightingale often used the Greek expression “synergii”. God was always the initiator, but we had the privilege of seconding God’s work in the world.
Where 1 John 3:19 states that “we love Him because He first loved us.” Nightingale… in an unpublished sermon, she insisted on God’s “real personal interest in our welfare,” not just His “mercy generally.” It was hard to believe this, she acknowledged, “But if this belief once takes possession of our hearts, then are we redeemed indeed.”
Selected quotes from “Nightingale’s Spiritual Journey” - Keynote Address –
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was baptized in the Church of England as an infant, in Florence, Italy, where she was born in 1820. As a child she attended Church of England services with her family in Hampshire, Methodist chapels in Derbyshire (the Nightingales were a dissenting family and continued to support the chapels of their Derbyshire workmen and tenants). A Wesleyan influence will be clear in Nightingale’s spiritual journey to the end of her life…
In 1836, at age fifteen or sixteen, she was “converted” and the following year, at a very precise date, 7 February 1837, she perceived a “call to service.” She recounted the former experience fifty years later, referring to the: “American book which converted me in 1836 — alas! that I should so little have lived up to my conversion — The Cornerstone. There was such a striking chapter: Pharisees, Peter, and Judas even, all live now. And, then it gave them as they appear in these days.”
The book is by Jacob Abbott, an American Congregational minister and educator. It presents a very activist faith, right from the first page, which gives its intention as the explanation of the elementary principles of “the gospel of Christ…for a human soul hungering and thirsting after righteousness.” But this gospel could not be understood “unless the heart is willing to comply with its claims.” The reader was advised to “go to God before you proceed farther.”
…Nightingale understood her call to service as one to save lives, by nursing the sick certainly, but also by social and administrative reforms. Her family did not permit her to nurse - too lower class an occupation - so that Nightingale for more than fifteen years suffered the frustration of not being able to act on what she believed she had been called to do. Later in life she could see that she was not ready to do the work that was really needed.
…She read widely: the medieval mystics, Puritans, metaphysical poets, Roman Catholics, her fellow Anglicans, and various evangelical tracts and low-brow religious novels. A priest friend brought her communion at home. She was expert on the Bible, and read it and annotated it devotionally as well.
…For Nightingale Jesus was “the most important person that ever lived.” She kept a picture of Christ, crowned with thorns, in her bedroom…
The cross of Christ had a “practical meaning,” for Christ:
“As a victim voluntarily giving himself, offering himself up — not again in the vulgar sense, as if it were to appease the anger of a perfect Being — but in the sense of willingly incurring any and all sufferings which come in the way of helping to carry out God’s will and work.”
On the Father’s sacrifice of Jesus:
“O why could he, irreplaceable, not be spared? But when the Father gave up His own Son to die He might well have said “not that one, not the one precious Son.” Yet that Son was given. Oh may we not try to be perfect (in giving) even as the Father in heaven is perfect — in giving Him our best, even as He gave us His best?”
Similarly she found comfort in the Beatitudes:
“Nowhere Christ says: Blessed are the fashionable but blessed are the persecuted, that is, they who have to work against fashion and popularity.”
Christ’s identification with the poorest, weakest members of society was an example for her:
“I don’t think any words have had a fuller possession of my mind through life than Christ’s putting himself in the place of the sick, the infirm, the prisoner — and the extension which the Roman Catholic Church (especially) gave to these words, as it were God putting Himself in the place of the leper, the cripple and so forth, telling us that we see Him in them. Because it is so true.”
She wondered that Jesus was not more discouraged by the reaction to him:
“There was little encouragement for Jesus’ work; few understood what he meant by
“deliverance from evil” and even the little success he had seemed only to arouse greater hostility….”
“We are sensitive to offences committed against ourselves; but Christ was sensitive to offences committed against God.” While we might sometimes be aware of what we are and what we might be Christ habitually was. Not only was the conflict in his soul greater than in other humans, “so also his confidence in God was greater or rather absolute, for he could no more be separated from Him than he could be separated from his own being” (f107).
1 John 4:10-11 tells us:
“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”
Nightingale in her Bible commented:
“We love him, because he first loved us. What we ordinarily want is a belief of God’s love to us. We do not realize to ourselves all that Christ’s death shows us of God’s love; we do not believe that our own single individual soul is and ever has been the direct object of the infinite love of the most high God. It is hard, both because of our own littleness, and because of our own hardness. But, if this belief once take possession of our hearts, then are we redeemed indeed.”
At Romans 12:2 which tells people not to be “conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Nightingale referred to our one day being restored, in body, soul and spirit, “to the perfect likeness of our glorified Saviour.”
…In various places Nightingale referred to the affirmation of the Apostles’ Creed about God “descending into hell.” She asked:
“How can God suffer? How can God ‘descend into hell’?”
Her answer was that it is more difficult to conceive of a God who does not suffer:
“The good God living up there in heaven by Himself, while we, His children, are suffering all this.” (Notes from Devotional Authors, in Mysticism and Eastern Religions)
She strongly disagreed with the portrayal of God the Father as a distant and heartless judge, against whom Jesus had to contend, a judge:
“Always weighing and balancing our sins against our disadvantages, or listening to Christ, who is always asking Him to do what He would not do without such asking! Who would wish to have such a God?”
Alluding to the words used in the absolution in the Book of Common Prayer she remarked that “were a man to ‘desire the death’ of anyone who had offended him,” would we not feel “just abhorrence of such character”? (Notes from Devotional Authors)
Nightingale did not believe in a permanent hell but did believe in judgment. Some would be admitted directly into the “Immediate Presence.” For herself she was more diffident. At a time of serious sickness she described to Jowett her expectation of standing naked before God in judgment, conscious of her weakness and mistakes, utterly dependent on “God’s providence alone and not…anything of my own at all.” But even for herself she looked forward to seeing God.
On the Holy Spirit Nightingale remarked:
“Some of the disciples did not so much as know that there was a Holy Spirit and we who know…make no use of Him.”
Nightingale understood the function of the Holy Spirit as the communication of the real essence of God, a communication necessary to combatting the dominant culture which always conspires
to tell us what we want to hear. Thus for her the “sin against the Holy Spirit” was:
“Always finding a moral reason for doing what one likes, always finding an argument for thinking what one likes….O how much there is of that now!”
…A letter late in life to comfort a friend affirmed:
“God grieves for our troubles like a heavenly Mother as well as Father, and sees us all safe through as earthly fathers and mothers cannot do as they would.”
After citing an Italian writer, probably Fra Eguido, a companion of Francis of Assisi, on our inability to know as much of God as a grain is to the universe, she quoted his statement:
“All scripture but speaks to us of God as a mother makes soft inarticulate sounds to her babe, the babe that could not otherwise understand her words.”
Moses:
At Exodus 33:18, to Moses’ request, “Show me thy glory,” God answered: “I will make all my goodness pass before thee.” Nightingale’s annotation brought the two ideas together:
“The glory of God is His goodness. [God] does not want to be praised, to be adored, to
have His glory sung. We can scarcely conceive a good man… wishing it. How inappropriate, then, to Him all this praise!”
Nightingale sympathized with Moses, for having to live among people “who are always provoking you and irritating you.”
St Paul:
Nightingale was moved by Paul’s statement (in Gal 6:14): “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” She called it:
One of those grand bursts of heroic enthusiasm which there is nothing in all history to compare to. (Notes from Devotional Authors)
St Teresa of Avila:
Nightingale identified with Teresa, as she recorded in her Bible at the passage of Paul’s (Gal 2:20) “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me:
There is nothing that I would not do for Your service.”
Teresa was aged forty-three when she wrote that, Nightingale forty-seven:
“From that time I opened a new book, that is, I began a new life. That which I had lived
hitherto was my own, but that which I have lived since, I may say, has been God’s, for it
seems to me God has lived in me.”
For Nightingale, the mystical state was the essence of common sense. She described the mystics as being ahead of us in their ideas of God and prayer:
“Where they failed was in supposing this world is not what God has given us to work upon. All I mean by mystical theology is what Christ meant. He was the first great mystic who was at once yet the most active reformer that ever lived. The real essence of all true mysticism lies in his words: ‘And my Father will come unto him and we will etc.’ Was mysticism ‘not the attempt to draw near to God not by rites or ceremonies but by inward dispositions? Is it not merely a ‘hard word’ for ‘the kingdom of Heaven is within’”? (Notes from Devotional Authors)
St. Francis of Assisi:
Nightingale was not being entirely facetious in her belief that non-human species share in prayer; she was enormously fond of the psalms, in many of which animals, mountains and rivers praise God. In a letter to her sister she referred to birds, “whispering at dawn their prayers to God.” At the end of war in Egypt she commented to her brother-in-law:
“Every little bird seems to sing its praise for this great mercy.”
Like Francis of Assisi Nightingale had a special fondness for birds. Early in life she told her cousin:
“There is nothing makes my heart thrill like the voice of birds, much more than the human voice. It is “the angels calling us with their songs.”
She noted:
“St Francis of Assisi did not like the ants because, he said, they were ‘so anxious.’ But the birds, he said, were just right: industrious, I suppose he meant, but not anxious.”
A letter from late in life, to her brother-in-law, raises several delights of nature:
“I think of you and learn a lesson of your faith. I never see a soap bubble when I am washing my hands without thinking how good God was when he invented water and made us invent soap. He thought of us all and thought how He could make the process of cleansing beautiful, delightful to our eyes, so that every bubble should show us the most beautiful colours in the world. It is an emblem of His spirit, when we put our own into it and handle them too roughly; immediately they break, disperse and disappear. So I try to put as little of my own as possible into things.”
“Some Scotch doctor says, wait for the buds and the birds and trust in God. So I scarcely
ever see that lovely thing, a bird, without thinking it teaches me to trust in God.”
Martin Luther:
Nightingale’s view of Martin Luther was largely favourable, although there is a reference about his being a tyrant, where he is grouped with John Calvin, about whom there is not one favourable mention.
“It is perhaps impossible to overrate the gigantic effort of mind of a Luther who inquires into that which he has been educated to think is blasphemous, impious to inquire into.
Luther’s reforms “swept away some absurdities” of the church and this had itself ‘moralized the Church of Rome.’”
Nightingale wrote an extract from Luther on the Lord’s Prayer into her Bible at the place (Luke 11:2):
“Whosoever professes that he has a father in heaven acknowledges himself to be a stranger upon earth — hence, there is in his heart an ardent longing like that of a child that is living amongst strangers, in want and grief, afar from its fatherland.”
John Wesley:
Nightingale’s references to John Wesley are consistently positive and some are warm indeed.
“Let us all be Wesleys” she declared in a sermon, referring to Wesley jumping onto the wagon to save a condemned man being taken to the gallows.
“One word, one minute, or the poor wretch will be launched to everlasting damnation. There is time yet, say you believe, one tear, one sign — see he believes; he is saved. Glory be to God. It is as important as Wesley thought it to get one word to tell that poor wretch of the love of God. It is only that that is not all that is important. Let us all be Wesleys, so that the day may come when there are no more who sin and have to be snatched from death, as Wesley would put it.”
A note to Jowett refers to “the gallant fervour of the Puritans and later of John Wesley.” In Suggestions for Thought, she said that Wesley had diminished the numbers of the Church of England “but moralized their lives, and thus the church was really strengthened.” When she read Julia Wedgwood’s book on Wesley she so “dog’s eared and docketed…mauled and marked” it that she could not return it.
Other Missionaries:
Dr David Livingstone was for Nightingale “the greatest man of his generation”:
“Dr. Livingstone stood alone as the great missionary traveller, the bringer-in of civilization, or rather the pioneer of civilization — he that cometh before — to races lying in darkness. I always think of him as what John the Baptist, had he been living in the nineteenth century, would have been.”
She called Livingstone’s work:
“The most glorious work of our generation. He has opened those countries for God to enter in. He struck the first blow to abolish a hideous slave trade. He, like Stephen, was the first martyr…”
She then quoted the hymn of the “missionary bishop,” Hebert, which was used at her own funeral –
He climbed the steep ascent of heaven
Through peril, toil and pain;
O God! to us may grace be given
To follow in his train!
“Missionary” was always a positive expression in Nightingale’s writing. Rural public health nurses were “health missioners.” Sir John Lawrence was a “missionary statesman” in India for his work on sanitary reform… Members of Parliament could be “God’s missionaries,” when they were passing legislation for good, even more so than religious persons:
“Here is a legislature doing God’s will without knowing it while saints and missionaries, who are always thinking of God’s will from not knowing what it is, never do it.” (Notes from Devotional Authors)
From her call to service for the rest of her life Nightingale saw herself as God’s servant. To her father, discussing the sorrowful loss of their vicar’s child she explained:
“Nay, it strikes me that all truth lies between these two: man saying to God, as Samuel did, ‘Lord, here am I,’ and God saying to man as Christ did, in the storm, ‘Lo it is I, be not afraid.’ And neither is complete, without the other. God says to man in suffering in misery, in degradation, in anxiety, in imbecility, in loss of the bitterest kind, in sin, most of all in sin, Lo, it is I, be not afraid. This is the eternal passion of God. And man must say to him, ‘Lord here am I to work at all these things.’ I have said all my life, ‘Here am I, Lord,’ but I have been ‘afraid’ all my life, and have never believed ‘the Lord’s “Lo, it is I.’”
“You see, so far from disliking the biblical language, as you do, I always fall into it. The Bible puts into four words of one syllable what whole sermons cannot say so well. The whole of religion is in God’s Lo, it is I, and man’s Here am I, Lord.“
Journal notes reported in Spiritual Journey are highly personal, recording prayers, reading, frustrations and reflections. Here are a few from old age:
1893 - Bless the Lord, O my soul and all that is within me, all: repentance, remorse, anxiety, disappointment, all bless His holy name. Bless the Lord O my soul and forget not all His benefits: Crimea, India, nurse training, all all. Who forgiveth all thy iniquities, Who healeth all thy diseases, Who crowneth thee with loving kindness and tender mercies, Who redeemeth thy life from destruction, Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, so that thy youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s.
“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Father, forgive me, for I knew not what I did. O God, the Father of an infinite Majesty, give me Thy Holy Spirit (twenty times a day) to convince me of sin, of righteousness, above all to give me love, a real, individual love for everyone. This alone will make us happy; without this we cannot be happy. Thy Holy Spirit (twenty times a day) to give me — nothing else matters — love, forgiveness, suffering, joy and the counsel of the Highest.“
“Do Thou, then, put such thoughts into my mind, such words into my mouth, every hour. To make the final decision between Christ, God and self with prayer.”
“To make the decision whether God’s or self’s. Ye are bought with a price, ye are not your own. O how happy to be God’s. Help of the helpless, and what help? The Father of an infinite majesty, charity. Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt.”
1895: “Personal union with Jesus Christ; without this we are nothing. Father, give me this personal union. Come in, Lord Jesus, come into my heart now. There is no room. Each day more and more of this new year, 1895, and may it be a better and a happier year than any before. So help me/us God!”
“To believe in Christ as our friend, that is faith. To act for Christ as His friends, that is practice.”
“God governs by His laws, but so do we, when we have discovered them. If it were otherwise we could not learn from the past for the future.“ (“Essay in Memoriam,” in Society and Politics 5:60)
The preceding contains only excerpts and all quotes can be found via this link: Florence Nightingale: Faith and Work
Onward and Upward!
From Sissel Kyrkjebø: O store gud ("How Great Thou Art") - Sissel and The Tabernacle Choir - 8/26/2019
From The Revival Channel: Dutch Sheets - Open Visions of Revival - UNSTOPPABLE REVIVAL!!! – 3/12/23
From Integrity Music: ”Way Maker” - Darlene Zschech & William McDowell | REVERE (Official Live Video) - 6/5/2020
From World Outreach Church: The Absurdity of Gender Identity | Allen Jackson Ministries – 3/15/22
From Fresh Wine Records: No Longer Slaves- Eddie James | Worthy Cfan 4/15/2020
From The Victory Channel - FlashPoint: China & Biden Ties Revealed! – 3/24/23
From Steeljaw Scribe - YouTube: “Once to Every Man and Nation” - 5/24/2008
From CBN News: UK Preacher Reported as Terrorist After Shocking 'Misgendering' Arrest Wins BIG – 3/23/23
From Bethel Music: No Longer Slaves (Official Lyric Video) - Jonathan David and Melissa Helser | We Will Not Be Shaken - 1/26/2015
ICYMI > From CBN News: 'I Stand By the Language': Bible College Fires Professor for Tweet Against Sexual Sin – 3/20/2023
From My Faith Votes: Are Children being Parented by the Government? (Lt. Col. Allen West) – 3/17/22
From The American Minute with Bill Federer: Patrick Henry "As for me, give me liberty or give me death!" – 3/24/23
From Jonathan Cahn Sermon: The Sacrifice of Love - a Jonathan Cahn Sermon – 3/26/23
Podcast - From Dutch Sheets Ministries:Don’t Be Moved by What You See | Give Him 15 Daily Prayer with Dutch | March 23, 2023
Podcast - From Kingdom League International: Signs that the Day of the LORD is Approaching! – 3/24/23
Podcast - From D'Souza Media: The Parallel Between the Democrat Party and Authoritarian Regimes – 3/23/23
Monologue - From Huckabee: From Huckabee: Your STUPIDITY is the Country's Biggest SHORTCOMING, According to These People – 3/25/23
Recommended Reading…
From Kingdom Winds (w/ video): The Kingdom is Always Worth the Sacrifice – 3/21/23
From BizPac Review: Chinese pastor who fled persecution warns America is ‘descending into a very dark reality’ under leftist leadership – 3/23/2023
From The Christian Post: Women: We must not kneel before the trans patriarchy – 3/22/2023
From Christianity Daily: Pope Francis Hints End to Catholic Church Celibacy Rule: Calls Ban on Priest's Sexual Activity 'Temporary' – 3/16/2023
From Christianity Daily: 8 Bishops of Orthodox Church Protest its Eviction from Kyiv Headquarters – 3/22/2023
ICYMI > From Kingdom Winds: Defining True Freedom – 3/17/2023
ICYMI > From Faith Island: The Importance of Humility in Life – 6/18/2015
What affects one, can affect all!
* News From The Growing Free Union -
From CBN News: 'Revival is in the Air': New Reports of Spiritual Awakening as a Huge Event Slated for April – 3/14/23
From BizPac Review: Fentanyl blamed for teen overdose deaths doubling in 3 years, but report ignores Biden border crisis– 3/26/2023
From Forbes Breaking News: 'The Navy Is Implying Here That Religious People Are Abnormal': Tommy Tuberville Slams DEI Trainings – 3/26/2023
From 60 Minutes: Is the Navy ready? How the U.S. is preparing amid a naval buildup in China – 3/17/23
From Facts Matter with Roman Balmakov: CDC Bought Phone Data of 55 MILLION Americans to Monitor Lockdown Adherence – 3/22/23
ICYMI > From One America News Network: Mike Hambrick On His Book “Memphis: Rock DJ Uncovers Conspiracy Behind MLK Jr. Assassination” – 3/20/23
ICYMI > From D'Souza Media: Here's Why I Think Tucker Carlson Stopped Airing Jan 6 Footage – 3/19/23
* News From the States –
News From Florida -
From Forbes Breaking News: 'You're Opening Up A Major Can Of Worms': DeSantis Warns Against Biden Executive Order – 3/24/23
News From Pennsylvania -
From UPI.com: Fifth victim of fatal chocolate factory explosion confirmed as two people remain missing – 3/26/23
News From Rhode Island -
From MinistryWatch: Child Evangelism Fellowship of Rhode Island Sues School District for Religious Discrimination – 3/17/23
News From Virginia -
From The Blaze: Virginia teachers arrested for 'inappropriate contact' with students, police say – 3/25/23
News From Wisconsin -
From BizPac Review: ‘No trial if they dead’: State Supreme Court candidate went easy on murderer who tried to have witnesses killed – 3/23/23
What affects one, can affect all!
* Friends of the Repubic -
* News From Our Canadian Neighbors -
From the Toronto Sun: LILLEY UNLEASHED : Katie Telford set to testify over Chinese election interference – 3/21/2023
From CTV (Canadian) News: Here's why Mulcair thinks Poilievre has rattled Trudeau - 3/22/23
* News From Our Israeli Friends -
From ONE FOR ISRAEL Ministry: Passover SHOUTS the message of salvation! Join us this year as we proclaim the Gospel! – 3/15/2023
ONE FOR ISRAEL Ministry: SHOCKING exposé! Israeli professors unveil secrets of the Passover seder - 4/10/22
From CBN News: Netanyahu Says No to Anti-Evangelism Bill | CBN NewsWatch - March 23, 2023
From Jerusalem Lights - Rabbi Chaim Richman: Jerusalem Lights Podcast # 154 : The Power of Unity – 3/17/2023
Recommended Resources - follow the links…
Excellent Election Education Resource: US 2020 Election Fraud at a Glance
Excellent Non-Partisan Election Resource: Election Integrity Project California
Excellent Constitution Education Resource: LIBERTY TREE ONLINE UNIVERSITY
Excellent Citizen-Patriot News Resource: Steve Bannon's War Room
Excellent Citizen-Patriot News Resource: From Frank Speech - the Home of Free Speech
Excellent Citizen Comprehensive Resource: David Horowitz Freedom Center
Excellent Expose’ of Political Prisoners within the US: American Gulag
Excellent Source of CRT information for parents: Moms for America
Excellent Christian Homeschool Resource:
https://ed-exit.com/
Excellent Citizen Activist Resource: Precinct Strategy: Home
Excellent Guide to Protecting Families: A Guide to Protecting Your Family From the Coming Insurrection and Violence 1 ARE YOU SAFE?