In 1854, Florence Nightingale answered a government call for nurses and headed to Scutari, near Constantinople, to care for British soldiers from the Crimean War. What she found was awful. The hospital was dirty and crawling with vermin, and it didn’t even have basic supplies. More men were sick from disease than from battle wounds. Florence and her nurses got to work. They set up food kitchens, washed linen and clothes, wrote letters home for the soldiers, and started reading rooms. The Times reported that at night she walked among the beds checking on the wounded with a light in her hand. That’s how she became the Lady with the Lamp. Greatness in God’s kingdom usually looks like somebody carrying a light into a place nobody else wants to go.
