Florence Nightingale's Voice at Embley Park

On February 7, 1837, sixteen-year-old Florence Nightingale sat in the garden of her family's estate at Embley Park in Hampshire, England. In her private journal, she recorded four words that would alter the course of modern medicine: "God spoke to me." She did not hear instructions. She did not receive a plan. She simply knew, with a certainty that settled into her bones, that the Almighty was calling her to some form of service.…