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A series of fascinating books on those remarkable people called Christians, who say they have been born anew through the power of a man called Jesus Christ, and who have shaped the course of human history for the last two thousand years. They include emperors and peasants, kings and transients, extraordinary women and challenging men, people of great wealth and people sworn to a lifetime of poverty, scientists, poets, politicians and musicians, but all holding one captivating thing in common, a deep faith in, and commitment to, the man called Jesus, who regards them all as his brothers and sisters. Here is their story, told as it has never been told before, an epic like Lord of the Rings, but soundly historical, factual and true, with people so vibrant, so real that they will make you question the depth of your own commitments, and examine your own life in the light that shines from theirs across the ages. See how they met the horrendous difficulties that so often beset them, how they regarded death as a triviality and life as an eternal phenomenon. But see also how they were far from infallible, frequently went astray and erred seriously. Yet they were always called back, and step by painful step laid the very foundations of the society we live in today–a society we could delude ourselves into thinking we cannot lose. If you are a Christian, then you are one of these people, and this is your story, the story of your family, your brothers and sisters. Meet them. For you too have wars to win and souls to save, and they may show you how.
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The scandal of that Nightingale girl
When Florence Nightingale arrived at the British military hospital in Scutari, Constantinople in November 1854, to enter what she would later describe as “the kingdom of hell,” she had no idea that she would leave it within two years with her health permanently shattered at age thirty-six. Nor could she have predicted her return to England as a wildly acclaimed heroine of the Crimean War, nor her ultimate credit for establishing modern nursing standards throughout the English-speaking world. What she did know, however, was that at age sixteen she had clearly heard God calling her to his service, and on that call her life must be centered.
To the utter consternation of her upper-class family, by age twenty-two Florence had concluded that God wanted her to be a nurse. English nurses then were drawn almost exclusively from the lower classes, did menial work for meager pay, and had well deserved reputations as drunkards and wantons. It was by no means uncommon, for instance, notes biographer Mark Bostridge in Florence Nightingale: the Woman and Her Legend (2008), to find a night nurse in bed with a patient. That a treasured daughter of the wealthy and well-connected Nightingale family should be part of such a milieu was simply unthinkable.
© Copyright 2010 Society to Explore and Record Christian History