Joel 2: 12-18 (links validated on 2/10/25a)

I don’t know if you ever saw the Jim Carey film, “Bruce Almighty,” but it’s a fascinating perspective on how people see God. It’s about a guy who complains about God too often and then meets God and receives God’s power to teach him a lesson that the world is far more complicated than he ever imagined. There’s a scene when Carey’s character starts to hear the prayers of people like a huge crowd that’s chattering away at a distance. Sometimes the noise increases almost to a roar and starts to overwhelm him. God appears and informs Bruce that he’s hearing the sound of people praying. Bruce tries various ways to deal with all the prayers, finally using a computer program that downloads everybody's prayers like email. He tries to go through all the prayers one at a time but finds it an impossible task. Giving up, he hits a key and yells, “Yes to all!” Unfortunately, this means that everybody who was praying to win the lottery wins all at once, so each winner only gets $17 and chaos ensues...

In her poem Otherwise, Jane Kenyon captured the spirit of what Ash Wednesday wants to teach us. It goes like this: “I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.”...

Pressures on our young people are extraordinary. I've never seen a better summary of these pressures our youth face than the following letter sent to an advice columnist: “Dear Ann:” begins the writer, “The reader signed ‘Georgia,’ who lived through the Depression and described how hard it was to be a teenager in the 30s, said kids today have an easy time of it compared to teens in his day. You said you couldn't argue with him. Well, I can. Let me ask your generation a few questions.” “Are your parents divorced? Almost every one of my friends come from a broken home. Were you thinking about suicide when you were 12? Did you have an ulcer when you were 16? Did your best friend lose her virginity to a guy she went out with twice? You may have had to worry about pregnancy, maybe even VD, but did you also have to worry about AIDS? Did your classmates carry guns and knives? How many kids in your class came to school regularly drunk, stoned or high on drugs? Did any of your friends have their brains fried from using Meth? What percentage of your graduating class also graduated from a drug/alcohol rehabilitation center? “ “Did your school have armed security guards in the halls? Did you ever live in a neighborhood where the sound of gunfire at night was normal? You talk a lot about being dirt poor and having no money. Since when does having money mean happiness? The kids at school who have the expensive cars and designer clothes are often the most miserable. When I am your age, Georgia, I won't do much looking back, I'll just thank God that I survived.”...

Hospital staffs are facing an alarming problem, literally. It’s all the constant beeping, booping, wailing and chirping of a gaggle of monitoring devices to which patients are attached. The IV stand beeps when it's empty. The blood pressure alarm screams when the patient shifts in bed. The ventilator bongs whenever the patient coughs, and the heart rate monitor gives its telltale flat-line whine when one of the stick-on pads comes loose. If you’re on a hospital staff, it's hard to keep track of it all. Thing is, though, most of these alarms are of the false variety. They're just irritating, harmless anomalies that become a form of annoying white noise after a while. One estimate revealed that such false alarms go off on an average of every 66 seconds. The alarming problem this causes, though, is something called "alarm fatigue" in health care professionals. Nurses, doctors and other hospital workers can become so desensitized to the din day after day after day that their instinctual response becomes to turn down or mute the alarms, or ignore them altogether. Think of it sort of like that "Check Engine" light on your car dashboard that fades into the background after you've ignored it for several months. The consequences of ignoring the alarms in the hospital, however, can be fatal. A high school junior recently died after a simple tonsillectomy. She had been given a powerful painkiller which slowed her breathing and eventually caused irreversible brain damage. The condition wasn’t caught because the respiratory monitor had been muted, probably because of alarm fatigue. Patient safety advocates at the ECRI Institute listed alarm hazards as the number one health technology danger to patient safety last year...

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