To Busy for Ash Wednesday

When I worked as a nurse in the Intensive Care Unit, most years on Ash Wednesday I could be found working at a frenetic pace taking care of my patients.  I would start work at 7 AM and if it had been a good day leave by 8 PM, if it had been a bad day, you poured another cup of coffee and kept working.  On Ash Wednesdays the chaplain would come to the units and offer ashes and a brief prayer for anyone who wished.  It was a brief moment of grace in a long and sometimes painful day. 

I thought about those Ash Wednesdays this year as I stood on the sidewalk by the bus station offering to sketch the sign of a cross in ashes on passerby’s foreheads and a brief prayer. The local newspaper came by and interviewed those imposing the ashes and those receiving and the headline in the paper read “Pastors Reach out to those to busy for Ash Wednesday”. 

I will admit, I cringed when I saw the headline, “to busy for Ash Wednesday”.  What? To busy to attend church? And then I remembered my time in the ICU working 13-14 hours a day, and the patient’s and their families who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave.   I thought about the people who work 50- 60 hours a week just to keep their job, or work “mandatory” overtime for companies who have cut back on staff, but still expect the work to be done,  people working a couple of jobs just to keep food on the table and a roof over their head and about those for who just getting through each day is a struggle and attending church is not easy or even possible.

Those moments of grace in the ICU and many years later standing on the sidewalk outside the bus station are indelibly linked for me.  In the giving and in the receiving I hear God’s call.  And perhaps that’s what it is all about, experiencing God’s blessing and hearing His call wherever we are at, whether in an ICU or on a sidewalk in downtown Phoenix.