Complacency

com·pla·cen·cy

self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies

Today was a busy day in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). I work in a hospital that is fairly new. The NICU has been open for about 3 1/2 years. We have 6 beds, with a staff of very well seasoned NICU Nurses, most of us have worked in other busy NICU's before coming here. We have a really unique work environment. It seems that we are either very busy or very slow. It cycles, depending on what was going on 8 or 9 months ago, or what the weather is like, or if there's a full moon out that week, or who knows what.

We accept babies as early as 30 weeks. There are other NICU's that accept babies as early as 23-24 weeks. And even though we don't accept babies less than 30 weeks, we have to be prepared to stabilize babies as young as 23-24 weeks. We need to be able to stabilize these babies and prepare them to be transfered to our sister facility that has the specialists available to provide care for them.

We need to always be prepared for the unexpected.

So as I worked in the busy NICU today, I realized that during those slow times, many of us have become complacent.

What I mean is, we get too relaxed. We forget to check our equipment or our supplies, we forget to prepare bed spaces. We get comfortable.

We become unaware of what might happen.

So as I worked in the busy NICU today, getting vital signs, feeding babies, hanging IV fluids, I wondered if sometimes in life we become complacent too. We get so wrapped up and comfortable in our lives that we forget about God. We forget about our final destination. It made me think about the verse in 1 Thessalonians......

I don't think, friends, that I need to deal with the question of when all this is going to happen. You know as well as I that the day of the Master's coming can't be posted on our calendars. He won't call ahead and make an appointment any more than a burglar would. About the time everybody's walking around complacently, congratulating each other—"We've sure got it made! Now we can take it easy!"—suddenly everything will fall apart. It's going to come as suddenly and inescapably as birth pangs to a pregnant woman. 1 Thessalonians 5:1-3 (The Message)