Mrs. Bertha Adams, 71 years old, died alone in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Easter Sunday. The coroner’s report read: “Cause of death . . . malnutrition.” She had wasted away to fifty pounds.

When you face an impossibility, leave it in the hands of the Specialist! Refuse to calculate. Refuse to doubt. Refuse to work it out by yourself. Refuse to worry or encourage others to worry. Stand against that.

Francois Fenelon, a seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Frenchman, said this about prayer: Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one’s heart, its pleasures and its pain, to a dear friend. Tell Him your troubles, that He may comfort you; tell Him your joys, that He may sober them; tell Him your longings, that He may purify them; tell Him your dislikes, that He may help you to conquer them; talk to Him of your temptations, that He may shield you from them; show Him the wounds of your heart, that He may . . .

Of all the professions, that of the physician has to be the most paradoxical. Brilliant and quick-thinking . . . yet unable to write so that anybody (except a pharmacist) can decipher the words. Decisive and disciplined . . . yet more preoccupied than an overworked inventor on the edge of a discovery. He’s the only guy I know who can have both hands in your mouth while asking you three questions back to back as he stares up your nose and has his mind on his golf game. Honest and principled . . . yet lies through his teeth every time he says, “This won’t hurt a bit . . . you’ll hardly feel it.”

Class Action is a class act. It’s a film about two lawyers who go head-to-head, both in court and in life. They are father and daughter . . . on opposite sides of a complicated case charged with the full spectrum of emotions.

Better than any other word I can think of, change describes our world. Vast, sweeping changes, especially in the last 150 years. Simply to survive requires adjusting, and to make any kind of significant dent calls for a willingness to shift in style and to modify methods. Consider two of the more pronounced changes in our world.

As one understanding soul expressed it: “Compassion is not a snob gone slumming. It’s a real trip down inside the broken heart of a friend. It’s feeling the sob of the soul. It’s sitting down and silently weeping with your soul-crushed neighbor.”

We are a success-saturated society. The telltale signs are everywhere. Each year dozens of books and magazines, scores of audiotapes and videotapes, and hundreds of seminars offer ideas, motivation, techniques, and promises of prosperity.