A while back, WWJD made the rounds as a new Christian fad. An acronym for "What Would Jesus Do?", it found its way onto t-shirts, bracelets and other sundry chochkies. Though the question itself is a valid one, I dismissed it as just another annoying way we out ourselves as hypocrites, placing people who sported WWJD kitsch in the same category as people who flip me off on the I405 as they drive by with their Christian fish decal. Personally, I try to keep my road rage options open by limiting my Jesus bling to a small cross hanging from my rearview mirror.
Still, the WWJD craze served to solidify the growing stature of catchy acronyms in our English language. I take some responsibility for that tragedy, since I work in an industry that has made text messaging ubiquitous, and acronyms are an easy end around character limits. However, my Stanford siblings will tell you that acronyms had infiltrated the bastions of slightly higher learning before cell phones ever found their way into the hands of pre-adolescents. Truth be told, though we blame acronym-mania on the deterioration of our educational standards, those of us who have made education a priority shoulder much of the blame, calling our best museums MoMA and LACMA, while lazily referring to our country's highest positions as POTUS and SCOTUS. At Yale, for instance, we took derisive pleasure in calling the Department of University Health, DUH, long after the school tried to correct the implications by renaming it the Yale University Department of Health.
Given the intellectual roots of my acronym fetish, it should come as some surprise that my current acronym of choice did not come from snooty linguistic laziness, but from a toddler. As my niece came into her own as a Tittle Talker, she developed the amusing habit of prefacing all her questions with "Oh". My favorite exchanges would go something like this:
Katie: Oh, what are you doing?
Me: I'm sitting in the car.
Katie: Oh, what am I doing?
Me: You're sitting in the car, too.
Katie: Oh, am I sitting in the car, too?
Me: Yes.
While she has since grown out of that phase, the habit has stuck with Sharon and I...call it a fair punishment for all the times I've tried to teach her to say things that were, shall we say, off color. In any case, her verbal stylings have become a regular staple of the way Sharon and I communicate and, since we text each other a lot, the phrases have been shortened to OWAYD, OWAID, etc.
As the title of this post suggests, it is OWAID that has been on my mind lately. As, I'm sure, was the original intent behind WWJD, it is a question that can be asked of any situation, at any time of the day. But lately, it has become a life question: OWAID?
I have been blessed with a great many things in my life. A loving family. Healthy (mostly) relationships. A good job. A nice house. A huge yard, increasingly filled with beautiful living things. A tremendous amount of ability and talent. And yet, here I sit, unfulfilled. OWAID? Oh, where am I going? The brutal truth of it is this is not where I expected to be at 33, buckling beneath the weight of my pedigree and expectations. I am not unhappy, but I know there's more to everything than this. I can't have been given so much to accomplish so little.
Oh, what is the point?
I don't know. As I said, I am not unhappy. In fact, in many ways, I am happier and healthier than ever. My life is good! Perhaps, what I am experiencing is divine discomfort. Maybe, just maybe, what I experience as OWAID, is God asking me OWAYD, nudging me forward to the next step. If God were to speak in pop music lyrics, perhaps He'd be saying "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
Great. OWTHDIDN?
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