OMG!!!

OMG!!! by Bernie

So I was listening to my eight year old granddaughter having a conversation with her eight year old friend. The friend was talking about a third party who was not present.

"So she says to her," the friend said of the third party. "'Oh my God, I hate you."

"That wasn't nice," my granddaughter admonished. "She shouldn't have said that. It's one of the Commandments. She should have said 'Oh my gosh, I hate you.'"

The other girl agreed.

I was very proud of my daughter at that moment -- her efforts to instill a sense of right and wrong in her daughter are bearing fruit. And I was very proud of my granddaughter for having the courage to use this knowledge in her everyday life.

Life is a little complicated most of the time. It is difficult to get a firm grasp on all its elements. Just when you think you've got it under control the transmission in the car goes out, or you burn the dinner on the stove top, or you lose your job. Oh my God, what am I going to do?  Worse still are those times when you are in control, or so you think, and still you wind up doing or saying the exact wrong thing. Oh my God, I shouldn't have done that.

My granddaughter is appropriately myopic in her observations about the world. She's eight, she's allowed to be. Hopefully, some day soon, she will begin to realize there is another dynamic at work in the statement she heard and with equal courage question the appropriateness of hate.

When I look at myself in the mirror, the phrase that most often comes to mind nowadays is Oh my God, I am getting old. I am really trying to move past this being simply an expletive. I am trying to embrace this as a prayer, trying to be grateful and hopeful. Oh my God, thank you for getting me this far, thank you for allowing me to see the fruits of my labor, thank you giving me the sense to appreciate life in all its dimensions. But there are those days when I am most keenly aware of the aches and pains, when I feel particularly diminished by the things that don't work anymore, when resignation replaces anticipation, and on those days I am saying Oh my God, do you see what's happening to me?

Then again, sometimes looking in the mirror is not a spiritual experience at all -- you just look at the skid marks and the wreckage and wonder if drinking contributed to the accident or did you just fall asleep at the wheel. In this case, follow my granddaughter's advice and say Oh my gosh, look at that mess.