It’s so easy to point the finger at the ills of society we see everyday. It really is. I did it for most of my life before I became aware of one simple fact, that I was the one that needed to have the finger pointing back at myself. I was the one that needing fixing, not everyone else.
I once thought this to be a trait that alcoholics and addicts only shared. As I’ve delved deeper into my relationship with God, I’ve begun to see that it’s a trait shared amongst much of the world’s population. So why is that? Why is it that people are prone to cite out something negative around them that someone else is doing? The answer is simple. It shifts the focus away from themselves. It prevents people from seeing who they really are. And for most of my adult life, I’ve been this way.
For the longest time, I mostly hung around with people who were living blatantly immoral. I always had at least one active addict friend in my life that I was close to who was regularly lying, cheating, stealing, scamming, or more in their lives. I would tell myself that I wasn’t anything like these people and I’d continue hanging around them because it made me feel more superior. My ego would congratulate itself on a daily basis as it felt I wasn’t doing anything remotely as negative as the people I was spending time with. So when the drama would happen in my life, I would usually transfer the blame and shift the focus onto those people around me that my ego felt superior towards. But what’s ironic in all of that behavior was that while I told myself that my crap didn’t stink, it really did. I just made sure to constantly shift everyone’s including myself’s focus onto those people living so outright lopsided.
Sadly, my life was filled with a lot of its own darkness that was just as immoral as those people I was trying to point my fingers at and fix. I was harboring sex and love addiction issues secretly in my life. I slept with married people. I skipped out on a lot of plans and promises so that I could live in these addictions more. I spent hours on the web at night perusing porn and communicating with people sexually that I never had any intention on being with. And I lied often to cover all of this up. I backstabbed people often by character assassinating them. Gossip was a regular part of my life and so was greed.
For a long time, I didn’t want to take a real long, hard look in the mirror at myself both literally, and figuratively. It was too painful. I didn’t love myself and I knew I was broken. I stayed away from me by trying to point out and fix other people’s toxic lives. I rarely focused on myself and the healing that needed to take place for me to spiritually grow. Instead, I kept these toxic connections to others alive so that I could feel better about my own craziness and have some project outside of myself that I could place my energy in fixing.
Over time I began to notice that no one ever got better. Not the people I pointed the fingers at and tried to fix, and not me. If anything, both grew worse. I became a very negative person. I began looking at all the bad things happening in the world around me and constantly commented on them aloud to anyone that would listen. I yelled at reckless drivers. I talked bad about those in the news who were doing shady behaviors such as politicians, actors and actresses, policemen and policewomen, coaches, teachers, etc. Through all of that negativity, my immorality increased until I was doing just as much of that type of behavior as those I had been pointing the fingers at.
Thankfully, a year ago when the pain in my life was becoming too great to handle, I decided it was time to turn over my entire will to something I knew could show me how to live a much better life than the one I had created. That’s when I turned all of the reigns over to God. It was the best decision I ever made as I realized soon thereafter, that I was the one broken and needed fixing and not everything I had been pointing out.
This makes me think back to a specific moment in my life when I had been trying to live as I am now. I was being interviewed by the local news and asked to comment on whether I thought President Bush was doing a good job or not and if certain problems our society was facing today were worse because of his holding office. I think my answer shocked them. I said that the President was just a figurehead and that the problems could all be fixed when each of us begin to realize the real work is done by healing ourselves first. This is one of the greatest illusions in the world today. Every single problem that all of us see happening now can be changed by changing ourselves, by fixing ourselves, and by taking that finger we point so quickly and turning it back on ourselves.
This is what I am doing today. I am working on fixing me. Little by little, I am repairing more and more of the damage I caused myself throughout the years. As I continue to work on fixing all those parts of me that were broken, I am seeing less of what’s wrong in the world today and more on how I can help God to heal it.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
