My spiritual teacher repeatedly tells me to not compare myself to others. Frankly, it’s hard not to when I see so many people living life similar to the way I once lived but with no consequences. In a conversation I had with her the other day, she reminded me that what I see on the outside with any of these people is not necessarily what is truly going on inside. After much thought to my old life, I had to agree with her statement.
For years, I lived as if I didn’t care about anything or anyone. I overindulged with cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, sex, caffeine, and money more times than I could count. I gossiped and was judgmental, negative, and greedy all too often. I usually looked at others with only one intention on what I could get out of them. And during all of those times, the worst that happened to me was having to experience anxiety and depression, which only halted my sick behaviors temporarily. What I didn’t know was just how toxic my insides had become from all of my sick actions in life. But, a day did come several years ago when I finally had grown weary enough of experiencing those mental and emotional symptoms, that I reached out to God for help.
I believe that when anyone asks God for help, that it’s like opening up a contract and accepting its terms and conditions when signed. Except in the case of God, those terms and conditions aren’t usually disclosed when we reach out for help. This has been my biggest challenge since I prayed to God with an open heart back in the Spring of 2010. I had grown so sick and tired of that mental and emotional roller coaster that I was living in then, that I humbly offered myself up to God in prayer. I asked to have me go through whatever I needed to, so as to heal from all of the toxins within me and to free me as well from all the things that drove me to those toxins in the first place.
Since then, my reality has become a full day to day onslaught of mental, emotional, and most disturbingly physical ailments. There are quite a number of days where I question my sanity and wonder like Job did in the Bible about God’s salvation. This in turn has led me to looking at those in this world who are still doing much of the same behaviors I once did and wondering why they’re not in pain. It’s then that my spiritual teacher reminds me that most of them aren’t trying to stop their toxic behaviors or heal from anything. She also helps me to remember that there was a day when I lived my life with hardly any cares in the world other than to please myself. And how in each of those days, I was becoming more and more toxic without even knowing it.
If you’ve read any of my other writings about healing in my blog, what keeps me going is hope and faith in believing that all of my pain is coming from residual toxins being cleared out of me by God. And essentially, that this is the answer to those prayers to God all those years ago when I had been so mentally and emotionally broken.
The bottom line is that it really doesn’t help me in any way to compare myself to anyone else. My teacher is totally right in that I don’t know what’s going on inside any of those people I see doing my old behaviors. What I do know though is that I asked God for help several years ago and because of that I created a contract with God. And like all contracts, I need to trust that God will honor God’s side of it. I may not like God’s terms and conditions, but in the long run, I really believe that only good will come out of it all.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
