If you’ve read yesterday’s posting in my blog already, then you’ll know by now that I spent some time in it discussing a big part of my life where I blamed God and questioned why bad things had to happen to us. I realized though after completing that entry that I failed to mention something extremely important within it. And it comes down to this…Maybe God does prevent many bad things from happening, except we never even know about them because they never actually happen?
I know that’s a mouthful to take in, so let me put this into a very simple example for you. It’s a work day for a person and they awake in the morning only to notice their alarm clock never went off. They glance at the time and realize they’re going to be late for work no matter how fast they move. As they get ready as quick as possible, they start thinking how their day is already starting off on the wrong foot. They might even be doing what I might have been doing all those years ago when I would be blaming God for that alarm clock not going off. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, a major accident has occurred on the exact route at the precise time and location that person would normally be at while heading to work. So while they might be feeling that God was letting something bad happen to them with that alarm clock not going off, maybe God made that happen just to avoid having them be in that major accident.
While I know that story is purely hypothetical, I’d like now to personally share with you one from my own life. It’s one where I believe God was working in my life, even when I had believed that God had let something really bad happen to me. And while you may find the story I’m about to tell you hard to believe, I can promise you that every word of it is completely true.
At the end of August, 1991, I was only two weeks away from heading back to college for my sophomore year. I had spent the summer hanging around the inner-city of my hometown with a number of active drug dealers who I called my closest friends. On one particular evening, my phone rang and one of them was calling me to hang out for the evening. After much convincing I started to get dressed and saw all my gold rings (eight of them to be exact) sitting on my dresser. I kept feeling this serious urge that I needed to put them on for the night, even though I didn’t like wearing a lot of expensive jewelry when I went downtown. I gave into that urge and headed out sporting all those rings on my fingers anyway.
When I arrived downtown at the address my friend was supposed to meet me at, I was alone so I leaned on a railing outside a random apartment and waited for him. I opened a bottle of malt liquor I had, lit up a cigarette, and listened to some hip hop on my walkman. Shortly thereafter, a black BMW, with windows I couldn’t see in, pulled up on the street in front of me and several men hopped out of it. One of them approached me and asked if I knew a guy named “Tone”. I responded that I did but that I hadn’t seen him around in a while. The man turned around, walked back to his BMW, and started looking in its trunk. A few minutes later, I felt myself being lifted up over that railing I had been leaning on and the next thing I knew I was in the backseat of my car with my friend driving me to the hospital. There was blood all over me, I couldn’t see out of one of my eyes and barely out of the other. My walkman was gone and so were all those gold rings I had been wearing. I can still remember being in shock and when my head finally cleared in a hospital bed a little while later, the anger seethed forth from within me towards God for letting that terrible incident happen to me.
About a week later, I had recovered enough to head to another friend’s house who always knew about everything that ever went on in the city, as I wanted to know why I had been jumped. When he saw me, he shook his head, smiled, and said I was damn lucky. I scoffed at his comment and asked how it was lucky that I got seriously beat up and had thousands of dollars in gold rings stolen from me. He responded by asking why I ever admitted to knowing another drug dealer. Rule number one he said, is to never admit knowing anyone or anything when you hang out in the inner-city. He then asked if I remembered the guy looking in his trunk and when I said yes, the next words to come out of his mouth is how I know that God does prevent some really bad things from happening.
He told me that they had a sawed off shotgun in their trunk and were going to kill me because the guy I admitted knowing was a major rival drug dealer who had blown up their BMW in the previous week. But they didn’t do that for only one reason…because I was wearing all those gold rings worth so many thousands of dollars. And that they had decided beating the crap out of me and taking all of them was enough retribution. His final words to me that day sometimes still haunt me as he told me that I really should be dead. I know today that it was God and not luck that saved me from that tragic event. I shudder at times when I think about that urge I felt to wear my rings and what would have happened if I hadn’t worn them that night.
I thank God today for being alive and able to tell this story because it has one very important message for the world to know. While we may think that God keeps letting bad things happen, I am convinced that God is actually constantly behind the scenes preventing the really bad things from happening, like the ones we wouldn’t ever be able to come back from. I’m alive today because of a forceful urge to wear some gold rings, and while you may say that it was all luck and chance, you might feel differently if you had walked in my shoes back then.
So the next time you are blaming God for something bad that’s happening in your life, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and realize that maybe the bad thing that’s happening, really isn’t so bad. And maybe, just maybe, that bad thing is really a good thing, because what you’ll not realizing is how God is actually shifting the course of events to prevent something truly bad from happening to you…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson