Welcome to another Grateful Heart Monday where I write about one piece of gratitude to start my week off on the right foot, which for today is for my Higher Power, whom I refer to as God.
I was actually surprised when I realized I hadn’t written a piece of gratitude yet for all the help I believe God’s given me throughout my life since starting this Grateful Heart Monday series. With this entry marking my 14th week of doing this, I wanted to make sure I didn’t continue this definite oversight any further. With that being said, I’ve been through an incredible amount of suffering in this life that by all means, I should be dead or at the very minimum, heavily medicated just to function. But thank God I’m not either and am able to honor God today through this very writing.
You see, it’s God who helped me survive a very rough and dysfunctional childhood that included mental and emotional abuse, bullying, and molestation, as I know without God I would have taken my life way back then.
You see, it’s God who removed all the compulsions to engage in a number of addictions from alcohol and drugs to sex and love that my self-will was never able to overcome and that would most certainly have driven me to death if I had kept engaging with any of them.
You see, it’s God who helped me to persevere after the tragic deaths of my father’s suicide and my mother’s drunken fall down the stairs, when my ego told me time and time again to give up and that life wasn’t worth living anymore.
You see, it’s God who helped me overcome the loss of my business and the majority of my financial stability, by guiding me to the Boston area when all that began happening, as there I’d lay the foundation to my 12 Step recovery life that would provide me an incredible support network to get through it all.
And you see, it’s God who’s helped me for the past six years to keep going, even in the midst of all this chronic pain and health issues, as I’ve never have to do any of it alone because of the many good teachers and friends God placed in my life along the way to keep lifting me up when I couldn’t do it for myself.
So, yes, I’m extremely grateful to God today for helping me to keep on, keeping on, one day at a time, year after year, in a life that has been more difficult than not to simply exist.
I know some may say that God gave me a crappy life to live with all that I’ve had to endure, and probably scratch their heads as to why I still feel so grateful to God. But I choose to look at it differently, as I’m a survivor and someone who sees all my trials and tribulations in life as things I can now help God help others with and to me that’s something to be 100% grateful for on this Grateful Heart Monday.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
