I recently subscribed to a magazine titled “God’s Mysterious Ways” (published by Guideposts), which contains real life stories about things that appear to be more than just coincidences, where God may very well indeed have a hand behind it.
That being said, I’ve had a few of those experiences myself and have already written about some of them for The Twelfth Step, which is why I thought it might be best to group them all together into a new category for my blog. From now on any article with this subject material is going to be titled exactly like my new subscription and my hope is that each of them may help people who may be questioning their faith, as I have done quite a bit in the past year myself.
In light of that, I actually do have a story to share today that involves this very blog and a prior article I wrote. As many of you know, I am in recovery for a former sex and love addiction that once plagued my life and have written about that subject material many times over already. One such article I wrote a good bit ago was about romantic obsession and talked about what that means and the toll it can take on a person’s life, like it did mine. Like many of my articles I’ve written, I simply posted it and hoped that one day it might somehow reach the people that could benefit from it. But, like most of my articles, it went mostly unread, at least according to the statistic counter I have access to behind the scenes that tells me how many times it got viewed.
Sometimes that very action of me seeing how very little my article was read has made me want to quit writing and shut down this blog. But it seems like every time I get close to making a drastic decision like that, God sees fit to show me that there is a greater purpose to The Twelfth Step, beyond just being a place to collect my spiritual musings of life.
I say that because just last week, I was sitting down with a new sponsee from the SLAA program, where in the course of our work together that day, I asked why they chose me as their sponsor. The answer I received was not one I expected. You see, they had done a Google search on romantic obsession weeks prior and what arose on page two of those results was that very article I had written about that subject material. When this person looked up the program of SLAA after learning about it in my article, they found a local meeting to attend, which just so happened to be the one I helped to start here in Toledo, Ohio. On the night they showed up to it, they quickly discovered the author of the very article that had guided them to that meeting and to SLAA was sitting right next to them. And that was all they needed for motivation to ask me to sponsor them through the steps.
So, was it in God’s mysterious ways that my writing actually helped to guide someone, not only to a program they desperately needed, but also to someone only God knew would be a great fit to help get them on the path of healing for an addiction that was destroying their life? I leave the answer for you to decide, but as you can see, mine is pretty clear…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
