Month: October 2018

Grateful Heart Monday

Welcome to another chapter of Grateful Heart Monday, where I begin each week with a piece of gratitude, which for today is for something that might sound a little odd, given it’s for my Toyota Camry Hybrid.

I own a 2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid and while I never named my vehicle, it truly has been something special to me and has been a blessing many times over. I currently have over 230,000 miles on it and am also its original owner, having driven it off the lot back in December of 2006 with a mere 10 miles on it.

Why I’m filled with gratitude for my car though is for a number of reasons, which I decided to numerically list the top ten:

  1. It helped me commute from Boston, MA to Chincoteague, VA (where the bed and breakfast I used to own was) countless times.
  2. It helped me commute from Boston, MA to Toledo, OH for two entire years while I was dating my partner long distance.
  3. It has kept me safe and helped me narrowly avoid a number of accidents over the years, and even protected me immensely when I actually did have a significant accident in 2012.
  4. It has been a great haven for me to vent and scream at the top of my lungs over my frustration with my health issues.
  5. It has been an extremely reliable vehicle with relatively low maintenance issues.
  6. It has been my “recovery shuttle”, given it’s been the only vehicle I’ve used to get me to all my recovery meetings ever since coming to Alcoholics Anonymous in 2007.
  7. Its license plates have been great talking points and motivations for a good number of people’s spiritual lives. (I’ve used “23RDPSM”, “BEURSLF”, and “DNTJDGE” over the years in case you’re wondering!)
  8. It has taken me on a number of long-distance vacations and helped me to go visit plenty of beautiful people, places, and things that I will cherish forever.
  9. It has maintained amazing gas mileage, even after all these years, as I tend to still average at least 35 miles to the gallon with every full tank.
  10. It’s been the home of much of my 11thStep life of prayer and meditation and mantra recitation.

So, as you can see, this vehicle has brought me a multitude of gratitude and remains very dear to my heart, given how integral it’s been to my life. Ultimately, I give all the credit to God though, as I feel it was God who was the One to lead me to actually purchasing it so long ago now, as I originally had my sights set on a much flashier automobile. Nevertheless, I truly have a lot to be grateful for when it comes to my 2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid and I feel blessed for it to have been a part of my life for as long as it has…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

Question To Ponder For The Day

There’s a question I’ve often asked people I’ve gotten to know on a spiritual level and decided to ask it here as well. For most people, eyesight and hearing are two things often taken for granted. But what if one of those was going to disappear for you in this lifetime, which of those would you hope would NOT be taken away and why?

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

God’s Mysterious Ways

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