Category: God’s Mysterious Ways

Welcome to another entry of God’s Mysterious Ways, where I write about things that may be more than just coincidences, where God may very well indeed have a hand behind it, which for today is about a sponsee I invited to attend my weekly volunteer commitment with me recently.

Every week, I volunteer at a place called Rescue Crisis, which essentially is for people who are severely struggling with addiction or mental health and need urgent attention. Every Wednesday I run a 12 Step meeting there for anyone who may need it, where my focus is on sharing my experience, strength, and hope with my recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction.

Normally, I run this weekly meeting by myself, mostly because the number of clients from week to week isn’t very high and thus doesn’t require any extra support. I’ve also enjoyed handling it alone because it’s empowered me and given me a sense of purpose in my own recovery. But just a few weeks ago, when I was talking to one of my sponsees and trying to coordinate a time to meet with him, I kept feeling the need to ask if he’d like to do my next volunteer commitment with me at Rescue Crisis. He instantly agreed and we met for coffee beforehand on the night it arrived. Afterward, we headed there and walked in to the building together. Immediately upon entering the lobby, I saw someone there who was standing next to several large black trash bags, looking very much in fear and despair. Ironically, the guy just so happened to be a friend of my sponsee’s and someone my sponsee needed to make an amends with. The reason for the amends was due to my sponsee having chosen to never return a call for help from this guy, when he had specifically told him to reach out and he’d help.  Sadly, he had lost track of how to reach him a good while ago and suddenly there he was again, standing in front of him.

My sponsee discovered his friend had been discharged from another recovery center due to a relapse and had been dropped off there. His friend was now homeless on a night where the temperatures were in the low 20’s and unfortunately, there wasn’t any ability for Rescue Crisis to take him in for the night. So, as a way to make his amends, my sponsee invited his friend to join us in our recovery meeting and then offered him his place to stay that night for a warm meal and a bed to sleep in away from the cold. But in my opinion, that’s not even the best part of this story! Because the next day, after that warm meal and bed, his friend got admitted into another recovery program where my sponsee got to personally drop him off there.

Who knows what would have happened if his friend had been forced to sleep out in the cold that night? Would he have drank again to deal with it? Would he have even survived the night? Was it God who saw fit to motivate me to invite my sponsee to a meeting I rarely feel the urge to bring anyone to with me, solely to bring these two together, knowing how the rest would play out?

I leave it for you to decide…

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

Welcome to another entry of God’s Mysterious Ways, where I write about things that appear to be more than just coincidences, where God may very well indeed have a hand behind it, which for today is with something that happened more than four years ago now with my home security system.

When I decided to finally move from Boston to Toledo to live with my partner at his home, I opted to upgrade his alarm system, which was rather outdated, mostly for my own peace of mind. On the day the installer came, I was told the system upgrade would probably take a full day to complete. Little did they, nor I, know just how complex the upgrade would be. After a full day of being there and wires exposed everywhere, I was told they would have to return the next day to continue. When the next day arrived though, they came and left in a very short period of time, never to return again, leaving me wondering what the heck was going on. After repeated phone calls to the alarm company, I learned they had abandoned my job for personal reasons, which left me hanging with a system that was no longer operational. It took several weeks and countless hours for the security company to rectify the situation he had left behind. In the end, it took about a month to get my alarm system fully operational, all because of the mess the original technician had left behind. Needless to say, I was quite angry by that point and told the company to never send this installer out to my house ever again. Whenever I had a service call with my alarm over the years that followed, I made sure to ask who the installer was, always ensuring it wasn’t this original technician. Yes, I was harboring a resentment, yet never even saw it that way, and felt my actions were truly justified. In the end, I think God saw it was finally time for me to forgive, because what happened just recently, made sure to cross our paths again.

I had to set up a service call for a minor issue with my alarm system about a week ago now, and as always, I inquired way ahead of time who the installer was. After making sure it wasn’t that original technician, I moved on with my life as always. But, the day before that appointment, I received an odd phone call from them that told me I needed to call their operational team who coordinates the installers schedules. During that phone call, I learned that the window they were supposed to arrive had somehow switched from the time I originally established. Unfortunately, the time they had moved me to no longer worked with my schedule, which led to management having to switch me back to the 8am to 12pm time slot. I never thought to ask after all that, who the installer was going to be, because I had been so caught up with frustration over the time mishap. So, when the service installer showed up at my door the next morning, the first thing he said was, “Do you remember me?” And for the life of me, I didn’t. Yet, when they introduced themselves, I suddenly remembered, and it was then I froze. Part of me felt myself clench in frustration, while another part of me said that maybe it was time to finally let my resentment go.

As this installer stood before me, they apologized and told me that they had been going through a divorce during the week I was being installed and a huge fight had ensued over custody of their kid, which had forced them to take the rest of the week off to handle matters. After hearing that, I had much compassion and knew I needed to forgive, which honestly, I look back and wished I had done so long ago. After shaking hands and saying I forgave them, I could see the tension in their eyes lighten. They told me that every time they had done an install anywhere near my home in all the past years that had passed, they had always wanted to come back here and apologize, but the company had refused to allow them to make any contact with me, all because of the words I had originally expressed in anger.

I must admit I have some sadness that it took well over four years for me to let this go and offer my forgiveness to someone who deserved it long ago. Yet I’m incredibly grateful that the Universe saw fit to bring two people together, one who seriously needed to let a resentment go, and one who humbly sought nothing but forgiveness from them. How they got assigned to my service call in the first place is honestly beyond my understanding, given the red flag that had been placed on my account and given the number of installers the company uses. Yet, that’s precisely the reason why I feel this is just another great example of God’s mysterious ways…

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

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