Category: Grateful Heart Monday

Welcome to another Grateful Heart Monday, where gratitude always remains the focus of my writing, which for today is for a beautiful spiritual message my therapist discovered and then shared with me. After reading it a few times, my own Spirit urged me to share it in one of my articles, which I felt best to be one of my weekly gratitude’s. Here is that message in entirety:

Technical Support: Yes, how can I help you?

Customer: Well, after much consideration, I’ve decided to install Love. Can you guide me through the process?

Tech Support: Yes, I can help you. Are you ready to proceed?

Customer: Well, I’m not very technical, but I think I’m ready. What do I do first?

Tech Support: The first step is to open your Heart. Have you located your Heart?

Customer: Yes, but there are several other programs running now. Is it okay to install Love while they are running?

Tech Support: What programs are running?

Customer: Let’s see. I have Past Hurt, Low Self-Esteem, Grudge, and Resentment running right now.

Tech Support: No problem. Love will gradually erase Past Hurt from your current operating system. It may remain in your permanent memory but will no longer disrupt any other programs. Love will eventually override Low Self-Esteem with a module of its own called High Self-Esteem. However, you have to completely turn off Grudge and Resentment to start that module. Those programs also prevent Love from being properly installed. Can you turn those two off now?

Customer: I don’t know how to turn them off. Can you tell me how?

Tech Support: With pleasure. Go to your start menu and select Forgiveness. Do this as many times as necessary until Grudge and Resentment have been completely erased.

Customer: Okay, done! Love has started installing itself. Oops! I have an error message already. It says, “Error – Program cannot run on external components.” What should I do?

Tech Support: Don’t worry. In nontechnical terms, it simply means you have to Love yourself before you can Love others. Pull down Self-Acceptance, then click on the following: Forgive Self, Realize Your Worth, and Acknowledge Your Limitations.

Customer: Got it. Hey! My Heart seems to be filling up with new files now! Smile is playing on my monitor and Peace and Contentment are copying themselves all over my Heart as we speak.

Tech Support: Well from the sounds of it, you are good to go.

Customer: Yes, thank you and oh, I just want to say that Joy is now running through my Heart as well and everything seems to be running so smoothly!

Tech Support: That’s great to hear. Just remember, if your Heart begins to experience any trouble again, always begin with running Forgiveness ok?

Customer: Sounds great! Thank you and have a great day!

I hope you found connection to this as much as I did. Blessings to you all on this Grateful Heart Monday!

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

Welcome to another Grateful Heart Monday! Today’s gratitude is for the surprisingly good Halloween 2020 I had just over a week ago now.

October 31st always benchmarks the end of the warm season for me. It’s the last night I keep the ornamental ponds open and all the summer decorations and accent lighting out. It also of course is when trick-or-treaters come out, which is something my partner and I have come to enjoy by decorating to get in the spirit of the occasion ourselves. Unfortunately, many of the Halloween’s around here since I moved to Toledo have been exceptionally rainy and cold, thus putting a serious damper on the occasion. Add in this year’s COVID crisis and many parents having previously told me they weren’t allowing their kids to trick-or-treat this year, I had questioned whether to even decorate or not. Thankfully, I did, but even more thankfully, was when the weather did cooperate and allowed for far more kids to enjoy the evening. While last year, we had a tremendous number of treats left over, this year we just about ran out! In addition, we also were able to have a fire in our firepit in the driveway for the trick-or-treating hours, which helped to create a nice festive mood and keep us all warm too!

Beyond the pleasure of seeing the delight of parents and their kids in costumes, like this one homemade full-body dinosaur suit that was pretty darn amazing and another who had created their own wonder woman outfit, I was overly thankful especially for the many compliments I received for my work in the gardens and yard. This year I also lent a hand to helping others have nice yards for Halloween as well by cutting three different neighbor’s grasses earlier in the evening. I was thankful to have had such a burst of energy to do so in light of how my health has felt lately.

And while the day started with a nice breakfast at a local chain restaurant, First Watch, it ended with doing something I normally would have waited until the day after to do, that being the decoration take-down. But, in light of the weather calling for it to be in the 30’s with 40 mph winds the next day, we opted to do the holiday cleanup and the end of the season work once the trick-or-treating hours were over. On some level, it really was a major relief to be able to wake up the next day and not have that looming over me to do.

Oh, and I should also mention that after all was said and done with the cleanup, I honored my inner child and the occasion by eating a bunch of my favorite Halloween candy bars, Mounds and Almond Joy, while watching a scary tv series.

So, with another Halloween come and gone, I just wanted to express a little gratitude in this Grateful Heart Monday entry for this year’s October 31^st having been one that left me with some very favorable memories.

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

Welcome to another Grateful Heart Monday! Today’s piece of gratitude is dedicated to, of all things, a license plate I saw on my way home from a friend’s house just over a week ago now, that I felt was a message from my Higher Power and one I really needed to see.

I know it seems rather strange to think a personalized license plate would bring me gratitude. After all, how many of those plates have I seen that either made no sense or were statements I found no energy connection to. But, in this case, I did find connection to it, although at first, I didn’t even know what it meant. Before I say what it actually said though, let me give you a brief backstory to why its message meant so much to me.

In the past few years, I’ve really felt that God has been on radio silence with me more than not. I feel as if all my prayers I put towards others get answered, yet, when it comes to my own struggles I pray over, especially with my health, I hear nothing but crickets. On more days than not, I’m angry at that and have struggled immensely keeping my faith in Something that has been reminding me a lot of my own mother and father, two people who felt more absent than present from my life, especially when I needed them the most.

That being said, I’ve written many times about how easy it is to have faith in God when everything feels like it’s going our way. Remaining faithful in a Supreme Being when one’s life is filled with abundance and relatively stress-free isn’t hard to do. Try having faith though in a God when life is throwing serious curve balls day in and day out, when it’s filled with one trial after another for long periods of time, where life becomes all about nothing but survival, as then it becomes far more challenging to believe something Greater even exists.

So, as I headed home the other night, I was really feeling that way, truly struggling to keep my faith in God. That’s when I noticed the light suddenly turn red a few hundred feet in front of me. I slowed down and came to a stop behind the only other car on the road around me and checked out its license plate in the process. I always have had the tendency to glance at them whenever I’m on the road, simply out of curiosity where people are from. This one was from Ohio, but it was the seven characters on it that ultimately got my attention. They read, “Jon 20 29” and I immediately wondered if it was a Biblical passage. So, as soon as I got home, I looked it up and this is how it read in the Message (MSG) version of it:

Jesus said, “So, you believe because you’ve seen with your own eyes. Even better blessings are in store for those who believe without seeing.”

After reading that, I actually had to chuckle a little, because all too often I find myself looking for God to talk to me in big ways like that all too familiar story of Moses and the burning bush. Yet, I continue to see that sometimes the Universe has a sense of humor by communicating to us in much more subtle ways such as this.

Regardless, what I took away from all this is that my blind faith is still serving a purpose. While I’m quite sure many others might think otherwise, I’m inclined to believe this truly was a small sign from my Higher Power. Because in the end, it really made me grateful by giving me hope that God sees my blind faith and is letting me know it’s going to lead to much greater blessings in the end, which is why I’m dedicating today’s Grateful Heart Monday to a license plate that simply read, “Jon 20 29”.

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