Category: Words To Live By

If you’ve read yesterday’s posting in my blog already, then you’ll know by now that I spent some time in it discussing a big part of my life where I blamed God and questioned why bad things had to happen to us. I realized though after completing that entry that I failed to mention something extremely important within it. And it comes down to this…Maybe God does prevent many bad things from happening, except we never even know about them because they never actually happen?

I know that’s a mouthful to take in, so let me put this into a very simple example for you. It’s a work day for a person and they awake in the morning only to notice their alarm clock never went off. They glance at the time and realize they’re going to be late for work no matter how fast they move. As they get ready as quick as possible, they start thinking how their day is already starting off on the wrong foot. They might even be doing what I might have been doing all those years ago when I would be blaming God for that alarm clock not going off. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, a major accident has occurred on the exact route at the precise time and location that person would normally be at while heading to work. So while they might be feeling that God was letting something bad happen to them with that alarm clock not going off, maybe God made that happen just to avoid having them be in that major accident.

While I know that story is purely hypothetical, I’d like now to personally share with you one from my own life. It’s one where I believe God was working in my life, even when I had believed that God had let something really bad happen to me. And while you may find the story I’m about to tell you hard to believe, I can promise you that every word of it is completely true.

At the end of August, 1991, I was only two weeks away from heading back to college for my sophomore year. I had spent the summer hanging around the inner-city of my hometown with a number of active drug dealers who I called my closest friends. On one particular evening, my phone rang and one of them was calling me to hang out for the evening. After much convincing I started to get dressed and saw all my gold rings (eight of them to be exact) sitting on my dresser. I kept feeling this serious urge that I needed to put them on for the night, even though I didn’t like wearing a lot of expensive jewelry when I went downtown. I gave into that urge and headed out sporting all those rings on my fingers anyway.

When I arrived downtown at the address my friend was supposed to meet me at, I was alone so I leaned on a railing outside a random apartment and waited for him. I opened a bottle of malt liquor I had, lit up a cigarette, and listened to some hip hop on my walkman. Shortly thereafter, a black BMW, with windows I couldn’t see in, pulled up on the street in front of me and several men hopped out of it. One of them approached me and asked if I knew a guy named “Tone”. I responded that I did but that I hadn’t seen him around in a while. The man turned around, walked back to his BMW, and started looking in its trunk. A few minutes later, I felt myself being lifted up over that railing I had been leaning on and the next thing I knew I was in the backseat of my car with my friend driving me to the hospital. There was blood all over me, I couldn’t see out of one of my eyes and barely out of the other. My walkman was gone and so were all those gold rings I had been wearing. I can still remember being in shock and when my head finally cleared in a hospital bed a little while later, the anger seethed forth from within me towards God for letting that terrible incident happen to me.

About a week later, I had recovered enough to head to another friend’s house who always knew about everything that ever went on in the city, as I wanted to know why I had been jumped. When he saw me, he shook his head, smiled, and said I was damn lucky. I scoffed at his comment and asked how it was lucky that I got seriously beat up and had thousands of dollars in gold rings stolen from me. He responded by asking why I ever admitted to knowing another drug dealer. Rule number one he said, is to never admit knowing anyone or anything when you hang out in the inner-city. He then asked if I remembered the guy looking in his trunk and when I said yes, the next words to come out of his mouth is how I know that God does prevent some really bad things from happening.

He told me that they had a sawed off shotgun in their trunk and were going to kill me because the guy I admitted knowing was a major rival drug dealer who had blown up their BMW in the previous week. But they didn’t do that for only one reason…because I was wearing all those gold rings worth so many thousands of dollars. And that they had decided beating the crap out of me and taking all of them was enough retribution. His final words to me that day sometimes still haunt me as he told me that I really should be dead.  I know today that it was God and not luck that saved me from that tragic event. I shudder at times when I think about that urge I felt to wear my rings and what would have happened if I hadn’t worn them that night.

I thank God today for being alive and able to tell this story because it has one very important message for the world to know. While we may think that God keeps letting bad things happen, I am convinced that God is actually constantly behind the scenes preventing the really bad things from happening, like the ones we wouldn’t ever be able to come back from. I’m alive today because of a forceful urge to wear some gold rings, and while you may say that it was all luck and chance, you might feel differently if you had walked in my shoes back then.

So the next time you are blaming God for something bad that’s happening in your life, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and realize that maybe the bad thing that’s happening, really isn’t so bad. And maybe, just maybe, that bad thing is really a good thing, because what you’ll not realizing is how God is actually shifting the course of events to prevent something truly bad from happening to you…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Bad things happen all the time in this world. You can see it quite easily by just looking at the news headlines on any given day. Wars, famine, poverty, killing sprees, weather catastrophes, diseases, and more, I could keep going on with the amount of darkness that is pervading this world lately. This has often led many people, both those who have faith in something greater than themselves and those that don’t, to ask the age old question, “If there is a God, why would he (or she) let all these bad things happen?” And I was once one of them.

As much as I don’t like admitting it to myself or anyone else, I used to hold a lot of hatred towards God and blamed God for just about everything bad that happened in my life. As a kid I was mentally and emotionally abused by my family, I grew up with alcoholic parents, I was bullied constantly at school, and I was sexually molested by the age of 12. During my young adult years, I grew addicted to alcohol and drugs, my father left my mother and abandoned the family for awhile, I got jumped by gang members which landed me in the hospital, I was arrested for stealing, and I lost a best friend when I came out to him. By the time I became an adult, my father committed suicide, one of my closest friends died from AIDS related complications, my mother fell down the stairs drunk and died instantly when she broke her neck, and soon after that, I began to lose track of the amount of bad things that kept happening in my life. The common thing uniting all of them was my contempt for God. I, like many other people couldn’t understand why God allowed these bad things to happen and in my mind God became the cause for all of them.

This only led me to become filled with more darkness in life because the more I remained angry and blamed God for everything, the more I acted out in toxic behaviors. And the more I acted out in toxic behaviors, the more I blamed God for the bad things that kept happening while I acted out toxically. It became a vicious cycle that didn’t take me anywhere except into the depths of despair. For almost three decades I lived this way until I realized God wasn’t the cause for any of these things, either my spiritual sickness was, or someone else’s was.

For example, my father committed suicide because he was mentally sick and it was his own decision to check out of life early before he was truly meant to go. It wasn’t God who told him to kill himself. Or take my mother’s tragic fall down the stairs where she died instantly from a broken neck. God didn’t make that happen either, it was my mother’s evening binges of alcohol that did. Even using the example of that molester who took sexual advantage of me at the age of 12, God didn’t tell that man to do this, that man’s sickness led him to do it. And as for my own addiction prone life, God didn’t lead me into any of them, my desire to remain numb from all the pain in my life did.

I know many people might still say to all of this, “So what? God still could have prevented them from ever happening!” And yes, you’re right, God could have. But ask yourself the following questions on how life would look like, if God prevented everything bad from ever happening for the rest of our lives…

1. Would we ever seek God or anything greater than ourselves?

2. Would we ever grow stronger and learn any life lessons?

3. Would we ever have a desire to become more spiritual?

There’s many other questions I’ve asked myself on what could have happened if God prevented all these bad things from ever happening in my life. But the truth is that all of those bad things in my life helped me to grow with more love and light each time they occurred. I am who I am today because of them and I like who I am today. If God had prevented all of those things from happening, I might still be that same selfish and self-centered person who thought the world revolved around himself. And I didn’t like myself at all when I was that person. Maybe that’s why I hated God so much and blamed God for everything bad that happened in my life. As when I didn’t like myself, it was much easier to put the blame on God, or anyone else for that matter, then look at my own unspiritual behaviors or do what I could to heal from the results of other people’s unspiritual behaviors.

But to answer that age old question of why God let’s bad things happen. Maybe it’s really as simple as God sees how each of them will eventually shape every one of us into a person filled with a much greater capacity for love and light. I’m not God so I really don’t know the precise truth to this question. What I do know is that I am glad all those bad things happened to me throughout my life. They’ve led me to finding a much deeper and more loving connection to God and myself. They led me to living a more selfless based life where I am loving everyone more equally. And they’ve led me to writing day after day about each of them in here. Maybe now in knowing all this, you can see at least one reason why God might led bad things happen…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

One of my personal goals is to write an article in this blog each and every day. When I began doing this about nine months ago, it was due to a homework assignment that was given to me by both a therapist and a spiritual teacher to journal my daily life experiences. I was less than thrilled with the idea because I’ve never been the kind of guy who enjoys doing the “Dear Diary” type of thing. But one of them suggested I try blogging online instead and I agreed to try that. What I didn’t and couldn’t know was how God was going to use my writings as a vessel to help others.

Every day when I log in here to do my writing, there is a counter that tells me how many people checked out my blog during the previous 24 hours. At first, I found this to be a serious distraction because the number in that counter was often in the single digits prompting my ego to tell me that no one would ever read my blog. But my spiritual teacher kept reminding me that I wasn’t doing this for everyone else, I was doing it to heal myself. You see, I gave up on writing several years ago when I became too active in addictive behaviors which caused my inner light to grow quite dark. Prior to that, I had been a monthly columnist for a local paper in Virginia, had experienced success in being published in a few others magazines and newspapers, and even written the first book in a series planned for kids to young adults. So as I began to write in here, it really was about healing myself. And somewhere along the line, that started happening.

I can’t honestly say how all of this has worked. But the fact is, it has. With me just sitting here at my computer every single day and writing something about my life in a positive way, it has led me to healing so much of myself. And just when I start to think I’m running out of things to say, another idea comes to me. I give all that credit to God because it wasn’t too long ago, that I thought I had nothing left to offer this world, where God found another way to use me.

Many people often give up when they feel their they have nothing left to offer this world and that their life has become purposeless. Some will fall into addictions because of this and others will even end up taking their own lives. I was one of those people who came very close to ending my own life when I thought my existence had become pointless. I don’t think I can say that anymore. More and more people seem to be finding my blog every day and some are even sharing now how much my words are helping them. I’ve always believed that I came into this life to help uplift and inspire others but somewhere along the lines I got lost and off track from doing that. For years and years, I chased after the quick highs I could get in life through people, places, and things and instead, I went in the exact opposite direction of the one I believe I was meant to go in. Thankfully, I don’t feel that way anymore and somehow, my writing has been a big contributing factor to that.

It’s become a way of life for me now to spend time each day writing and I will admit it’s frustrating at times. The reason why journalling and writing in general can be beneficial for a person is that it forces them to see their life in front of them. Often, we as human beings will go on doing things day after day and become oblivious to the fact we’re even doing them. By writing down those day to day things, it forces our brains to see exactly how we’re living our lives. With my blog, I am taking all my day to day experiences, including my pains, irritations, and things that overwhelm me, and find the words to express about them. Once I find those words, I start writing them down in here and turn them around by looking at where I have either grown in life or could still grow. And through all of it, God has been leading more and more people to find and read my blog. In fact, it was just a few days ago where I noticed that 24 hour blog traffic counter was in the 800’s.

All of this goes to show that none of us ever know how God is going to use us. I don’t believe that anyone is this world has a purposeless life, and if any of you are feeling that way, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and take a deeper look at how your living your life. It was my own chasing after worldly things that led me to feeling this way but when I finally let all of them go and asked God for help, I was led to doing something that gave me a purpose. You have a purpose, trust me, you really do. Don’t give up, don’t despair, and know you’ll find it, as all it may take is some online journalling.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson