Category: Words To Live By

I’ve often wanted to go out into the world and randomly do a survey of 100 people where I ask each to describe God using different adjectives. That’s only because I feel it would be interesting to see just how different everyone views God.

Throughout my life, the adjectives that I would have used have changed over time. There were moments I despised even the concept of God because I blamed everything bad that happened in my life on God. So any adjectives I might have used during those times probably would have sounded very negative. I’ve also experienced times where I was having a very deep connection to God through long sessions of meditation and prayer. During those periods of my life, the words would have changed to ones of great praise. Lately, with all the work I’ve done in recovery through the 12 Steps, I’ve come to realize that God really can be summed up with just one word, “Love”.

I’m convinced all of us were brought here to love each other unconditionally and in doing so, we would draw closer back to God. Unfortunately, much of the opposite occurs daily on this planet and instead people are experiencing things such as guilt, shame, doubt, fear, remorse, anger, rage, and greed to name a bunch. One of the things that I have struggled with in many organized religions and people who are part of them is that much of the feelings I get from their energy are often those opposites of “love”. I’ve been around many of those people and they have quite often attempted to make me feel guilty or ashamed of who I am. They have tried to create doubt and fear within me as well. And I don’t believe that is God at all.

I don’t think that God guilts or shames people into doing anything. People do that to each other. I also don’t believe that God has a desire to make people doubt or be in fear. I’m inclined today to think we do that to each other as well. Regardless, people often judge each other and do the exact opposite of love when they fear what someone else is doing, especially when it’s unlike what they believe or feel or are accustomed to in their own lives. Churches for example often only use certain texts as their means of preaching and there is no room for any other teachings or lessons outside of it. Thus when someone is doing something different than what’s in those texts, the judgements begin and people move away from unconditional love.

While I can’t speak on God’s behalf, I do believe that God would be in agreement that we should all be focusing solely on loving each other more on this planet and nothing else. So that is the only adjective that I am sticking with today for my description of God. But if I was to expand beyond that word, the only ones I would ever use would be those that come out of acts of love such as kindness, generosity, and selflessness. As for any other words that aren’t synonymous with “love” today, I would tell everyone that they just aren’t God.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Being a jovial person who talks with great conviction can seem pretty convincing to bystanders that they have it all together and that their life is pretty good. It can often lead those bystanders to even want what those people have. Unfortunately, all of that can also be an illusion and that was a hard lesson I had to learn when I began to follow those types of people in my life and place them up on pedestals.

Placing a person up on a pedestal essentially means that one is going to be looking at a person at a loftier level then themselves. That’s a dangerous place to be especially when those people don’t have it all together even though they may be leading everyone to believe they do. In the AA world, I’ve done this a few times when I saw people who spoke with fire and were able to move a whole room of listeners. When I followed some of those people more closely, thinking I wanted what those people had, the illusion that they had it so great in life, often unravelled the closer I got to them. Some were adulterers while others had road rage and major anger issues. There were those who gossiped, judged, and backstabbed at the drop of a dime. Quite a few spent their evenings looking at porn. A large number had massive financial debt issues. And many had just substituted their alcohol and drug addictions with other ones such as caffeine, cigarettes, gambling, or sex. Yet all of them always appeared as happy go lucky people at the meetings and were able to speak with such moving testimony. And this would result in many deluded listeners asking for those people’s phone numbers. The sad part about this is that I was once guilty of this.

God gave me in this lifetime a pretty good ability to speak and write eloquently. Smiling and making other people laugh with my own antics are also two assets I was given. And for years I was able to convince many that my life was the one they should want and all too often I was placed up on a pedestal where the legs should have been kicked out from under me. While I may have appeared like my life was grand, what most never saw was the massive addiction based life I was still living. People were oblivious to the fact that I was sleeping around with newcomers and those still addicted to alcohol or drugs. They didn’t know that I spent hours on the Internet living out my sex and love addiction. They didn’t see how I was often rude and mean to those who were trying to love and care about me. Essentially I created an illusion that people saw what I wanted them to see. Living this way and having people place me up on pedestals only led me down darker paths in life. And for those who I was placing on pedestals, many have since relapsed. Thankfully my pain got great enough before I did too. It was my pain that led me to the decision to turn my entire will over to God to remove all the toxic elements out of my life. This has led me to being a much healthier person inside and out. While in the past, my ego liked people putting me on pedestal, I don’t want that anymore because it just separates me more from God. And while I may still be a good writer and speaker, my thanks for those gifts only goes to God now for the words that come out of me. I’m not a toxic person anymore nor am I telling the world that my life is one that everyone should want. I’ve found over the years that most people who do that are usually pretty messed up like I was.

I still hear great speakers all the time both in meetings and in life in general but I’m not following them anymore or saying I want what they have. I’m not placing them up on pedestals or trying to be like them. The only thing I really am trying to follow now is God and the more I live on that path, the more I’m finding that everything is coming together all on its own.

While some people have begun to approach me lately and indicate they want what it is they feel I have, I am only redirecting them to what I really believe they are seeking, which is a deeper relationship with God. I truly believe that for anyone we see on any given day who is smiling, happy, loving, caring, and kind, that the only reason we may want to be like them is because those are the traits within God. So it really is not any of those people that we should be wanting to be like, following, or placing up on some pedestal now is it?

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Since I was a kid, I never really quite fit in. Back then I wanted to be cool but just didn’t fit the bill of what others labeled as that. For years I sat alone in crowded cafeterias getting picked on. That was until I became a chameleon.

Chameleons are a type of lizard that can change their colors to blend in with their habit around them. It’s usually done as a way of protecting themselves from predators. I have often identified with this type of creature because of how I learned to change my own colors to hide from the predators I’ve endured throughout my life. In my grammar school years, those predators were the bullies that picked on me day in and day out. In college, they were some of my fraternity brothers who liked to make jokes on my behalf. And as an adult, it was most of the people I got into relationships with. In all of those periods of my life, I found ways to adapt who I was, what I believed in, what I looked like, how I talked, and more, just to fit in so I wouldn’t be preyed upon by any of those predators. But all for what price? I lost sight of myself and who I really was inside.

Changing my colors to avoid all those predators throughout my life included doing many things that I look back on today with shock that I even allowed myself to go there. While it started simply with me changing my clothing styles and hairdo back in my teenage years, it progressed to heavily drinking and sampling various illegal drugs, and then later it involved giving myself away sexually to people I really didn’t want to be with. I even went so far as to deny God was ever going to help me heal at one point in the chameleon phases of my life.

Being this chameleon may have helped me to avoid many confrontations from those predators in life but it also led me to not liking myself very much. With God’s help today, I am trying to not change my colors anymore to fit in with those around me. Unfortunately, that’s led me right back to how it was when I was that young kid sitting alone in that cafeteria getting picked on.

I don’t know why I’ve always been such an easy target for other’s people jokes but the one thing I can say is that at least I’m not being a chameleon anymore to avoid them. It has allowed me to truly learn to like myself a lot more. Even better, the few friends in my life today embrace me for me and appreciate my individuality without having to pick on me. I think that’s a whole lot better than having crowds of people around me who like me because I’m fitting what their image of cool is.

I encourage everyone to stay away from living in The Chameleon Effect. It will only lead you away from being the special and unique person that God brought you here to be. In the long run, while you may not have as many friends, you will definitely like yourself a whole lot more and so will the few people that remain by your side.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson