Category: Words To Live By

Don’t you just hate it when you are driving along a road and are talking on your cell phone when suddenly your connection gets distorted and full of static? Even worse, doesn’t it just stink when the call just outright drops? In both cases, the culprit is usually that the person has driven into an area where there isn’t a cellular tower nearby to keep the clarity or the call active.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the symbolism of this to my relationship with God. I fully believe that I was born directly under God’s cellular tower where I had a completely full signal and was carrying on clear communication with God. But as I grew older, and began to use my free will, my decisions drove me farther and farther away from that tower. So for each time I got drunk, or high, or promiscuous, or treated people poorly, it was almost as if I was traveling towards some part of the world which couldn’t be reached by God’s cellular tower. The more I did any of my selfish things in life, the more bars I lost, which did nothing more than add distortion to my conversation with God. Eventually, after doing enough selfish things for way too long, I completely lost my signal and all those bars, and my conversation with God dropped completely. It was then that I landed in the mental hospital where I found myself in total disbelief and wondering how I got there.

The funny thing about cell phones is that no matter whether the model is very old or relatively new, their ability to get a strong signal with those towers is very dependent on maintaining the current software updates within each of them. The same holds true for me. My software is programmed into my mind, body, and soul and the more I work on making them healthier , the better my connection is to God’s cellular tower. The less that I’ve worked on any of them, the more I’ve seen my conversations with God get garbled and come close to dropping altogether.

Another important thing to understand is that cell phone towers don’t reach every single inch of the globe. There are some areas which are considered dead zones and I’ve driven into many of them. I think God’s cellular tower is no different. There are some places that people can go where it becomes very hard for God to reach us. And I’ve been taking many actions now to get out of those dead zones and back into the areas where I have a much better reception with God.

There are many competing cellular companies who say they have the best signal and the most coverage. But that coverage is always dependent on maintaining those software updates and being in close proximity to their towers. For me, God is the largest cellular carrier who has one very strong tower for each of us to communicate with. I failed for many years to keep updating my software to connect with it and I often traveled into those areas where I couldn’t maintain a signal to it. Today I am making every effort to stay on top of those updates and am doing everything I can now to return to being directly below that tower. It’s there where I know my conversation with God will be the most clear, even more so than that pin drop you might hear over on the Sprint network.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

If you knew that you had one day left to live in life, how would you spend it?

Have you ever pondered this question? I know I have. Life is already too short, but I’ve tried to imagine if I suddenly knew I only had 24 hours left to live, how would I use the precious moments that remained?

There are infiniteness answers to this question and for each individual that may be posed it, they would vary. Some might party like it’s 1999 as Prince once said. Others might cry profusely and spend their last moments being depressed and alone. Then there’s those who might spend a ton of money and buy lavish things or travel to an exotic locale. There’s also those who might call all their close friends and family and tell them how much their loved. And of course there may even be some who might seek forgiveness from all all those they had hurt throughout their lives, before it becomes too late. Those are just some of all the possible paths that people might follow in their final moments alive on Earth.

While I’m not sure I know what I’d exactly do in my last hours of life if I knew I was in them, I can say for sure I know what I wouldn’t do. I’ve had many people ask me if I would ever consider breaking my sobriety if I knew I was going to die imminently. My answer to them then and now is still the same; no. Why would I want to spend my final remaining moments being numb when I’ve worked so hard in my life to go in the exact opposite direction. I can also say that I probably wouldn’t go spend a ton of money either because that never brought me much happiness in any point of my life. But if I really was to make a serious gander at what I would want to do in the final day of my life, I have a pretty good idea of what it could be only because I believe I’m already doing it.

Today, I try to look at every day, ever hour, every minute, and every second, as if it were my final moments to live. Because of that, I tell those I care about, that I love them every single time I part company or hang up the phone at the end of a conversation with them. I do my best to be selfless and giving, and also kind and considerate to any person I come across. I really work hard to remain free of judgment of things I see around me that my ego doesn’t like. I ask for forgiveness when I make mistakes because I still do make them at times. And I strive to free myself of all anger and resentments towards everyone and everything because both are poison to my soul. All of this is different from how I used to be as for the longest time in my life, I was extremely selfish and self-centered. I hurt people because I was hurt. I sought after misery and created even more of it, in and around me. So when I lost people, like my parents, to sudden deaths and was left to ponder my final moments with them, the memories that I was left with were usually of me fighting or arguing with them or being completely caught up in my selfishness. I lived with much regret for the longest of time over this until I finally made a promise to myself that I was going to do everything I could to becoming healthier, more loving, and totally devoted to God.

Through all that hard work, I really do take each day now as if it could be the last for either myself or anyone else that I may come across. If it really was going to be mine or someone else’s final day, the last thing I would want to do is fill it with anything else but light and love. So the next time you might find yourself in an argument with someone, ask yourself what if this was your’s or their’s last day alive? Would that fight you’re having be worth it then? I know what my answer would be.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

For most of my life, friendships were hard to come by. Either I never fit the image of what was cool, or if I did, I was far too selfish and self-centered for anyone to want to remain within it. But one of those friendships denied all those odds and withstood the many tests I put it through over the sixteen years since it began. And this past weekend I got to spend quality time with this friend while I helped him celebrate his 50th birthday in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

It’s pretty amazing to see how far this friendship has come ever since the first day we met. That was on a Monday evening back in 1997 in Brockton, MA during a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. For whatever reasons, we hit it off immediately and were soon inseparable friends. There was a major difference between us though back then. He was very immeshed in his recovery from his addictions, whereas I was very immersed into finding more of them to live in. Within six months from that time, I chose to move back to Virginia after having lived in Massachusetts for less than a year, solely for the purpose of finding another geographical cure for my misery in life. Many miles and a bunch of states then began to separate our friendship, but something deeper kept it alive, which today I can only say must have been God.

Over the next decade though the distance between us grew as my path of self destruction got worse, while his path of freedom from addictions grew even stronger. I would occasionally visit him on trips I took back to Massachusetts to see my sister who still resided there. As hard as it is to say this, it was always about me when I was in town visiting. I never wanted to go to those AA meetings with him when he asked. More often than not, I guilted him into not going to them and instead would convince him to do something completely different. So what we did, where we went, and any itinerary that was established always came back to my own doings and control. Essentially the friendship was running on a lot of my own self will and was weakening day in and day out without me really even knowing.

Eventually my life fell apart in Virginia, when I had lost my business and a long term relationship. I felt I had nowhere else to go except back to Massachusetts since the only two remaining people left in my life who seemed to give a crap about me were my sister and this friend. In a total act of desperation, I chose to go to his AA home-group on a Friday night when he asked me to tag along. For years I had only gone to an AA meeting for either the sole purpose of looking for a sexual hook-up or for those times when I was having a down day and just wanted to dump my mess on someone else. Having so much pain and anguish within me, and seeing how happy this friend always was, a part of me felt that maybe the path he took all those years ago when we had first met, was the choice I should have taken too. That night, I began my recovery after many years of being a dry drunk, but I also started something else as well. I starting trying to work on a much closer friendship with this friend seeing that it was beginning to run out of steam due to my actions.

Unfortunately, over the next five years, I tried to juggle my recovery alongside my addictive behaviors while trying to maintain that friendship. I continued to perpetuate those seriously unhealthy and toxic based relationships and became so codependent on most of them, that I often sacrificed the time I could have been spending with this long standing friend re-developing a closer bond. For someone that had stuck by my side through thick and thin, I didn’t show much of the same dedication back towards him. After enough times of me choosing to stay more devoted to those toxic friendships than to working on mine and his, he began pulling back a little at a time until so much distance was between us that it was as if I was living again in another part of the country. It’s ironic that just about a year ago, that distance had grown so great that I thought this friendship was truly over. The damage I had done to it from all those years of acting out in various addictions had made it seem totally beyond repair. But one thing HAD started to change last year that gave this friendship a glimmer of hope. ME.

It was around that same time that I had finally begun removing all those toxic people out of my life who I had kept around for way too long. Layers and layers of baggage were lifted off of me and my life from that action alone. Then I started working on turning my life COMPLETELY over to the care of God every single day. Not partially and not by a certain percentage like I had always done in prior years, but fully, I made the decision to have God take over the reigns of my life. Through this, my friend became willing to sit down with me to see if God wanted us to salvage what was left from our once very strong connection. When that day arrived and we met, it had been over two months with almost no communication between us. I had already come to the acceptance that if God wanted the friendship to still be there, it would be. And if not, I would move on.

Three hours later, my friend and I embraced after having made very deep amends to each other for the parts that we both contributed to, in the distance that had grown between us. We made a promise to set time aside each week to hang out from that point forward, and to talk in the days that came in between those times. And through our own relationships with God and the strength that continues to build in each of them, we have kept those promises now for close to a year.

I can safely say that today, as this Provincetown trip comes to a close, my friendship with this person is now stronger than it ever has been in any of our previous sixteen years together. The laughter, the tears, the embraces, and the warmth within it, are beyond any of the friendships I have ever had in this life with anyone else. For that I must give all the credit to God who was able to guide me out of that darkness back into the light, and also saw fit to breath life into something that I thought my destructive ways had moved beyond resuscitation.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson