Category: Words To Live By

With a lot of what is going on in my life lately, anyone spending time around me would probably hear me mention the word God at least several times during any of my conversations. I know at least more than once, I’ve had people tell me in those conversations that they are not religious. What’s funny is that neither am I.

For some reason, the first thought is of religion when one might hear the utterance of the word God. For the longest time, I probably felt the same way. I grew up in a family that attended a United Methodist church on just about every Sunday. My father was a layman there and my mother a bell choir ringer. My parents donated faithfully to the church every Sunday. They volunteered for many of its events. They even did religious weekend retreats and weekly Bible studies. On the outside to everyone else, we seemed like the perfect family. We weren’t though. In fact, we were far from it. Like many might today, my parents often used the Bible as a weapon for their arguments. “That’s not very Christian like” might have been a phrase used during one of them. The way they acted at home was so very different from the way they presented themselves at church and in the public. While we might have been deemed a good Christian family to others that we knew back then, I had secretly vowed to part ways from it all when I left home. Being religious brought up a lot of negative connotations within me because of what I endured growing up. On top of the paradox that my parents lived behind closed doors versus how they lived in public, I also remember many sermons at church that were about how all human beings are sinners and that we are guilty more than not. I remember that to keep a good religious label meant donating more time and money to building a better church. And that’s just with what I remember as a child on what being religious meant. Today, the Bible is being used as a dagger in so many different ways, one of which is affecting me directly. Homosexuality is still deemed one of the ultimate sins by most major religions and I have been rejected from ever being a part of at least five different churches now in my life because of it.

Through my work in the rooms of 12 Step recovery, I have learned that spirituality is quite different from religion. I once heard of a very simple way to understand the difference. Religion was defined as the study of all its laws and principles that came within its own practice. Spirituality was defined as simply applying them in one’s life. My 12 Step work has led me to expand this definition more by realizing that I don’t need to go to church to hear God’s higher calling for me. And I don’t need to attend a weekly service to learn what is in my greatest highest good.

Being spiritual for me instead means serving God in whatever capacity I can every single day. It means starting my day by asking God to guide me in all my thoughts, words, and actions. It means asking God to keep me free from all addictions and obsessions throughout that day. It means keeping myself open to giving and receiving by praying and meditating daily. And it means giving thanks and gratefulness to God when each of my days come to an end. While I do own a Bible, several of them for that matter, I also own many other religious books and texts and none of them are the basis for living my life today. While each of them may lay forth good principles to living a healthier life, being spiritual in my life has led me to taking my instructions on daily living directly from God.

So am I religious because I use the word God often in my life? Absolutely not. I am spiritual because I live by my spirit within and I do my best every day to listen to what my Higher Guidance may be asking me to do. For me, it doesn’t come from a building that has a cross in it. It doesn’t come from a structure with an alter at the front of it’s hall. It doesn’t come from studying books that were written a very long time ago. It doesn’t come from a constant reminder that I was born a sinner and need to repent often. It doesn’t come from learning laws and principles that someone else is preaching to me. Where it does come from though is from my own daily practices which include praying, meditating, and communing with God alone. In those times, I ask how it is that I can live a more peace-filled and loving life here on Earth and then I wait for the answers to come. They always do. And when they do, I apply them to my daily living and in doing so, I continue to maintain a life of living spiritually.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Many years ago, I wrote a column for a local newspaper down in Virginia. The following entry was one of those articles I once submitted for publishing. With some minor updates, I have re-printed it here as I feel it’s message of positivity is relevant given the state of our world right now.

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X-Men: First Class, The Amazing Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, The Wolverine, The Avengers…These are just a few of the many superhero movies that are hitting the theaters in recent years. And that list is only continuing to grow. Each of them have been huge box office successes and generated an enormous amount of revenue from both ticket and DVD sales. So why are superheroes so popular lately? Well I have a theory, one that centers on the child in all of us.

Everyone has their own journey of what it was like to grow up. Throughout my life, I have met many who have endured as difficult of childhoods as I have, if not worse. From being physically beaten, to having suffered from family incest, to receiving mental and emotional abuse by their parents or other family members, to moms and dads that were never around, to never even having a mom or dad to start with and being forced to grow up in foster homes, the list is painfully endless for the stories I’ve heard. The one consistency I have found between all of these people who dealt with harsh childhoods including my own, is that each of us learned to create very early on in life, our own world of fantasies. It was our way of tuning out what our eyes were seeing and what our bodies were experiencing. It was our safe harbor, our escape.

As a child, I secretly fantasized about being a superhero. I wanted to have super strength to defend myself from the bullies who picked on me incessantly. I wanted to have super speed or the ability to fly so that I could get away as quick as possible when my parents were fighting. I even wanted to have the ability to read people’s minds so that I could anticipate what family members were thinking so that I didn’t end up saying something that might set someone off and end in a form of punishment. As I grew older and stronger, in both a physical sense as well as an emotional and mental one, I gained my own independence and found less of a need to continue creating this fantasy world. But the lure of having superpowers has never fully faded.

In recent years, when I find myself fantasizing about having them, sometimes I put a lot of thought together as to why I still think about them so much. While I may not be in a broken home anymore that led me to create these fantasy worlds, I realize I have a greater family, one that consists of billions of brothers and sisters. And one that is just as aching and hurt as my own family was so many years ago. Just look at the state of the world today! It doesn’t take much to realize it is in dire straits. Poverty continues to increase. Sickness continues to spread. There are wars about to break out or already raging in multiple countries. Alcohol and drug addictions continue to increase and are leading to more violence as well as the spread of disease. More and more children are growing up in broken homes. Gangs continue to thrive as disillusioned kids look for social acceptance. Rape. Murder. Terrorism. Anyone can see this horror by simply just glancing at the front page of a paper or tuning into a morning or evening news program. I know there are others out there like me who would just like this madness to go away. We attempt to ignore and tune it all out, but unfortunately we can’t because it’s everywhere. So we continue to hope that the world will produce heroes who will provide a reprieve from the misery that seems to be surrounding every corner of the globe. Unfortunately, the heroes from our childhood fantasies don’t exist yet, at least not in the form that most comic books have portrayed.

So in droves, I, and many others, look for a reprieve from the growing terror and head to the local multiplex to watch the latest superhero flick where a hero risks their life to protect the world from a villain who is causing destruction to people, cities, countries, or even the whole planet. And while we watch these films, we find we are able to suppress for several hours any fears within us over the state of the planet. And when the hero in the movie ends up saving the day, we often leave the theater feeling a little more happy and safe inside. But sadly that bubble usually bursts not too long after when we see the latest news report covering another tragedy. There is hope in all of this though. There is a good side of the coin to look at.

While none of us may be a hero with powers like Superman, all of us do have our own gifts that we were born with and each of these in their own way can be used to create love and peace in this world. Whether you are a writer, a musician, an actor, an artist, a chef, a teacher, a gardener, a seamster, a pottery maker, or whatever your creative outlet is, just place all the love and passion into it you can and know that someone, somewhere, is going to have a positive life changing experience because of it. Think about how the following creative works have spread love to so many people: Harry Potter and Twilight, “Don’t Worry Be Happy” and “We Are The World”, the Mona Lisa and Starry Night. No one truly knows what positive impact their gifts will have at their time of creation.

So I encourage each of you to take a moment today, breathe, and set some time aside to engage in that creative side of yours. Place your heart and soul in your work and trust and believe it will make a difference in someone’s life for the better. While you may not have super abilities like the Avengers, your creative talents are already making you into a superhero. Whatever your gifts are, God has blessed you with them. All you need to know is that they can and will help this world become a happier, more peaceful, and definitely more loving place.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

It’s so easy to point the finger at the ills of society we see everyday. It really is. I did it for most of my life before I became aware of one simple fact, that I was the one that needed to have the finger pointing back at myself. I was the one that needing fixing, not everyone else.

I once thought this to be a trait that alcoholics and addicts only shared. As I’ve delved deeper into my relationship with God, I’ve begun to see that it’s a trait shared amongst much of the world’s population. So why is that? Why is it that people are prone to cite out something negative around them that someone else is doing? The answer is simple. It shifts the focus away from themselves. It prevents people from seeing who they really are. And for most of my adult life, I’ve been this way.

For the longest time, I mostly hung around with people who were living blatantly immoral. I always had at least one active addict friend in my life that I was close to who was regularly lying, cheating, stealing, scamming, or more in their lives. I would tell myself that I wasn’t anything like these people and I’d continue hanging around them because it made me feel more superior. My ego would congratulate itself on a daily basis as it felt I wasn’t doing anything remotely as negative as the people I was spending time with. So when the drama would happen in my life, I would usually transfer the blame and shift the focus onto those people around me that my ego felt superior towards. But what’s ironic in all of that behavior was that while I told myself that my crap didn’t stink, it really did. I just made sure to constantly shift everyone’s including myself’s focus onto those people living so outright lopsided.

Sadly, my life was filled with a lot of its own darkness that was just as immoral as those people I was trying to point my fingers at and fix. I was harboring sex and love addiction issues secretly in my life. I slept with married people. I skipped out on a lot of plans and promises so that I could live in these addictions more. I spent hours on the web at night perusing porn and communicating with people sexually that I never had any intention on being with. And I lied often to cover all of this up. I backstabbed people often by character assassinating them. Gossip was a regular part of my life and so was greed.

For a long time, I didn’t want to take a real long, hard look in the mirror at myself both literally, and figuratively. It was too painful. I didn’t love myself and I knew I was broken. I stayed away from me by trying to point out and fix other people’s toxic lives. I rarely focused on myself and the healing that needed to take place for me to spiritually grow. Instead, I kept these toxic connections to others alive so that I could feel better about my own craziness and have some project outside of myself that I could place my energy in fixing.

Over time I began to notice that no one ever got better. Not the people I pointed the fingers at and tried to fix, and not me. If anything, both grew worse. I became a very negative person. I began looking at all the bad things happening in the world around me and constantly commented on them aloud to anyone that would listen. I yelled at reckless drivers. I talked bad about those in the news who were doing shady behaviors such as politicians, actors and actresses, policemen and policewomen, coaches, teachers, etc. Through all of that negativity, my immorality increased until I was doing just as much of that type of behavior as those I had been pointing the fingers at.

Thankfully, a year ago when the pain in my life was becoming too great to handle, I decided it was time to turn over my entire will to something I knew could show me how to live a much better life than the one I had created. That’s when I turned all of the reigns over to God. It was the best decision I ever made as I realized soon thereafter, that I was the one broken and needed fixing and not everything I had been pointing out.

This makes me think back to a specific moment in my life when I had been trying to live as I am now. I was being interviewed by the local news and asked to comment on whether I thought President Bush was doing a good job or not and if certain problems our society was facing today were worse because of his holding office. I think my answer shocked them. I said that the President was just a figurehead and that the problems could all be fixed when each of us begin to realize the real work is done by healing ourselves first. This is one of the greatest illusions in the world today. Every single problem that all of us see happening now can be changed by changing ourselves, by fixing ourselves, and by taking that finger we point so quickly and turning it back on ourselves.

This is what I am doing today. I am working on fixing me. Little by little, I am repairing more and more of the damage I caused myself throughout the years. As I continue to work on fixing all those parts of me that were broken, I am seeing less of what’s wrong in the world today and more on how I can help God to heal it.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson