Category: Words To Live By

“There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.” (Alan Cohen)

Today’s quote is for a very specific reason. I truly feel I need to take a break from writing in my blog for a few weeks. I had always planned on doing that in February when I usually go on my annual vacation, but in all honesty, I really think I need one much sooner. So given the upcoming Christmas and New Year’s holidays and given that I do have a close friend coming in to visit for almost a week, I decided that maybe the next few weeks would be a great time for me to take a small rest from writing.

So often I’ve not done that for myself and instead pushed myself to the limits of one extreme versus the other. Sadly, the only thing that’s ever done is drive me into shut down mode or something even worse, such as an addiction that just numbs me. I definitely don’t want to get to either of those places, which is why I feel it’s so important to balance my work and my rest.

I also feel it’s very important that I let you know how much I appreciate each of you who continue to read my words and get something out of them for your own spiritual journeys in life. I’m truly blessed by that and on some level, it helps to keep me going day in and day with all of what I’ve been dealing with in life.

With that being said, I want to wish each and every one of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And in the meantime, I hope each of you will enjoy the “Thought For The Day” entries I place in here until I return with a new article for January 1^st.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

I truly believe that finding Christ’s love within ourselves can heal just about anything. I say this because for almost two years there stood a huge wall between myself and some of my partner’s family. But in recent months, since reconfirming my life with Christ, I have to say that my relationship with them has totally changed for the better.

It honestly seems so frivolous now what initially caused me to erect that huge wall that kept my partner and I from spending time with these family members for so long. And while that incident doesn’t really need to be brought up again, the truth is that since reconfirming my life with Christ, I’ve begun to see everything so differently, especially with what happened back then. This is precisely why I felt my heart move to personally got together with them in recent weeks and make my amends. This is why I’m writing this because since doing so, I have felt Christ’s love pour forth from within me and ease all that tension I had felt with them.

Now my partner and I find ourselves enjoying time with them again. We spent a few hours on Thanksgiving catching up and have had fun on a game night as well. It’s almost as if that entire gap of two years that passed by with relatively little communication between us and them has been totally erased. I’m definitely grateful for this and know the sole reason this has been made possible is the only thing that changed within me these last few months of my life. And that’s the absolute fact that I asked Christ to come back into my life and my heart.

I’m now seeing this same love pass on to other areas of my life lately and am watching the walls I’ve had with others melt away as well. In fact, I find myself not wanting to have any walls remain erected within me anymore because truthfully they just keep me separated from God.

So I just wanted to pass this little bit of cheer along to anyone who may end up reading this, especially during this holiday season. Because I’m thoroughly convinced now that as long as we tap into the love of Christ, that any wall we’ve ever erected between us and another can be removed.

And while I’m sure that my words today may come off as a little too religious for some, this was not my intention at all. It’s just my hope that one day all of us may tap into the love of something greater than ourselves and start removing all of those walls we still have within us. For me that something greater than myself has been Christ as of late, and as we approach Christmas Day, I must say I’m very thankful for knowing my partner and I will be spending some of it with his family this year rather than apart…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Have you ever had to call a company’s technical support hotline for something that wasn’t working quite right and spent countless hours trying to resolve it with them? If so, did anything good ever come out of it? More than not, I usually dread calling any technical support hotline because all too often I find myself spending an incredible amount of time trying to fix it with them and frequently it never gets resolved. But ironically, I felt it was important to share some thankfulness about one of these experiences I had recently that surprisingly ended differently, one that was with me receiving a gift.

The experience I’m speaking of is with Hewlett Packard (HP). Back towards the end of October I purchased a new laser printer from them, which in all circumstances worked like a charm for all my needs, all except for one thing that is. It dealt with an option that was on the printer itself. Every laser printer these days usually has an operating system that keeps it running, kind of similar to how Windows runs a PC or Mac OS runs an Apple machine. For a laser printer, that operating system is known as firmware and occasionally has to be updated just like it does on a computer. Unfortunately, the option on my new printer to check for the firmware update kept giving me an error message every time I selected it, indicating that either I wasn’t connected to the internet or the service wasn’t available. This is what precipitated my initial call to HP technical support.

For the next month and a half after that first call, I would spend an incredible amount of time talking with HP’s level one support, level two support, and then an even higher level of support that I can’t quite remember what they were referred to as. In each case, countless hours were logged with a number of their employees diagnosing my entire setup at home, time and time and time again, each of them arriving at the same conclusion, that the problem wasn’t on my end, it was on theirs. Yet none of them were able to fix the problem either. Eventually, I grew so frustrated with their help that I placed an explanation of the issue on the HP support boards. It was then I began to see that many others out there were facing the same problem as I.

At some point I came to acceptance that the issue might never get resolved, but thankfully I did find a workaround. My life then moved on and I didn’t think much about it until one day just over a week ago, I received a call from an HP employee who was part of that high level of support I can’t remember what they were referred to as. He agreed that my technical issue may not be fixed any time soon or never at all, yet he did want to offer me something for all the trouble I went through. What was it? Replacement toner cartridges for each of the colors of my printer, which were black, cyan, magenta, and yellow, total value being over $250! I was shocked because I’ve never had any of my technical support issues end in something like this.

So in the end, I decided I needed to reevaluate the feelings I normally have had when I think about a technical support hotline. I guess good things really do come for those who wait patiently, especially when it comes to technical support from a company. Thus I must say I’m grateful to two HP’s right now in life. One being Hewlett Packard for the nice gift they gave me, and two for my Higher Power, who truly has been the one to foster my growing level of patience in life…

Peace, love, light and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson