The Twelfth Step

Have you ever had something happen in your life that you’d consider “the straw that broke the camel’s back”? In other words, having one more negative thing happen to you where you end up throwing your hands in the air in total frustration? Recently, I experienced this with something that really shouldn’t have mattered as much as I allowed it to.

It all began about two months ago when my blog started having some performance issues with how my entries are publicized for the world to see. There are two ways I can do this. One is manually, where essentially I login to my blog and post an entry on the fly. The other is scheduled, where I set a date and time in the future for an entry to be posted that I’ve previously written. For the most part, I’ve done the latter since the beginning, but one day back in September, this feature suddenly stopped working like it should. I discovered this when I didn’t get the daily email confirming that my entry was published. As a side note, I should probably mention that when each of my blog entries are published, three things usually happen. They immediately show up on my site, all of my subscribers get a confirmation email, and each of the social media I utilize receive a small snippet informing those connected to me there of the new entry. Unfortunately, most of this wasn’t working each time I attempted to schedule my blogs.

Initially, I got pretty irritated by this, but given I had a backup option to manually publish them, I quickly got over it. Ever since, I’ve been manually publishing while waiting on the software developers to resolve the problem. But when the manual publish began having performance issues as well just over a week ago, I suddenly became totally unraveled. So unraveled, that I threw a 2-year old type of temper tantrum at my kitchen table the night it started to happen and sadly, my partner had to witness it.

So why did this get to me so much? Well as I said in the beginning of this entry, that old saying of “the straw that broke the camel’s back” was quite fitting because for the past five months, I’ve been so completely overwhelmed by plenty of other issues going on in my life including, but not limited to, my health, my partner, my finances, and a few friends. Thus when this happened, it became one more thing that wasn’t working in my life the way I thought it should be working, which immediately made me angry and even slightly rageful. But when I finally calmed down the next day, I realized it was my ego that’s been the one saying things aren’t happening in my life the way they should be.

So why does God allow us to be challenged like this, by a bunch of unfavorable things happening all at once to us in our lives. Well, what if those events are not as unfavorable as our egos tends to make us always try to believe. What if instead they are only to help us grow our faith, our patience, and our trust that everything will work itself out when it’s meant to? And what if they are simply meant to help us let go of the control we often exude so much of in life? The latter of which I’ve struggled with quite a bit throughout my own. This is why I’m convinced that the only reason why this blog issue became “the straw that broke the camel’s back” is because there are still areas for me to face and let go of that control.

I think the reality and the solution to all this is really just one of acceptance. Acceptance that God’s got my back, even when each of those unfavorable things are happening to me all at once. Acceptance that God is helping me to grow stronger spiritually through them. And acceptance that it will work itself out when it’s meant to, so long as I keep letting go of that control…

Peace, love, light and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Today’s entry is a little strange in that although it’s November 9^th, 2016, the day after the Presidential Election, I actually wrote this on October 30^th. I did this for a specific reason, because at the moment, I have no idea what’s going to happen once we all have figured out who our next President is.

I’ve heard of plenty who say they are going to move to Canada if Clinton wins and I’ve heard the same said for Trump as well. There also has been great talk in the news about potential riots and other civil unrest that may occur based upon the possibility of either candidate winning.

The fact remains that I’ve never been more concerned about any presidential election in my entire life until now. And it seems as if everyone else is on edge too, not just in our country, but in the rest of the world as well.

I used to love living in the United States and was extremely grateful for being born into a family here. The freedoms I have had since that day are ones that many others in this world have never experienced. Yet I’ve silently wondered what the next four years are going to be like seeing that half the country will be against whomever is elected.

I’ve also thought a lot about what’s going to occur if this new president begins to make mistakes that cause major problems for our country. Will the half that didn’t vote for them become angry and resentful at the other half who did? Will there be a lot of “I told you so’s” taking place because of it and in turn, will violence then erupt because of it?

In addition, many have talked about the possibility of our country entering a new war with our next Commander-In-Chief, but has anyone considered the idea that it could be another civil war? The reality is our country is so divided right now and will be even more so with our new president. We haven’t seen the likes of this in well over a century as far as I’m concerned.

That’s why I’m pretty scared right now to be an American citizen. Scared that some of my current rights and freedoms could evaporate over the next four years. Scared that I might see greater bloodshed taking place on our own soil in the coming years. Scared that other countries could take advantage of our present divisions and instability. And scared that our economy could take a serious tank because of it all.

While I have no premonitions of what is going to happen under our new president’s government, I can only pray that God will protect us all no matter what. Yet I agree with what my friend Karen always says to me in that the real work is not done by our President or the government for that matter, it’s done by us.

We are the ones who make the difference. We are the ones who must foster peace and love between each other. But the more we focus on how much we don’t like who was elected, the more we miss that point altogether and the more we will remain divided.

So the best I can say for the day after election is this. Do your best to be kind to each other and to love each other no matter who our new President is. Because in doing so, we’ll all win in the long run. But know this, in doing the opposite, the only thing we’ll be doing is giving power and creation to all those fears we’ve each been harboring throughout this entire presidential election. And I’m sure that’s at least one thing all of us can agree on we don’t want to happen…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson