The Twelfth Step

Is your Higher Power a punishing one? This is something I wrestled with for a very long time, especially given the fact that I grew up going to a church and within a family where God was presented exactly as that. And it’s without a doubt the number one reason why I ran away from God for so many years. Thankfully when I came into the rooms of recovery from addiction, I quickly learned through my work there that I could create a God of my own understanding.

Doing so has definitely helped, as the concept I had of God prior to this was always one where if I did something deemed “bad” or “unhealthy” or a “sin” by myself or anyone else, I constantly assumed I was just going to be punished somehow for it by God. That’s precisely why I ran from God and anything spiritual for that matter, for so long. I mean who would want to serve a God that acted like this anyway?

I think that’s why so many people have such a negative view of God, because too many churches still preach this type of message. That’s why I’m pretty grateful I don’t see God in this light anymore.

This idea of punishment reminds me far too much of my parents who grounded me a lot for even the slightest of things during much of my younger years. But the image I have of God nowadays is one that is far more unconditionally loving. One where I think of God as being sad or crying when I make a poor decision. Ironically, that’s in stark contrast to how I used to see things. As before, I would visualize God reacting to my poor decision in anger, fuming, finger pointing or arms crossed, and then subsequently dishing out some type of punishment in my life that always involved great pain.

While I don’t feel God acts like this with me anymore, I must clarify that I still do believe that God does allow me to go through times of hardship to help mold me into a far better version of myself. Call that discipline, or whatever you want, it doesn’t matter. I think what matters is that the difficult times we each face in life are necessary for us to become spiritually healthier.

I’m going through one of those times in my life right now in fact, that in the past I would have looked at it as a punishment, one that came due to all my former addiction-laden behaviors and the people I hurt from doing them. Yet now, I see it as something that was necessary to shape me into a much more unconditionally loving individual, one who has a lot more compassion, one who’s ego is no longer constantly in charge, and one who is willing to follow God’s will way more than his own.

So do I think God punishes us when we fall short of living to our highest potential? Not at all and I am inclined to believe that was only ever my ego that made me believe God was like this. But thankfully I hold onto a belief today that God allows me to be disciplined for one reason and one reason only. To re-align me to why I came here in the first place, which is to become a spiritual being of unconditional love and light.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Have you ever wondered who disappeared from your Facebook friends list when your total number of friends suddenly decreases one day to the next? I’m sure there are some out there who would say they have never paid attention to such a thing. But I’m just as sure there are others out there like me who probably have. Regardless, it’s something that I occasionally think about when it does happen like it did recently when the number of friends I was connected to decreased by four in a 24-hour period.

Oddly enough, during that same 24-hour period, I had only posted two things on my Facebook timeline. One was the link to an article I wrote in my blog about a gay men’s coffee group I’m part of here in Toledo that has been a spiritual blessing to my life. The other was nothing more than a question I also posted on my blog about what people’s fears might be if Trump was to become our next president.

Of course my initial thoughts when I saw the number of my Facebook friends decrease by four in such a short period of time was that it related to the content I had written in my blog.

Could I have been connected to some people who didn’t know I was gay and who really didn’t want to associate to a gay man?

Or was I connected to Trump advocates who read my question and quickly thought I was completely against the man and doing nothing more than trying to stir up negative comments about his presidential run?

While the latter question was definitely not true in my motivation for posting it given I asked the same question about Hillary a few days later, the conclusion I came to is that it ultimately doesn’t matter whether someone unfriends me or not. The same principle holds true when someone abruptly blocks me on Facebook or doesn’t accept my friend request.

Why do I say this?

Because I’ve come to believe that the people God wants in my life, whether in person or in the digital realm, will stick around, and the people that aren’t, won’t.

The fact is, people have come and gone a lot throughout my life. That why I place stock in that old saying that people come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. And if I trust in God like I say I do, then I must try that God is taking care of who’s intended to remain a part of my life and who’s not.

So the bottom line is that while I may still at times think about that Facebook friends counter when I suddenly see it decrease one day to the next, I choose to believe that God is in control of even things like those who are meant to remain my Facebook friends…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson