My husband has smoked cigarettes for 42 years. He started when he was 11 years old, after he spotted his older brother smoking in the woods with his friends. So, to ensure that he wouldn’t rat them out, they made him smoke too. This isn’t to say that he wouldn’t have smoked anyway. I’m quite sure that he would have, given the pack of ruffians he hung out with when he was growing up, and since a pack cost 35 cents in 1976, they were not hard to come by. His parents eventually found out, and grounded him, but he was not deterred.
I smoked too, for at least 10 years, my favorites were Marlboro lights 100’s in a box. There was nothing like the feeling of zipping the cellophane off a new box and inhaling the sweet smell of tobacco from what looked to be a box of perfect, white chalk sticks. I enjoyed the social side of smoking, and I’m pretty sure we were both smoking when we met at a pit party in 1989. I continued to smoke, even throughout my first pregnancy (hey! my easy-going OB-GYN said “pfft that’s like smoking nothing” when I tearfully admitted that I still smoked three cigarettes a day), and even while I was in labor (although I’m not proud of this fact, please know that our now 27-year-old daughter has never smoked a day in her life, and has no health problems related to my foolishness). However, 5 years later, when I was pregnant with our son, I was older and wiser (24! LOL!), and felt too guilty to continue, so I quit only to pick it up two weeks after he was born in attempt to lose that baby weight, which I did – seven pounds worth in the first week. When our son was about a year old though, I had a patient about my age, who was on birth control like I was, who also smoked, and had had a stroke so severe that she could not pick up her own baby. The similarities were striking and scared me into quitting the very next day. It’s been 20 years since then, and although I still dream about smoking occasionally, and have often joked that I plan to return to it when I’m 80, I’m actually pretty sure that I won’t ever smoke again.
My husband, although proud of me for quitting, did not stop. He continued to smoke even after he went to college for physical therapy, and worked with patients who were dying of cancer and those whose activity was so limited by lung disease, that not only could they not walk due to breathlessness, but eventually even eating took their breath away. As a caregiver, it is such a helpless feeling to watch someone struggle to breathe; I can’t even imagine what it feels like for a family member to watch their once vibrant loved one become a shell. I didn’t want to see my nature loving, exercise obsessed, gotta-move, husband become like that, and I told him so, but still he smoked.
It’s not like he didn’t try to quit. Over the years he had many periods in his life that he did not smoke for days, and sometimes weeks, due to unfortunate incarcerations, or self-imposed week-long Appalachian trail hikes, meant to get him over the hump, literally and figuratively. He also tried the gum, patches, and even hypnosis, but nothing worked for him. Each time he came home, he was so restless, and so terribly irritable that he couldn’t stand himself, and I couldn’t stand him either. I once told him to leave the house and not come back until he had smoked because I couldn’t stand his crankiness one more minute.
As the years went by, he became very self-conscious about smoking. It had not been socially acceptable for many years, the era of the rugged Marlboro man long gone, replaced with the trappings of poverty and weakness. It became a very heavy burden; always looking for a place to smoke when out in public, remembering a lighter, trying to cover up the smell, not to mention the cost! He started to despise it so much, that he always tried to hide it from our granddaughter, and he obsessively washed his hands after he’d been outside (he hadn’t smoked in our house since 1990), and he was constantly asking me to wash his jacket because he didn’t like the smell.
Enter our granddaughter Bean. She and I have prayed for him to quit smoking for at least half of her six years. I’ve talked about the power of Bean’s prayers before; the red balloon, the boyfriend…but this request put our faith to the test. Half of your life, is a long time to pray for something, but she didn’t give up. The night he stopped, was no different. I had picked Bean up from school, taken her to dance class, and I was putting her to bed, while waiting for her mom to come home from work. Bean started with “Dear Lord,” then added in her little girl concerns and ended with…”and please help my Papa quit smoking! Amen!” I said the same, tucked her in, kissed her, said goodnight, and shutting her door went downstairs, picked up my phone and found this…
Now, don’t get me wrong…I absolutely believe in prayer, I believe that God answers all of our prayers, and that he wants the best for us, but this seemed too good to be true! I’d heard testimonies in church of people being “delivered,” but to have this addiction taken from him so effortlessly seemed too much to hope for. We were both a little afraid that talking about it would “jinx” it, so we moved on to other topics from there. I also didn’t want to pressure him, and make him feel badly if another attempt was unsuccessful, because every effort he’d made didn’t work, and every time he’d tried, he’d limped back to that controlling old lover with his tail between bis legs.
We didn’t say too much about it when I got home that night either, but the next day, I was dying to know what happened in the morning, as this was the time of day he needed to smoke the most. So, I waited awhile, but at break time at work, I could stand the suspense no longer and texted this…
“It can’t be this easy,” he said, but it was. He was not irritable, he didn’t have to chew the terrible tasting gum, wear the patches that gave him panic attacks, or distract himself from nicotine cravings with candy. It was as if he’d never smoked at all…No cough as the previously paralyzed cilia in his lungs woke up and started to sweep out the debris, and his sense of smell, something he didn’t know was crippled, returned. The concerns he’d had initially about filling his time, dissipated. It was all so easy because God did it.
Reader, you might scoff at this, you certainly have the right to believe whatever you want. You might have been praying for things to change in your life, and it seems as if he does not hear you. But, let me tell you, He does. My husband was addicted to cigarettes for 42 years; it controlled his life and mine. He tried so many times to quit, but he could not do it on his own, at least not without an immense amount of suffering on his part, and on mine! It took some time; Bean and I prayed about this for years, and I know he’d also been praying about it for a long time, but if it had happened sooner, it would not have seemed like the miracle that it truly is.
I want you to know that my husband and I are rational, normal people. We are nothing special, just a regular American couple. We have two children and a granddaughter, we work, go to church occasionally, read our bible way less than we should, and tithe when it is convenient. We swear sometimes, go to bed angry sometimes, and are not always a good example of God’s love. We are Christians, but not what I would consider to be “good Christians,” if there is even such a thing. But, let me tell you something that I know, that I know, that I know…and that is this. It doesn’t matter if we are good; God is good. It is not about our faithfulness; He is faithful. It is not how much we love; He is love, and He loves us. We try our best, and he does the rest. It is just that easy, and it is just that simple…and that is the real miracle.
