The Amazing Power of God
How God and Advair saved my life
The above image was a mirror of my morning ritual. From sixteen years old to forty-seven years old, I was a smoker. I’d tried to quit on a few different occasions. Well-intentioned as those times were, they just didn’t work out.
It was the twenty-second day of February 2012, the first day of Lent, when I thumped my final cigarette butt into the front yard. There was only one decisive difference on that day: God spoke to me.
I know. It sounds weird when someone says such a thing. It wasn’t a deep and thunderous voice, rolling off the clouds, bringing fear with the shaking of the ground. No, this voice was more akin to the little voice a person hears in their own mind from time to time, and this voice issued a challenge. That’s what still convinces me that it was God. Absolutely. No doubt.
I thought I would be able to quit on my own terms. The religious season of Lent was starting and I felt confident that I could give up the smokes for forty days just like I’d given up soda the previous year. But with the smokes, my plan was to continue after Lent and be free of them for life. The plan? I would smoke my last cigarette in the parking lot of the church, right before that evening’s Ash Wednesday service. My own terms.
