When the Smoke Clears

Hi there. Before I get started, I really need to apologize to Mrs. Kathy for ‘standing her up’ with the last article I was supposed to write.

Life seems to have sped-up on me since December and I can’t seem to catch up, nor can I remember things like I used to.

I feel like a little old lady trying to remember all the extended family’s birthdays. It just doesn’t work without calendars and notebooks to remind. So I got a calendar on Sunday. Sounds ridiculous, but I think I will be able to enter the real world again. Ready or not, here I come.

There are things in my life that are not pleasing to God; these are the ones that make Him cry because He loves me and doesn’t want me to get hurt.

There are also things in my life that He helped me to overcome. Those are the things that I believe He smiles about, that He is proud of. For instance (and there are many more), by working in the restaurant business and being around smokers since I was 16-years-old, I started smoking then.

I figured, ‘everybody else is smoking, I’ll make myself like it.’ It took a little while, but after I got the hang of it, enjoy it I did! Until one day, years later, I realized that I was playing a game with my life and that I had to the make a choice. I had to choose between my enemy (my sin) or fight for my life. I had to believe that one day, I would be clean from the chemicals that had become a part of my body.

When I met my husband, Jason, he informed me that my smoking was revolting.
Not only did the smoke smell horrible, but that everything else contaminated by that (my) smoke smelled revolting.
Not only did I not care when I heard the news, but while we looked for a home in Nashville, I tortured him by chain smoking in his little ’98 Honda for two weeks. What a horrible person I was.
This was a point in my life that I was going to do what I wanted to do. Nobody was going to tell me how to live. Smoking was a part of me. It was one of the things that made me who I was (well, I did smoke for 13 years).

It doesn’t matter that someone finally told me the truth. Someone who cared about me, who didn’t want to see me hurt myself because he loved me. But the truth did not matter I continued to smoke for three more years after we got married. I fought for it, I hid it, and I still enjoyed it. While all along, I felt guilty about it, felt sneaky and a little ashamed that I didn’t want to quit. Oh yeah, and I was hurting the one who loved me.

Jason and I tried for three years to start our family, and after putting out my last cigarette in December, the Lord blessed us in March, when I found out that we were pregnant with Christian. What a celebration.

The Lord blessed me. I believe that He honored me with the desire of my heart when I put the thing down in my life that had become a sin for me.
You see, Jason knew that it was going to kill me and that eventually my health would deteriorate because of the chemicals put in those things.

Although I knew that they are horrible and that addictive additives are put in them to keep cigarette companies in business, I didn’t care. I didn’t care because I was in the middle of my selfish world and no longer saw the truth as I had seen it before I became addicted.

So you see, smoking was not the only thing that had become a sin in my life, but I was lying, being sneaky, I was angry, I smelled bad, I was not considerate of my neighbor as I blew smoke on them endangering their health and causing them to stink.
(You may think these are funny if you still smoke, but it’s not funny for those who don’t.)

I was under a weight that held me back from the next great thing in life that God had in store for me because I couldn’t put to death the sins that were holding me back in so many areas of my life.
The Bible tells us that the wages of sin is death. And yes, eventually we will all die, unless the Lord comes for us first.
The thing that I want to ask you… Do you really want to be living a death while you’re struggling to live?

We all have sin in our lives, some of these we are conscious of, some we are not.

I believe that when we are shown our sin and are convicted of it, it is then time to do something about it, don’t you?
I love you and I don’t want to see you hurt yourself or your loved-ones, you can do it, with the help of Jesus Christ. Not only will He convict you, but He can also show you a way out, if you will only listen.
Peace and love,
Cheryl