It was the New Year of ’95, and after having quit for several months, I had picked up smoking again during a move out of state and away from my family. It was a lame attempt at comfort-seeking, but it helped me get through towing a boat for 7 hours behind the wheel of a rented moving truck, away, away, away from all the people who had ever loved me.
I was already sick of it again, sick of the racking cough, the inability to breathe, being enslaved by it, the way I and everything I owned reeked of it. But I couldn’t quit. I had tried so many times, and the one time I succeeded, I capitulated at the first stressful event. I was doomed to emphysema.
No one at church knew I smoked. I hid it out of supreme embarrassment, because I was once approached at a restaurant by a beautiful older woman who told me 
in the drawl of the consummate southern belle, “Young lady, you’re too pretty to smoke.” If anyone at church had suspected I was a smoker, I know they would never have asked me to teach that class.
It was during this time I received one of the best parenting strategies I have ever heard of, but of course I didn’t know that then. I was still honeymooning, a child myself, one very conflicted about teaching a class while participating in what I knew to be sin. But would I have been asked if He did not want me to do it, I prayed?
“If you love me, do what I say,” was the reply, implanted deep in my heart as I read the Scriptures (John 14:15). I did love Him. I believed very strongly all I had been taught.
And yet as He repeatedly confronted me with this verse, I understood that I did not really love Him if I did not do what He commanded, if I did not seek freedom from cigarettes and truly make my body a temple through which He could work (1 Cor. 6:19-20).
I was deeply disturbed by this, because I knew I was completely unable to quit smoking. The truth was, I liked it as much as I hated it and could not imagine my life without it. To add to the conflict, I had run across this:
“We know that our old self was crucified with him so that … we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin…So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:6-14).
If I loved Him, I would obey, and I did love Him … so I did the only thing I knew to do: I tried again. I tossed the remains of my last pack with the nostalgia of one who casts the ashes of a beloved pet to the tides. And then I went to bed. I knew the physical addiction would be eliminated in 5 days, so that was my goal, and what better way to begin than with unconsciousness, in which I could not smoke.
It was a minute by minute struggle. I watched the clock and commiserated with profound compassion with St. Paul who (I imagined) wailed, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:21-24).
I begged God for help every second, it seemed, until I had gone all morning without smoking, and the morning turned into evening: the first day, the first week, the first year. Victory. The first New Year’s resolution I ever kept. I have been a non-smoker for sixteen years, and it was the hardest physical habit I have ever had to break. The most surprising thing I learned was that what follows freedom from sin, is freedom to serve God without reserve and with a clear conscience.
When my oldest son was very small and he was learning the difficulties of deciding whether to obey or not, I asked God how to help teach him, and my Heavenly Father reminded me of a lesson He once taught one of His own wayward children, “If you love me, you will do what I say.” There have been watershed moments in parenting when this approach has made all the difference for us, and what I am learning is, the matchless power of love can move mountains and “make straight the way of the Lord” (Is. 40:3).
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