Overnight

My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power.
-1 Corinthians 2:4-5

Walking around the house with one of her cigarettes hanging out of my mouth usually worked pretty well. More often than not, I'd get the attention that I craved from my mom, once she caught on.

She had smoked for as long as I could remember, and by the time I was 11, I not only knew that messing with her cigarettes was a way to push her buttons, I was also curious about how smoking worked-what they tasted like and if they made you feel more grown up. For a few years, she would laugh at me and shake her head, playing a kind of cat and mouse game with me until I gave up the cigarette that I had playfully pulled from her pack of Marlboros. Then, one day when I was 12, she handed me a cigarette and allowed me to light it up.

I started smoking.

I shared cigarettes with my mom, smoking around the house after school. Soon I began to befriend other kids who smoked, and for some reason, it was easy to sneak around the campus and bathrooms at my school to take a few puffs in between classes. By eighth grade, I needed these cigarette breaks. Smoking had become a habit-I was addicted. It was no longer a choice.

One day, there was an assembly at our junior high school which featured a guy who had cancer of the throat. It was pretty eerie to hear him speak. He had to talk through a speaker in his throat because he had lost the use of his vocal cords. In this electric-sounding, monotone type of voice, he tried to warn my friends and me to stop smoking so that we wouldn't turn out like him. I remember thinking to myself, I will never be like that!

Then later that year my grandpa died of lung cancer. I dealt with it by telling myself that I needed to smoke more to deal with his death. Weird logic, huh? But smoking had become a crutch, and I used the excuse that it comforted me.
By the time I was 17, in my junior year of high school, I was smoking a pack and a half a day. It was also then that I decided I wanted to be a lifeguard. So I tried to quit smoking.

It was hard.

I couldn't do it.

I figured then that I would always be a smoker, because it was just impossible for me to quit. I was able to cut down, but I couldn't cut it completely out of my life. So I told everyone that I had a terrible fear of diving as an excuse not to get certified as a lifeguard. Deep down I knew that I didn't have the endurance to save a drowning life.

Around that time, a friend invited me to come with her to her church youth group. I had been there a few times as a fifth grader, but now I was in high school, full of a past that I wondered if people could see as I walked into the room. But when I looked at the teens in the youth group, they smiled and seemed too preoccupied with being happy to notice anything negative about me.

The meeting was pretty fun overall until it came time for what they called "confession." There I was, feeling kind of trapped, knowing that my turn would come around. When it came, I felt like there was a huge, hot spotlight shining on me. At the last minute, I came up with something to say. Some of the teens in the youth group knew I smoked, so I decided to just use that as something to confess.

"I smoke a pack a day," I divulged.

I felt that if these positive, happy people knew I smoked a pack and a half a day, it might rock their world too much. Little did I know that the One it mattered to the most already knew how much I smoked and how much I lied about it. But what did I know about anything like that? I wasn't a Christian-I was a partyer! I decided that I shouldn't dare confess any of the other illegal stuff I smoked.

In reply to my confession, the youth pastor asked me, "Do you believe that God can heal you from the addiction of smoking?" I really wasn't expecting him to throw such a question at me, so I sat there thinking for a minute. Finally, I thought to myself, it's worth a shot, I've tried everything else, and so I responded, "Yeah. Sure."

Looking back now, I realize that I was just testing the reality of God. The group prayed for him to break me from the addiction of smoking, and in the prayer, they prayed that I would have the strength to go home and throw my cigarettes and lighter away.

The next morning, I woke up nauseated at the smell of smoke from my mom's cigarette burning. I was shocked. How could this be? I actually tried to smoke, but it made me sick to my stomach. Me-the pack-and-a-half-a-day girl could no longer stand even the smell of smoke.

Not possible.

Unreal.

I could no longer imagine having the desire to smoke. In some weird way, I had the feeling that I had never even lit a cigarette before! There was just no way that I could have made this change on my own after five years of smoking every day. It was definitely a God thing. He had definitely done a modern-day miracle in my life.

In a way, I felt like my image was shot. I had thought it was cool to be a smoker. It was a status thing. But eventually I gave up smoking other things, too, because it didn't make sense to me to do one and not the other. Besides, I had completely lost the craving for smoking anything.

It took some coming around, but I also finally decided to ask God into my life. It wasn't easy at first. Slowly but surely I realized that some of the things I had been holding on to really didn't compare to what I got from being in a relationship with God.

It's true that the truth will set you free, and the truth is this: he is a powerful, loving God who answers prayers and changes lives.

He changed mine overnight.

Renee Krapf

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