"Addiction is hopeless without you......"

This arresting sentence leaped out at me from a billboard as I was driving down the highway on my way to pick up a friend. “Wow,” I thought, “addiction needs a willing participant in order to have any kind of power.”

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug abuse is costly to our Nation, exacting over $600 billion annually in costs related to crime, lost work productivity and health care.

I know just how debilitating this addiction can be. I let go of the smoking habit almost 30 years ago because I had come to a crossroads in my life. I knew instinctively there was a better, freer way to be and live, and participating in this habit and living this better way could not coexist. Something had to give. But the decision to quit, and the life changing transformation that followed, didn’t happen overnight.

For a few years prior to this, I had felt very conflicted about smoking - deeply desiring to be free of it yet not feeling strong enough to do so. But I had been studying a book called Science and Health and one day came upon this sentence, ”Puffing the obnoxious fumes of tobacco, or chewing a leaf naturally attractive to no creature except a loathsome worm, is at least disgusting.” This really made me laugh and grabbed my attention because the last thing I wanted to be was disgusting.

What I was reading in this book gave me a totally different way to view myself, my health and who and what God was. My self-esteem started to rise above the smoke screen and felt I was being lifted away from the thought that I had to be the victim of an unhealthy habit such as smoking.

With this new view in mind, it gradually started to dawn on me that not only was smoking an expensive habit, I was tired of my clothes smelling awful and I was tired of feeling awful. But most of all I wanted to be a good role model for my children.

I remember having my last cigarette at a Tina Turner concert. I lit up, looked at the cigarette and then realized how completely ready I was to put it down for good and snuffed it out. There were no withdrawal symptoms or any of the horrible after effects that you hear so much about, and I walked away a free woman.

What I learned on my journey out of this destructive habit was that I first had to change how I was thinking about it. Once I realized that I could exercise dominion over addiction through divine power, it became inert and the physical dependence on it vanished. No longer finding me a willing participant, the addiction was not only hopeless, it was lost. And I was free.