Smoking is just one of the dirty little bad habits I have. I started smoking when I was twelve. A cousin who was two years older than me and streetwise did not turn me down when I asked her for a puff. It's been an uphill battle since then. Even when I became pregnant with my first child I still smoked a little. It never bothered me much until about last year. Up until then I had told myself every lie in the book about my addiction. I only smoked on occasion, but during particularly stressful times I might smoke about three cigarettes a day. Certainly not much by any stretch of the imagination, but after fifteen years of smoking I was starting to feel the effects. I was losing my breather more easily and I was starting to cough. What really bothered me is that I kept saying I was going to quit and that it would be easy, but time after time I went right back to smoking when times got stressful.
I realized that I was not in control of smoking cigarettes, they were controlling me. Everytime I had a bad day or something went wrong I told myself I would quit tomorrow, when things got better. I finally realized that life was never going to stop having it's challenges. I had to quit. I have been doing much better recently. I can go several days without smoking, and I feel much stronger than I used to. I feel motivated because I know I did succesfully quit for almost two months (then I relapsed). Still, going two months without smoking, facing the temptations and not giving in, empowered me.
Surprisingly, with the new year coming, quitting smoking is not high on my list of resolutions. While quitting is so important, there are so many other areas of my life that need improvement. There are aspects of my personality that need a lot of help. I won't write a tell-all here about all the things I do wrong and all the mistakes I make, but suffice it to say, I am far from being perfected. What matters more to me than quitting is getting my inside in order. Getting control of all those ruinous human emotions like anger and jealousy are more pressing issues for me.
I still haven't made my resolution list up yet, but I am sure it will mimic closely the lists from years past. I don't take the list seriously, rather I use it as a guiding light for areas I want to improve. I don't know what your list will look like or if you will have one at all, but I sure hope you fare well. The good news is that where we fall short or where we miss the mark altogether, God will be there to pick up the slack. I am a firm believer that if we take one step, God will take three. May this Christmas season and new year be filled with many blessings from the one true and living God, Jesus Christ.
