Hello Doves,
 
It is has been awhile since I have written to you and have
My husband Barry read me a story about smoking and this is very timely as I was sharing my
story with someone else when he read it to me.
 
This is my story:

                                GO AND SMOKE NO MORE                                           Wednesday March 10, 2004
 

While we are on the subject of freedom, I want to tell you this story that happened, not to me but to my fiancee, Linda. This was shortly after we had met and were just beginning to see each other regularly. We were constantly talking together about God and what we knew about Him and what we were still learning.

One day, God said to her, out of the blue, “Would you like Me to heal you?” Her immediate response to this was to feel a sense of panic that she must be dying or had some dreadful disease.  Oh my gosh, what do I have, Lord, Am I dying?” Was her response.

“Calm down,” was what He said to her. I will let her tell it in her own words.

This all started while I was driving alone in my car on my way to work in the morning, one day. As was my custom, I was in the process of praising God and praying in tongues. Something I had only recently learned how to do. Out of the blue God said to me very clearly “Would you like to be healed?” I immediately thought I had some horrific disease.  The panic rose in me and He in response told me to calm down.

“You are not dying, I’m speaking of healing you of smoking.” When I heard this, I was suddenly apprehensive and became defensive. Yet at the same time, I was wondering “What is wrong with me, of course I want to be healed of smoking…” But the prospect of actually being freed from something that you have had as part of your life since you were 14, is a bit of a sudden jolt to your system. Therefore, even though I did very much want it, I asked God if it would be alright for me to take some time to think about this. Though it may seem that He would not like this sort of response, I saw that He was in fact pleased that I was willing to take His offer into my heart and give it the serious consideration that it merited. I went on into my day and kept this conversation very close to my heart.

That evening I called Barry and told him about this situation and he asked me what I was going to do about it. I said that I was going to take some time to think about it. I expected him to have an opinion and that he would try to talk me into going for it, as if to say, what are you waiting for, etc. but he was staying out of it knowing that it was between me and God. I did admit to Barry that I was afraid. He asked me, what I was afraid about and I told him that I was worried that after having been a smoker for so long, that there would be withdrawals and problems associated with quitting. Barry suggested that I should write these concerns down on a piece of paper, and discuss them with the Lord in plain terms, so that He has a chance to address each of them. Which I did.

It was five days later, I even remembers the very date, March 15, 2004, at around 6:30 am. I was again on my way to work. I began to bring it up to God, saying that I was ready to talk about it now. He said “Okay…” I said,

“I really want this which you have offered me, to be free of smoking, but I have some concerns that I want to talk about…” To which He said,

“Okay, I’m listening…” I began to explain my concerns, going down a short but detailed list.

“My identify is so much wound around being a smoker that every time I have tried to quit in the past, I have spent days on end, not only physically withdrawing from the cigarettes, but mentally, I was obsessed with them as well. I couldn’t think about anything else, and I hated that.”.  I moved on  to point number two, I don’t want to suffer any ill effects from being a smoker and I quickly was moving on to the next on the list when He suddenly stopped me and said,

“How about this, I will make it as though you never smoked, will that be sufficient?” He asked me. I had no concept of what exactly that would mean, but I decided that it sounded very good and by faith I said,

“Yes, Lord, that would be sufficient, let’s do it!”

At this point,  there was then silence from God, as I waited for something to happen. Then I said,

“Is that it, did we do it?”

“Yes, we did it, it’s done,” God said back to me.

“What, no fireworks?” I asked. God laughed.

“No, no fireworks,” God said. At this, I looked to my left and saw the half a pack of cigarettes that I had in the driver’s door compartment’s cubby hole, and immediately, without a second thought, I grabbed them and crushed them in my hand and with one quick motion, I did something that I normally would never do, because I do not litter, but I threw the crumpled pack out the window of my car at freeway speed. I felt that this was the right thing to do. It wasn’t until some years later that I would understand why this act was important. It goes back to instructions about adding to your faith virtue. Faith was working in my spirit but virtue is the taking of that faith and acting upon it in an outward, physical way, which is what really seals the deal. By tossing those cigarettes out of my car, I was tossing them permanently out of my life.

I testify that God has indeed kept His word to me to make it as though I had never smoked. I not only never smoked cigarettes from that moment on, but He took away from me any withdrawals, any obsession over the cigarettes, and any thoughts about them one way or another. One thing that is common among people who have been smokers and then quit is a lingering emotional attachment that is difficult to deal with. They find it difficult to be around anyone who is smoking. But this never happened for me. I have discovered that I have literally NO emotional opinion about smoking one way or another. It is truly as though I have never smoked at all, and this is after a 28 year habit of at least a pack a day.

One of the most important things in this, is that God told me that He was doing this for an even bigger reason than just the quitting smoking, itself. But He wanted this to be an example of how faith works so that I will be able to look back on this and use it as a model for other areas of my life as well. It had to be something that I knew was real. Something that could never have been faked or done in my own power; something that others would also recognize was real and from God, so that they too would believe that God is able to help them as well.

So sudden was this change in me as in regards smoking and so complete was my deliverance from cigarettes that Barry and I laughed in the days shortly afterwards that it was as if Jesus had said to me, “Smoker, Go and smoke no more!”  
 

 God Bless all of my friends on the 5 Doves,

 

Linda Amundsen