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My ciggie habit
Extol:
Huzzah, progress! Thanks for the updates. We love you. 8)
Rhys 🕊:
I started smoking myself around the age of 20. Was quite keen to do it as well but just didn't like it and stopped within a week and glad I did.
I read your smoking post you had from a while back Gina and often have prayed for you. I can see that it's something you want to get rid of and I still pray that this will be the case. I'm sure God is working here and you will get through it. I pray for the day when you wake up and you just don't want another one. I hope the various methods you are trying will work soon.
And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. 1 Peter 5:10
Rhys ;)
Gina:
--- Quote ---And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. 1 Peter 5:10
--- End quote ---
~Rhys
I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the great locust, the grasshopper, and the caterpillar, my great army, which I sent among you. (Joel 2:25)
Thanks, Rhys. (Only two or three so far today. It's so odd. And do you know that I actually threw away what Marlboro's I had left?! I have not thrown away a perfectly "good" ciggie ... ever! God is good!)
Gina:
Love you too, Extol, my brother!! 8) Thank you!
Update:
It's 7:02 p.m. here and I've only smoked five cigs out of a new pack that I opened up this morning at 6:30 a.m. I'm completely blown away! I had my last cig tonight around 5:30, but then I didn't smoke before I got in my car to go home (I don't smoke in my car or apt.) and I usually come home, change my clothes and sometimes not, but immediately will go out on my balcony and have a smoke, and I just realized tonight, I got home (around 6:30 p.m.), did my dishes and now I'm starting to make myself some dinner! It's like I've forgotten to light up! This is wild! I'm elated!! (Can you tell?)
Gina:
I hope you all don't mind that I blog, because it keeps my fingers busy.
Idle hands are the devil's workshop.
:)
No pressure to respond! No pressure to read. Won't hurt my feelings in the least. How would I know which one of you wouldn't at least read my posts? So therefore, I won't know! haha! See? That's the beauty of online communication. And if this is just my ego, God will let me know. He always does. But I really don't think it is. )
So, it's about 8:07 p.m. now and I just got finished having my first "after work cig" where typically it'd have been my third! This is just unreal! WhOEvEr YoU R ThAt'S pRaYinG fOr Me -- I just want to hug you.
Anyway. It's not easy though. Most of this excitement is coming from the fear of that feeling I get after I smoke a cigarette--guilty. Wonderful feeling.
When I quit last time--true to the thing Ray said (somewhere) I was dreaming hard about smoking cigarettes. I was happy to have quit, but depressed at the same time because I had nothing to keep my mind off it (and I was terrified because I was out of work, and I was sick as a dog-which is what caused me to quit. Then, I figured out that I didn't think about smoking as long as I was busy with doing something that had to be done. So what I'm actually doing here writing all this is tricking myself into believing that someone will benefit from what I say and the only way to say it is to write it. LOLOLOL (I know I'm crazy. But I'm not the smothering kind of crazy. I take after my Dad! He loves, loves, loves to write, and few read Him and fewer still understand Him. And I can totally relate to that! )
But the dreams convinced me that if I wanted to be free from guilt and worry (that I was going to be punished for smoking and deservedly so by some people's standards) I was going to have to quit smoking.
It just seems like such odd behavior - Step 1. grow a field of tobacco. Step 2. scratch head, wonder what to do with field of tobacco. Step 3. roll up tobacco in paper. Step. 4 put fire to tobacco. Step 5. inhale. Step 6. Cough lungs out. Step. 7. Repeat steps 1 through 6 until you get it right and can't live without it.
And you can't convince yourself that it's okay to do it, so instead you working on forgetting what you're doing is wrong by everyone's standards and needs to be corrected. Just corrected. Not punished. Some smokers feel like they're being penalized heavily for their "choice" of habit. I'm not one of those smokers because unlike them, I now understand that I'm not being penalized but gently steered away from doing something that I wouldn't want my child doing, but I wouldn't punish them for doing it. I would make doing the right thing look just as attractive as doing the wrong thing, because when you get a "high" so to speak, by doing the right thing, it dulls the excitement of doing the wrong thing and so you naturally end up choosing to do the thing that brings you the most satisfaction.
And I was not satisfied waking up from those dreams knowing that the only reason I hadn't smoked in the last hour or two or three was because I was unconscious. haha
Listen, I would wake up from those dreams immediately thrilled to know that I hadn't really smoked at all -- that I'd just had a dream. But then reality would set in and now I WAS AWAKE and not unconscious. I would be very able to now go walk out on my balcony and grab a smoke and light it up. And then the next thought was, "But you can't because you're sick and the last time you tried to inhale the cigarette you almost choked... Is that how you want to ... die? Conscious that you're gasping for air? Noooooo. You really don't. So then I'd smirk and pull the covers back over my head and try to not "dream."
But then it would be time to get up out of bed, and I had no choice because I had to eat or whatever. And like clockwork the fighting started. I want a cig. Can't have a cig. What can I do to take my mind of the cig. The cig. The cig. That's all I focused on was the cig-- and how to NOT want it. So inevitably I was constantly fighting it off because I always had the urge.
It's been a constant fight. Constant struggle. But I don't want to have to struggle. I want it to just ... go away. Bye-bye. I'm done. You served your purpose. No more of you. But it just doesn't happen that way.
Well, it's a pacifier is what it boils down to. I may as well be doing deep breathing exercises in the heart of Los Angeles at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine in rush hour traffic.
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