I used to smoke.

I took great pleasure in taking a deep drag on a cigarette between my fingers, sometimes with my eyes closed, all the way from my lips, down my windpipe, deep into my lungs … and then slowly releasing blue plumes of nicotine fumes from what sometimes felt like the depths of my very soul.

I did this several times a day for 15 straight years, though I was less and less captivated by it as the years wore on.

I had picked up a cigarette as a teenager out of curiosity, and curiosity killed the cat.

“I took great pleasure in taking a deep drag on a cigarette … but I hated how I felt afterwards,” said Peck who hasn’t touched a cigarette since quitting 20 years ago.

My trial degenerated into an addiction, and I spent the next 15 years of my life trying to quit smoking.

People ask how many packs I smoked a day. It didn’t matter – I could not manage a day without cigarettes, and if I could not face a smoke-free existence, I was addicted.

My first stop at any airport transit would be the smoking lounge.

I would not be caught at home or anywhere without my cigarettes.

I would trade in a nice heated office for the brutal cold of a harsh New York winter – head down, shoulders scrunched all the way up to my ears – just for a drag of nicotine.

I hated the smell. I hated how I felt after a cigarette. And I hated the ridiculous money I was paying for this vice, especially one I didn’t even enjoy.

A bad-feeling body

Although smoking does not make one a bad person – it just made me a bad-smelling woman with a bad-feeling body – I was wracked with guilt being in its grip even after I became a Christian.

My spiritual mentor at that time stormed heaven with her prayers for me to break this addiction.

One day, as I was doing my Bible reading, the seductive twirls of the cigarette fumes rising from between my fingers, my eyes fell on a line urging me not to use any part of my body as an instrument of wickedness but to use each part as a tool to do right by God. (Romans 6:13)

I did not dissect the sentence, I did no theological analysis of this Word, I didn’t ask God for any special guidance or revelation.

It was a simple moment – I read it and I decided I no longer wanted my fingers and my lips to be used for smoking.

And so on that cold January day 20 years ago, I went cold turkey.

I had no withdrawal symptoms – neither physical, mental, nor emotional – nor did I put on weight, as many had warned I would, and I did not have to avoid smokers.

Peck left New York and moved back to Singapore in 2015. She is now a writer with Salt&Light.

I remember hanging with a bunch of journalists at a big event just two months after that day, several of them puffing away at their cigarettes and offering to move away after finding out I had just quit.

I told them not to bother; I didn’t even want the cigarettes.

What multiple efforts through willpower could not do, the Word of God did in one clean cut.

I was free.

This story first appeared in the blog Quierotango and is republished with permission.

RELATED STORIES:

“I cannot, God, but You can”: She gave birth in prison, but still struggled to kick addiction

Addicted to drugs for 40 years, he had given up on any hope of change. Then this happened

One innocent swipe on the phone, years of addiction: How porn hurt this woman’s relationships