‘I used to pick up cigarette ends off the street’
I started smoking – in secret – a few menthol cigarettes that I’d steal from my stepmother’s packet when I was about 10 years old.
As a teenager, I even used to smoke in the toilets at my school.
Later, when I was about 15, if I didn’t have any money to buy cigarettes, I’d pick up cigarette ends off the street to salvage the remaining tobacco and roll my own cigarettes. I smoked all sorts of tobacco: blond, menthol, dark, cigars, rolling tobacco… until I became addicted to dark tobacco.
When I was about 25, I got to know some friends, former drug addicts, who occasionally took heroin but regularly smoked hashish. That’s how I was introduced to it. Thank God, I didn’t get into hard drugs and stuck to hashish. However, I wasn’t as addicted to it as I was to tobacco. It was cigarettes that really had the strongest hold over me.
When I was around 30, I tried several times — unsuccessfully — to give up smoking: nicotine patches, acupuncture, self-hypnosis… Whenever I managed to cut down, I’d get into such a foul mood that my colleagues eventually asked me to start smoking again.
The price of cigarettes was constantly rising, and this was putting a heavy strain on my budget. But I had become completely addicted. Whenever I found myself without cigarettes on a Sunday evening, at the weekend or on a public holiday, I would travel several kilometres to find a tobacconist’s that was open.
It was at the age of 39 that I was set free from this addiction — and from cannabis — by Jesus Christ (Luke 4:18; Galatians 5:1).
I use the word ‘delivered’ quite rightly: I made no effort whatsoever to be set free once and for all, and it had no effect on my mood. One day, when I longed with all my heart to be baptised, I knew that continuing to smoke was incompatible with the commitment I wanted to make to God. After praying, I simply threw my lighter, my cigarettes, my joint and everything else into the bin (Ephesians 2:8–9). From that day onwards, I never felt the need to smoke again.
Today, at nearly 64, I have no lasting effects. What Jesus did for me, He can do for you too… and much more besides.
Mireille
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