Judith M. Bell - The Christian Science Journal, January 2007
I started smoking as a teenager. After about 15 years, I wanted to be free of cigarettes. The smell of smoke on my clothes and on my body had become offensive to me, yet I couldn’t seem to break the habit. Using will power to stop smoking just didn’t work. I’d quit for a time but then pick it right back up again when I felt I needed something to calm me or when I was in a social situation where smoking made me feel more sophisticated.
Then I began reading the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. I loved what this book explains about my real nature as being entirely spiritual, lacking nothing. In accord with the teachings of the Bible, Science and Health shows how God, divine Mind, has created man and woman as its own pure, sweet, perfect, and satisfied spiritual ideas.
As I read Science and Health, and as I thought about the practical spiritual ideas it explains, I discovered I simply didn’t want to smoke. In a short time all desire to smoke left me entirely and has never returned. That was 35 years ago. Instead of my giving up smoking, the belief of myself as an unsatisfied, indulgent, material being gave up on me because I no longer believed that false concept to be my nature.
But what about second-hand smoke? Of course we can be free of smoking ourselves, but do we have to just silently allow ourselves to be imposed upon by others who do choose to smoke?
I’ve learned that it’s not what others do that makes all the difference in our lives, but rather how we, ourselves, think. Science and Health, which is based on the Bible, shows that we actually live in a mental environment, a spiritual atmosphere of thought, and that what we accept into our thought often becomes what we experience. Having control over our thoughts about ourselves and others, as well as our circumstances, brings freedom from being a victim of someone else’s behavior.
At one time I daily emptied and washed out the ashtray of a family member who smoked. I resented this, but kept my feelings to myself. Just as I had learned that using mere will power hadn’t helped me to stop smoking, I realized that being willful in this situation wouldn’t resolve the problem either. But I so wanted my home to be free from the odor of tobacco smoke. Because this family member had not asked me to pray specifically about becoming free of the smoking habit, I knew that I must find a way to be at peace myself and not interfere with another person’s decisions.
A testimony I read in one of the Christian Science magazines gave me the solution. A man told about being freed from a long-standing smoking habit before becoming a Christian Scientist. He simply lost the desire to smoke. He later learned that his wife, a Christian Scientist, had been praying daily for the purity of their home. There was my answer! I didn’t have
to try to change another individual’s habits, but I could pray to see that my true home is spiritual, the sweet-smelling atmosphere of God, divine Love, the pure dwelling of Soul, where harmony prevails. I could certainly pray for my own circumstances to be in alignment with spiritual purity.Turning my attention to the spiritual fact that my real home and all of its inhabitants are ideas of God, governed by Him alone, and who therefore cannot be imposed upon or enslaved by bad habits, I soon felt free from being critical of the smoker in my midst. I no longer felt burdened or offended by the smell of cigarette smoke.
Then one day, a week or so later, I realized I hadn’t cleaned an ashtray in several days. After a couple of weeks, I asked this family member what had happened. He explained that one day at work he had reached for a cigarette, but decided he didn’t want it. He carried a pack of cigarettes around for several days, thinking he might want to light up again, but the desire to smoke never returned.
I am so grateful that this compulsion to smoke, which seems to have such a grip on those dependent on cigarettes for various reasons, and which is so difficult to overcome, left me so effortlessly—and also my dear family member—simply by my seeing God’s pure ideas right where a distasteful habit appeared to be. I have now been blessed for 25 years with a smoke-free home.
Judith M. Bell
Chattanooga, Tennessee, US
