I had started smoking again when I was out with my brother one night in Connecticut after having not smoked for four years. By the time I left Connecticut to be with my wife and daughter in Florida, I had not yet quit again. They were staying with her mother, who was also a smoker, and I joined them there. Her mother made room for all three of us and we stayed there for several months before I was situated in a steady job and we could get a place of our own.
I always felt that I would quit smoking again fairly soon because it had worked so well for me the first time. Several times over the next few years I made a hearty effort but was never able to keep from smoking for more than a few days in a row. Once, I made it a couple of weeks before giving in to the urge to have a cigarette. It was not obvious to me at first, but it turned out that no matter what I did, I was unable to quit smoking again for the next 12 years.
During those years, I worked at the same job but we lived in a few different apartments. We had a second daughter when I was 30 and when she was two, we bought a house with a yard. Four years later, we were separated and the divorce was final a year after that. Much later, when I was 41 years old, I married my hairdresser, a woman who had always impressed me with her honesty.
I had not seen the inside of a church since the church in Wyoming that my second wife and I had attended some 14 years before. My third wife was active in her church and I had been feeling very interested in learning more about that sort of thing. As we joked about it later, I stepped out of her chair and into her lifestyle. This included being involved in two different Bible studies, going to church on Wednesday nights as well as Sundays, and actually reading the Bible myself while referring to other books that were all about the Bible. By the time I was 42, I was in a totally different mindset than anything I had ever experienced. My wife and I were being discipled in a new lifestyle by other Christian couples our own age who we considered friends. We had started hosting a fellowship at our house on Friday nights to study the Bible and were also learning about deeper spiritual experiences that came with taking the Judeo-Christian theology seriously.
One of these experiences our friends called deliverance, although they often referred to it simply as healing, which was short for divine healing. I had been around these people long enough to see that what they were practicing was an honest interpretation of what they believed from what they were learning in the Bible. The common thread that ran through the entire core group of that fellowship was that each person had a personal relationship with God and an obvious desire to go deeper with Him in that relationship.
A personal relationship is, to me, the opposite of what I call being (or acting) religious. I have hated religion all of my life. Religion to me is doing something (as in repeating certain phrases or attending a certain church) because it is what you think you are supposed to do. I was raised in a home where I was sent to church. Not brought, sent. What I was learning in church was not practiced at home or even alluded to until after I was an adult. I had no idea what you were supposed to do with this stuff! I had absolutely no use for it and stayed as far away from it as possible.
When I became a Christian, it was because a man who believed (the pastor in Wyoming) came to my home one evening and shared with me a very real God who (it certainly seemed to me) was capable of speaking for Himself. I am a very skeptical person, yet I had an experience that day that I will never forget and cannot explain any other way than supernaturally. The people that I rubbed elbows with in his church, however, were not that way when you spent time around them. They had specific ideas about how my wife and I should act and certain ones had no problem letting us know that. They seemed to think their church was some sort of a club and when they needed more dues the pastor should just somehow magically increase the membership.
When we were informed by one of the women at a Wednesday night fried chicken social that they were voting the pastor out because the church wasn’t growing, it didn’t sit right with me. I went home that night and thought about it. It seemed to me that the pastor was the only one that had anything to do with growing the church, which I had started to understand was a spiritual matter. I thought these people should be upset with themselves because the church wasn’t growing or perhaps go find another club for themselves besides this one.
I learned even more about the difference between the pastor and these others the day I went to see him at his house to let him know how I felt. I explained to him that I believed the people were voting out the one person who was working at growing the church because the church wasn’t growing and that I thought it was hypocritical because they themselves weren’t even trying to grow the church. Even though this was a spiritual matter, and I was just beginning to learn about such things, I was obviously trying to show my support for this man and acknowledge the work he was doing. His answer to me was simple. He said, “Mike, I don’t feel as though I am being sent away. I feel very much that the Lord is calling me to be someplace other than here and I don’t know why that should be. But if the only reason is so that you will remember the message and not the man, I’d be okay with that.”
The Christians at the church that my third wife was introducing me to were like that pastor and not at all like the people I had met at his church. Everyone that I was meeting here was very serious about their relationship with God and I could see that this was not just some exclusive club, but a group that I wanted to be around more. It was very important to me that God was real and not just some cosmic religious joke being played at our eventual expense.
Several months into attending my new church and being in fellowship with our new friends (both at our house and several of theirs), I got the message in spades. Rich and Lu were the couple that was coordinating the healing and deliverance ministry at the church which met on Thursday nights. They would schedule two or three prayer partners to meet with and pray for anyone who wanted to be prayed over that night. Those groups were called prayer teams and the teams would meet beforehand for a time of prayer and teaching before breaking up into groups to meet with and pray over the individuals who had come that night for prayer. The individuals themselves who had come for prayer had met together in a different room with a teacher and were prayed over in a general intercessory prayer before they met with their prayer teams.
When I got married to my third wife, she had just been invited to join the prayer teams and was going to church on Thursday nights as well as the other times that I went with her. The prayer teams met in the school building across the parking lot from the main sanctuary so as to take advantage of the classrooms to meet with and pray for people individually. As I became more aware of the process of interceding for people from our fellowship and the Bible studies that I was attending, I would go with her on Thursday nights and sit in the sanctuary by myself and pray general intercessory prayer over the groups that were meeting in the school building and the individuals with whom they were meeting. After a few months of that and learning more about praying for and with people in our fellowship, I was invited to join one of the prayer teams as an intercessor and I became a regular on Thursday nights in that ministry.
One Friday night at our house after our fellowship meeting, I was describing for Rich how I had been wanting to quit smoking. I told him how I had quit for four years then started again 12 years ago and hadn’t been able to quit again since then because of the urges. I actually said that I could easily quit if I didn’t have to deal with the urge to smoke all the time. I mentally kicked myself because I thought that sounded really stupid, but Rich was grinning. He said, “That is why they call it an addiction. Which by the way people get delivered from all the time. Why don’t you just ask God to deliver you from those urges? Then you can quit.”
I knew that he was serious because we prayed for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts every week who were in faith-based 12-step programs. They came for prayer believing that God would deliver them from their addictions even while working through their program. I agreed with him that that was exactly what I wanted to ask God to do. I went and got my open carton of cigarettes and took the open pack out of my pocket and asked him if I should throw them away or give them to someone who was still smoking. His answer surprised me. He said, “We’re going to ask God to deliver you from those urges to smoke. We’re going to keep asking Him until you no longer have the urge to smoke, at which time you can do whatever you want with them. But for now, I suggest you hang on to them. You may not be done with them just yet.”
I was pretty sure that was not how the alcoholics and drug addicts worked through their programs, but Rich and Lu were discipling us, which is the Christian version of mentoring. I either had to admit that he knew more about this than I did, or take matters into my own hands when I already knew that had not worked for me over the past 12 years. I decided that since he and his wife were conducting a very effective prayer ministry through our church, which I could plainly see with my own eyes as a participant, I would have my best chances at being delivered if we did this the way he described it. He and Lu prayed with us about it every week and my wife and I prayed about it together every day. She had decided that she wanted the same deliverance and we not only prayed together about it but prayed intercessory prayers for each other during our quiet time, the time that we spent in prayer by ourselves.
It was obvious to me that this was turning into what we call a prayer project, because nothing seemed to be happening and it went on for weeks like that. I would ask Rich if maybe we were being a little arrogant about this and shouldn’t I be doing things differently. His attitude toward it never changed. He absolutely did not think it was arrogant. We were asking for deliverance from urges to smoke and if the urges persisted then I hadn’t been delivered and we would keep asking until I was delivered. The manifestation of which, we both agreed, was that I wouldn’t want a cigarette. He said, “You have become an expert on those urges. You will know when they’re missing. Why would you want anything less than that? Arrogant would be you deciding how to help God make this work. Stay the course.”
What I really wanted was to go through life free from the urge to smoke. And that was just going to have to be God. For my part, after I finished the partial carton I had, I started buying single packs. Then I started waiting until the last pack was not only gone, but I had an urge for a cigarette before I bought the next pack. I knew I was anticipating the outcome and had to laugh because I didn’t want to be caught with too much inventory when it happened. I was such a control freak. I was sure at some level that it was an expression of faith, but also knew that when you focus on not doing something you are more apt to do it because it is what you are focused on. The weeks turned into months and nothing really changed on that front.
Our discipleship continued, both as a couple and individually. One of the requirements for being a prayer partner for others was to receive prayer for yourself periodically. Much of the healing that I was receiving when I was prayed for was in the area of emotions and forgiveness and I was continually wanting to go deeper in my spiritual relationship because so much in my life was going better because of it. And it was just fun. One night I woke up around three in the morning and went into the bathroom. The upstairs bedrooms at each end of the hall in that house were air conditioned, but the bathroom wasn’t. The window was open to the back yard which was low and a little swampy after a rain. At least it must have been that night because the frogs were out in full force. I was talking, probably out loud, about my day and how much I appreciated the number of things that went right that could have gone wrong and, of course, I was thanking God for the difference. At one point, irritated by the insistence of the frog chorus, I said in an off-handed manner, “Anybody can have frogs out at three AM on a damp night. That’s just no big deal. Birds at this hour would be amazing.”
Then I just went on with my original train of thought. I didn’t really notice the frogs slowing down at first because that happens periodically, anyway. I did notice when they stopped for a longer period of time than normal. And I didn’t miss it when the first bird chirped a minute later because I was subconsciously waiting for the frogs to start up again. When the birds got their chorus going to an appreciable level, I had to laugh. First I wondered how many people in the neighborhood actually heard this and realized how unusual it was, but then I thought, “Wow. I am in a relationship with the creator of the universe and He’s telling me this is personal.” It was certainly amazing and I couldn’t have been any more in awe than I was that night.
Over the next few weeks I scheduled myself for a prayer session on Thursday night. I specifically asked for the infilling of the Holy Spirit because I had been reading about it and it seemed like the next thing I wanted to do. The team that prayed for me that week was adept at this particular prayer and were praying for the evidence of speaking in tongues as well as the infilling of the Spirit. That didn’t happen, but I definitely felt a fluttering in my chest at different times during the prayer and later that night I slept better than I had in a long time.
The following night, Friday, was an off night for fellowship (we met every two weeks). After dinner, I was going to head to the gas station to get a pack of cigarettes and go down to the post office and get my mail. I usually had a cigarette after dinner, but I was out of them and the gas station was two blocks away and on the way to the post office. It was not an unusual run for me to make and I would smoke the cigarette on the way to the post office. I had just turned out of the street we lived on and was a block from the stop light by the gas station when I heard a voice say, “It’s a great time to quit smoking.”
The voice was inside my head but I looked around anyway. I remembered this phrase from somewhere in my past. I said, out loud, “Is this you, Lord?” even though I had never actually had such an experience happen before. Then I remembered a night long ago when I had proclaimed that a Friday night when you’re out of cigarettes was a great time to quit smoking. I took a right at the light and headed for the post office, figuring I would stop on the way back and get the cigarettes.
On the way back from the post office, I passed the gas station and was getting out of my car in my driveway before I remembered that I was going to stop and get a pack. I thought, “Well, maybe later” and went in the house. My wife was not in the dining room, but she had left a cigarette going in the ash tray on the dining room table. I thought, “Oh, I’ll just take a drag of that one.” I called her name and when there was no answer, I thought she was probably in the bathroom so I picked up the cigarette and just stubbed it out for her.
If that was an urge, then I just stepped past it and didn’t act on it. If it wasn’t, then it wasn’t. When I tell this story, I am never really sure if I was delivered while I was in my car or after I passed up the cigarette in the ash tray. What I am sure of is that God takes every relationship personally and He has a sense of humor. I didn’t miss two things that were apparently just between us. For one, He took something that I had been cocky enough to think I had figured out but could never get right and showed me how it was no big deal for Him. Second, no matter which moment I was actually delivered, there was no excess inventory. That night happened in 1992 and as of this writing, I have never had another urge to smoke. I can assure you that just like I thought, it is really easy to quit smoking when you don’t have any cigarettes and you don’t have any desire to get any or even to pick one up.
