I was about 13 or 14 years old when I had my first smoke. My dad, who was a smoker most of his life, had inadvertently dropped a pack of cigs one day in the rec room of our modest bungalow in Blacksburg, Virginia. I think Mom was also a smoker at that time, but not as much as Dad. The cool kids all smoked, so wanting to be cool like they were, I quickly snatched up the errant pack and absconded with it to my bedroom. At that time, Dad had finished our basement into a family room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. I had some privacy from the rest of the family who lived upstairs. My sister Beth was away at college or somewhere; my older brother, Mike, and younger brother, Jim, had bedrooms upstairs.

Practicing

Alone with my new smokes, it never occurred to me that Dad would be missing a pack—I was pretty stupid as a young teen. Behind the closed door of my bedroom, I pulled out one cigarette and stood in front of the mirror, practicing how to hold it. Initially, it was the thumb and forefinger hold, which I immediately recognized as a non-smoker hold—not masculine at all. Then came the index and middle finger hold near the tips of my digits. That looked like a girl’s hold. So, next came the same grip, but partway down the fingers. I had seen some movie actors do it that way, and it could look quite sophisticated. The cigarette commercials displayed a variety of methods modeled by handsome movie actors. Only when Virgin Slims hit the market did the ads show women smoking.

But remembering the Marlboro Man’s rugged look (he was the guy on the TV commercials and billboards, riding a horse, looking macho and cool—very manly), I adopted his hand posture. As I stood in my bedroom, I repositioned the rolled-up tobacco delivery system down to where my two fingers joined up with my palm, cradling it in the “V” of my two fingers. And there it rested, as I practiced bringing it up to my lips, wrapping my hand around the lower part of the front of my face, imagining myself puffing on it and exhaling it. Truth be known, I could envision myself sitting up in the saddle, looking over the herd of cattle, getting ready to round them up. I even practiced tapping off the imagined burnt ashes that constantly need discarding from a burning cig. The practice was not complete until I tried different positions for the cig in my mouth: dangling, sticking out the side, between my teeth, slanting upward. I even practiced talking with the cig in my mouth, something I had seen in the movies, where it bounced up and down in cadence with the words being spoken.

But, wait, there’s more!

Now came the look, the sideways glance with one eyebrow raised casually, the other lowered (not an easy stunt to pull off, but practice helped me develop this), pretending to inhale deeply, and then blowing imaginary smoke rings. Now that was cool! I was getting it all down pat—all except lighting it. I was smart enough not to do that in my bedroom, which had no windows. For that momentous rite of passage, I would need to move to the bathroom—but not before I practiced how I would light the thing.

The natural thing was to simply tear off a match from a matchbook, using my thumb and forefinger, strike it against the abrasive igniter strip, and then lift it to the end of the cig dangling from my mouth. But, no, that wasn’t cool enough. The real way that real men did it was to turn the match around and place it between the forefinger and middle finger, so the match head was now pointing back toward me. Then I had to bring the match down to the abrasive igniter strip and push the match head down, with pressure from my thumb, along the abrasive lighter strip. When the match lit, now cupped inside my curved hand (which would obviously warm up inside of my hand), I would practice bringing it up to my cigarette, using my other hand to join in cupping the flame to protect it from wind and air movements. Of course, this was practiced without actually lighting the match. I didn’t want to leave any telltale signs in my closed-in, barricaded bedroom that had no window.

To the bathroom

And so, after a long, long period of practice, maybe five minutes, I was ready to step up to adulthood and join the many other kids who took that brave step and not waiting for some magical age when it was OK to smoke. None of us wanted to wait to grow up!

So, the time came to migrate boldly into the bathroom. My heart was beating double-time! I closed the door, stuffed a towel in the door gap at the floor, opened the window, and then stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself. This was a massive moment for me. I was somewhere between 12 and 14 years old.

Finally, I was ready to make the leap.

I pounded the cigarette pack against my open palm (something people did then, but I didn’t know why). Then I took out the cig (which I had previously put back into the pack) and pounded that cig on its end against my palm (again, I didn’t know why you were supposed to do that, but that was apparently something men did). I put it up to my lips, casually raised one eyebrow sideways, lit the match in the cup of my hand, and raised it to light the cigarette.

Ouch, I waited too long to light it, and the match burned down to my fingers. I blew it out and went faster this time (forgot to raise the eyebrow), but in the speed of hand movement, the match blew out too soon. Darn.

Finally, I worked out the timing (there’s a lot to it, believe me!). I lit the end of the cig, then took it out and looked at it. No big deal. Put it back in my mouth, and this time I took a huge drag (slang for taking a toke, which is slang for inhaling). I am not sure what I expected, but it sure wasn’t what I experienced. Looking back on it, it was just what any intelligent, sane person should have anticipated, deeply inhaling a bunch of smoke. My lungs exploded with coughing and wheezing. I’m trying to muffle the sound with my free hand over my mouth, but the pressure of the exhaust fumes through my sinuses and out my nose was like a car backfiring and blowing out its muffler. My parents were upstairs somewhere, and the window was open, but that kind of coughing couldn’t be controlled.

What just happened?

Well, I was not going to be a weakling, so once my body reaction died down, I regained my composure and did it again. (I refer to my earlier statement about being a dumb teenager.) I was determined to master this smoking thing so that when the cool kids lit up at the next party I went to, I would be the Marlboro man, right there with them. In time, that experience in the bathroom got old—and the coughing continued, though it seemed to lessen with each inhale. Anyway, to be cool, you need others around to see your cool; otherwise, what’s the point? So I fanned the fumes out of the bathroom window and went back to my room, where I hid the pack of cigs in my underwear drawer.

Busted but brilliant escape

A few days later, my mother came to me with a stern voice and the pack of cigarettes in her hand. After being offended that she had obviously been rummaging through my underwear drawer (forgetting who washed, folded and put my underwear in the drawer in the first place), I fumbled around for an answer to her obvious question, “What are these doing in your drawer?”

Finally, a stroke of genius hit me, like a lightning bolt from the sky. It was an answer no other teenager on the face of the earth had ever thought of before, when they were caught with the stolen goods. I couldn’t believe what a genius I was! “Oh, Mom, I’m just holding on to these for a friend.” She looked at me— I can’t really remember what she said, but she walked out with “my” pack of cigarettes and a verbal lashing, “Don’t you ever do that again.” But surprisingly, she never mentioned it again. That is until one day I came home, reeking of smoke and Juicy Fruit gum, which I heard from my friends would cover the stench of smoke-breath (but in reality it only made it worse—but I didn’t know).

Maybe my parents thought it would be a losing battle to come down hard on me for smoking. Or perhaps they recognized the inconsistency of coming down hard on me when they were smokers.

Pattern begun

So began a pattern of smoking that started in a bathroom and then expanded to parties and then, in college, to a pack-a-day habit, especially when alcohol was involved—the two seemed to go together. My later college years included pipe smoking, one to two bowls-full a day, along with the rare cigar. Add in some marijuana on weekends, and my smoking had become well-entrenched in my life. No longer because it was cool, but because I couldn’t stop—everything in my environment encouraged the habit. In those days, a pack would only cost around 50 cents (this was before the government began the so-called “sin tax” to profit off our weak willpower), and I bought smokes by the 10-pack carton for about five bucks and purchased pipe tobacco by the can.

After college graduation, smoking escalated to two packs a day. I was utterly hooked. My office mates smoked, my roommate smoked, everyone smoked (except a few oddballs). A friend and I made a list of pros and cons, for and against smoking. There were four items on the pro side: relaxing, nice after a meal, goes well with alcohol, and encourages camaraderie with other smokers—you can always ask to bum a smoke (that is, asking someone to give you a cigarette) and no one would ever refuse you. On the con list were about 20 items: smoke gets in your eyes, smoker’s breath, yellow fingertips, always needing an ashtray, burnt holes in your shirts, can’t find a match, inadvertently have two cigs going at once, those pesky do-gooders who wouldn’t let you smoke in their office, nagging claims of cancer dangers, and the list goes on. Yet, we couldn’t quit. I couldn’t stop.

Then I met Jesus.

Well, first, I met followers of Jesus. They didn’t smoke, which I thought was weird. They never talked about it; they just didn’t do it. They didn’t judge me for it. But they weren’t enslaved to it; I was. I was intrigued by them; they had a zest for life.

Then one of them gave me a Bible to read, a New Testament (I wasn’t sure what the difference was between that and the Old Testament), and I began to read how Jesus came to set people free. The Bible didn’t say I had to quit smoking or anything like that, but I knew I was enslaved to that and many other things. I had begun drinking beer after work; what started as one bottle grew to three or four every night after work. I knew where this was headed. I was a slave to these things.

Surrender

One night in September of 1972, I surrendered to God. I wanted to be free from the greatest enslavement, that of sin, and I surrendered all to him. Not knowing what to expect, I was overwhelmed by God’s love for me and that he wanted to have a relationship with me, despite my rejecting him for so long. I was wonderfully saved that night, and I haven’t looked back.

I went back to my apartment that very night, where my roommate was already asleep. I broke open the new carton of cigarettes I had bought earlier in the day, opened every pack, broke every cigarette into pieces, and threw them all in the garbage. I was free! Praise God. I was a new creation in him, and I later found those words in the Bible: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor. 5:17). No, the Bible didn’t say I had to quit smoking; God had changed me on the inside, and I no longer needed to smoke. I was formerly caught in the smoldering chains of tobacco, but now I am a new creature in Christ. And I have never smoked since.

P.S. My roommate, the following day, discovered the garbage can full of broken tobacco sticks and asked me what had happened. I didn’t fully understand all the took place the night before and did not articulate it well. He was a secular Jew, so the “religious nature” of what happened didn’t bother him so much. But what did bother him was the wasted smokes: “Well, you could at least have given them to me and not thrown them out!”