Quitting smoking can be the hardest thing you ever do in life. It's not easy, so don't let anybody tell you otherwise, but I did do it. I wish I could tell you there is an exact scientific formula that could be bottled and sold on the market that could help all smokers quit, but I can't. I can tell you what happened to me in my long quest to quit smoking. First you have to understand, I am a person who believes in God and the power of prayer, but I am also a person who believes that God helps those who help themselves.

For years I have been living a wild contradiction. Working out in the gym anywhere from 3-5 times a week pushing weights, running on a treadmill, and occasionally playing basketball at the park. Even though I love to exercise and love athletics, I had a problem with smoking. I would get down to a half a pack a day, but when a bad day would come, I was back up to smoking a full pack. I was so stupid that I would go outside to smoke in the middle of a workout and wonder why I felt dizzy.

As I mentioned already, I believe in the power of prayer, and I prayed for over 10 years to quit smoking. I actually quit a few times, but it was back to smoking as usual after just one more. That's all I was going to have. The problem is just one is never enough. After the one, it's just one more, until you've smoked another pack. My frustration was mounting.

After so many years had passed, I couldn't believe I was still smoking. Stress was a contributing factor, or so I thought. Any time I felt it, I had to smoke. Stress at work was terrible, but I think God was listening because I was eventually able to start to work from home on creating webpages. Being a webmaster is something I enjoy doing very much. I still smoked though at first. I was amazed. I no longer had a great source of stress from my old work place, but I still had to smoke. It wasn't just the great stress of my old job, but it was any stress. I used any excuse to smoke. So I continued to pray night after night that somehow God would help me quit. I started to see that my face was getting a little wrinkled. I couldn't tell if it was simply a matter of my age, or if my smoking was causing me to age faster, but still I couldn't quit.

Then that fateful day, something happened. The reason why I had to mention the praying is do in fact that I cannot completely explain away how I quit. I really believe that God doesn't force us to anything. Even things we ask for, but somehow He gave me the right mindset. I had to be willing to finally give up smoking completely. I had to be willing to quit and to not look back. You can cut back only so far before you are smoking right back at the same level again. Every time I smoked, I increased my level of addiction. I had to finally be willing to give it up cold turkey with no looking back. To a non-smoker it seems probably silly to be so emotional over something as destructive a habit as smoking, but at that moment as ashamed as I am to admit it, I actually shed a tear. I shed a tear, feeling as if I were giving up a friend. It was a friend that was always there when problems arose. I now know that my feelings were just plain stupid. Cigarettes are not only bad for your health, but who wants anything in your life that isn't there by choice. No matter what a smoker tells you, if most could easily choose not to smoke, they would.

But I guess in the end addiction or not, we all have a choice. I don't know about most people who quit, but after all the times I failed, I'm convinced that it took help from heaven for me to quit. I cannot to this day explain in any other way how just out of the blue after 10 years I was able to get the strength to completely turn my back on smoking.