Faith Works 5-11-19
Jeff Gill
Addiction and recovery
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Years ago . . . okay, decades ago, I was in college and for a stretch of time, I smoked a pipe.
My dad had smoked a pipe, and it was a contrary enough affectation at the time it appealed to my sense of self, so while many of my classmates were drinking I smoked a pipe. Cherrywood, some with a Sherlockian swoop and others more stolid and stodgy, burning shredded tobacco from a quaint shop I still visit in my dreams at times, filled with large glass jars and a variety of vanilla and spicy scents weaving through the dark smoke of burning pipe tobacco.
Then I met the woman who would be my wife, and at a certain point she expressed her displeasure with the whole tobacco thing in any form (my roommate at the time did lure me into the cigar humidor in the back of the shop on occasion, his preferred smoke), and over a New Year's holiday with friends I threw my pipe into a lake, and that was it for pipe smoking.
I missed it . . . some, but honestly, not all that much. Tobacco didn't have a deep hold on me, even though I'd probably been smoking it semi-regularly for two to three years. Out it went.
These reminiscences are told you, of an antediluvian age (it was in a different century, after all), because just a few weeks ago, I was going out of a funeral home, on a very sad and quite sorrowful day, with a fair amount of stress wrapped around the week, and as I left the building I walked through a cluster of people outside, sheltering from the light spring rain, smoking.
I caught a good lungful of something I think from a vaping device, but a cloud of it wrapped itself around me for just a moment, and I caught a scent of vanilla and tobacco.
And darned if I suddenly wanted to smoke again. Not a robotic, jerky legged unwilling stroll to the nearest tobacconist, but just an impulse from somewhere deeper than deep, inside of me, that cried out "more of that, now!" It wasn't something I couldn't push past, and I got in my car, and drove off, but for the next thirty minutes or more, the thought like a moth at a porch screen by night kept banging back into my consciousness: "I want to smoke." I batted it away, and mindlessly the long-buried impulse kept surging back into view, battering against my thoughts: "go find some pipe tobacco, now."
It went away, but to be fair, I haven't been around another smoker for a while, either.
As we struggle as a community with addiction and recovery, mostly meth, more frequently opioid painkillers these days, sometimes any one of a number of illegal substances let alone alcohol and other drugs (that's where the acronym AOD comes from), I hear people's frustrations with addicts and their failures of recovery. Of relapse, of falling off of the wagon, of re-using, of failure.
Experts vary, but it's a commonplace that it takes an average of seven tries for someone to beat an addiction. My experience with addicts and their families would sort out to something like that. Some stop "cold turkey" and do it in one, others try again and again, but the multiple failures to stop before an ultimate state of security in sobriety: that makes sense to me. Seven or not.
What I want to get across to people of faith, friends in churches and beyond, to the entire community, is that addiction is still a mystery, but recovery is a reality. People do stop using substances, and often after repeated attempts that end in a return to the habit they're trying to break. And for anyone who thinks "I don't get it, why do they pursue this destructive path," I offer up my own passing realization.
Pipe tobacco is socially acceptable, perfectly legal (if you're over eighteen), and not terribly harmful, though it has its own cancer risks associated with the practice. Plus my wife doesn't like the smell of smoke. But after literally decades of not smoking the stuff, and not thinking in any meaningful way about the practice, the underlying nicotine and the innate appeal of the habit could suddenly grab me on a bad day, with a modest cue, and stay stuck in my mind for longer than I'd have thought.
How much more meth, or opiates, or whatever stronger has once had a hold on someone? Don't give up on someone trying to stop just because they go back. Addiction is powerful stuff, still dimly understood. With faith and patience and love, recovery happens. In patient and outpatient, alone or in groups, all around us, every day, right here in Licking County.
For them, we pray to the Lord.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's interested in helping anyone find hope who's looking for it. Tell him where you found some hope at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
