Smokers: This is Your Warning

I am not an aggressive person. I rarely raise my voice, and when I do, it’s usually out of excitement, not anger. There is one thing that will light me on fire though…smokers.


With the music blaring and windows down, I was speeding along I-4 last Sunday afternoon. I was in very high spirits after spending the weekend with my family. Weaving through traffic, my eye caught a blue minivan.

Things took a turn for the worse. Not only are blue minivans extremely tacky, but the driver of the atrocious van was disgusting. He didn’t have any facial problems or other noticeable unattractive qualities. No, the sickening thing about this man was the item he was holding in his hand. What is this object that is causing such revulsion in my mind? It was a lit death stick. In a van occupied with three children, this man was smoking a cigarette. To make matters worse, he had the windows up.

Nothing gets my blood boiling like a parent that smokes in front of their children. A parent that smokes in front of their kids while trapping them and the smoke inside the vehicle? That is enough to make me want to pull the driver over on the road and give him a swift slap on the head.

We don’t let toddlers cross the street without holding our hand. Children can’t ride in the car without being strapped down to a car seat that has met national certification standards. Nowadays we’re even walking our kids on a leash to keep them protected. Parents are doing all of these things to keep children safe, healthy, and most importantly…alive. We won’t tolerate parents that hit their kids, we arrest adults that abuse them, and we have more child safety laws than I can count. If we care so much about the protection and safety children, why is it acceptable to expose them to the life threatening risks of secondhand smoke?

Secondhand smoke is the mixture of the smoke off the burning end of a cigarette, and the smoke exhaled by the smoker. It contains over 4,000 substances. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, secondhand smoke is a serious risk for children. Some of the effects of secondhand smoke can cause asthma, lower respiratory tract infections like bronchitis and pneumonia, ear infections, and a significant lowering in lung function. It’s horrible to think that kids are being hospitalized because their parents won’t step outside to smoke a cigarette. No-Smoke says that secondhand smoke exposure greatly affects a child’s ability to learn. More than 21.9 million children are estimated to be at risk of reading deficits because of secondhand smoke.

Not only does secondhand smoke affect children an early age, the repercussions of smoking will last their entire lives. Kids who have parents that smoke will be twice as likely to smoke when they are older according to Medical News. We all know that smoking kills. So why are we just sitting by and watching it happen?

I have never been a smoker myself, so I don’t know how difficult it is to quit or how addicting cigarettes are, but I do know that if you love your children then you will make sure you don’t expose them to the harmful substances in secondhand smoke. For those of you who aren’t smokers, don’t be afraid to call someone out next time you see them blowing smoke in a child’s face! I’m not saying you should yank the cigarette out of their hand and yell at them (as tempting as that sounds), but you could let them kindly know that by smoking in front of children they are setting a negative example and hurting others. You could be helping save that kid from a lot of damage. I have no problem letting an adult know the harm that they’re causing by breathing chemicals into fresh air. They may not appreciate what I have to say at the time, but hopefully something will click in their brain later on, and maybe next time they’ll find a more appropriate place to smoke. Somewhere away from children. If we all work together to inform as many people as possible, smokers and non-smokers, about the danger secondhand smoke causes, then many lives will be changed for the better. Every year in the United States 7,500 infants and 15,000 children are hospitalized from secondhand smoke exposure according to American Lung Association. We can lower those numbers.

A word to you smokers out there: if you want to throw your money down the drain and slowly kill yourself by smoking, then I’m not here to stop you. If you plan to expose a helpless child to that, then we have a burning problem.

Broken.

I am broken.

I come from a broken past, a broken family, and a long list of broken relationships.

Let me define the context of the term 'broken'. Being broken can mean:
-Being abused.
-Going through a divorce.
- Dealing with depression.
-Ending a relationship.
-Death of a friend, child, sibling, or family member.
-Moving away from home.
I think anything that breaks your spirit and takes a little bit of happiness and joy out of life can be put under the broken category.

The reason I feel the desire to write about being broken is because up until now, I've looked at my broken past with regret and anger. When really, I should be looking at it with gratitude and appreciation for where it  has put me today.

Maybe I should give a quick summary of my own brokeness before I continue.

I come from a mother and father who were not exctly parent material. Simply put, they preferred sex and drugs over raising children, which caused them to get a divorce when I was two. My father could not handle raising two toddlers on his own so my grandparents kept me and my older sister until the age of eight. For two years my father made an attempt to raise us, but when I was ten he met a woman who quickly became our step mother...and she was not interested in her new husband being a package deal.
Her dislike for my sister and I led to three years of moving in with other family members until the failed attempts at finding a relative to take us in led to sticking us into foster homes.

In my childhood I moved into more houses than I can count on both hands, and made and lost more relationships than I care to think about. It is easy to say that I am a broken person, but harder to think about the fact that my brokeness is actually a gift. I think my brokeness reveals something about who I am.

Each of us has suffered in a way no other has. Those spirit breaking moments in our heart are what create our uniqueness. When thinking of how broken humans are I picture a road filled with potholes in my head. That symbolizes our hearts. Every pothole and bump in the road shows how damaged and broken our lives are.

The one wonderful thing about potholes: They can be filled.

Right now, I'm learing that the broken spots in my life are all just places that can be filled with God's over powering grace and love. In a book I'm currently reading called 'The Beloved', the author Nouwen says,

"When we keep listening to attentively to the voice calling us the Beloved, it becomes possible  to live our brokeness, not as a confirmation of our fear that we are worthless, but as an oppurtunity to purify and deepen the blessing that rests upon us...As I grow older, I am more than ever aware of how little as well as how much we can do for others. Yes indeed, we are chosen, blessed, and broken to be given."

Being a broken person, I often ask myself, Why me? Why now? What did I do to deserve this?
And though I don't have the official and perfect answer for these questions, this is what I think. Like Nouwen says, we are broken to be given. To be able to fully give ourselves to God, and others, we have to have some rough and broken edges in our life. How else can we relate to each other?

I am thankful to be broken. Being broken offers a whole new way of sharing life and giving each other hope. What could be more rewarding than that?