My satirical plea for people not to pray for me printed in The Dickinson Press on March 22 backfired and I owe my smoking friends an apology. Some smokers felt it would make Christians hate them more and use prayer as a weapon of control against them.
I never thought of that when I wrote my letter; but I can see their point after they pointed it out to me. The devil can take anything good and use it for bad, but God can take anything bad and turn it into good. I didn't think of prayer having the potential for evil, but now I can see how it can be.
My intentions, I thought anyway, were noble in the beginning. I wanted to protest people making pharmaceutical companies richer by buying drugs and using nicotine patches to quit smoking when prayer is free and brings you out of isolation and into communion with other people who care about you for yourself and not for the money they can make off of you.
For myself, I know that prayer and Christian fellowship do work. A Seventh-Day Adventist friend told me, however, that people shouldn't pray for anyone to quit smoking -- but, instead to pray for comfort and strength for their loved one, and "may thy will be done."
A Catholic friend told me we should pray for Jesus to grant our loved ones the strength to do what's good for them. The original sin was that Adam and Eve wanted to be like gods and have the knowledge of good and evil. Please don't presume to know that quitting smoking is good for me. Pray that I will be given the strength to resist temptation to oversmoke and just smoke my goal of two or three cigarettes a day.
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Marilyn Schoenberg,
Hebron
