ssssssSMOKIN!!!

I tried something new this week- thought I'd try reading the bible again. I wish I were more like the disciplined people who get up everyday and crack it open and get.....bored. I am ashamed to admit that sometimes I get nothing when I read it. It's like "same old same old" and I don't stick with it. Others do. Like my wife. I think she gets stuff. 'course she's a lot smarter than me. I know. Not a news flash. I think I'll stick with it for a while.....

My dad was a smoker. We hated it. We'd eat super fast at the dinner table because we had to beat dad. As soon as he finished he'd light up and we didn't want to get caught up in the cloudy haze of a couple of Winstons. I've got to hand it to my mom though...the house never smelled like smoke. She was a wizard at keeping the house clean and smelling fresh. As much as I hated smoking I tried it a few times. In 6th grade I saw this beautiful girl smoking- so sexy. So I went home and tried it. I didn't like it. It burned. And tasted awful. I tried again a few more times in my life...still gross.

I used to work as a maintenance man at a condo in Boca Raton while I was in college. There was this old Jewish lady that lived there who smoked like a chimney. She had to be like 180 yrs. old with that shriveled, puckered face of a long time smoker. She almost never came out of her apartment. Couldn't take the fresh air I guess. But when she did come out you could smell her a block away. Like an ashtray. Ever stand in line somewhere and the person in front or behind you reeks of smoke. I don't think they know. Well, the lady died. Complications from......a broken hip. (If cigarettes hadn't killed her by 180, they weren't going to). So another fellow and I went to clean and paint her condo. It was yellow with tar and nicotine and smelled so bad. She'd lived there for more than 20 years. Even the insides of the refrigerator were yellow. We cleaned with ammonia and started to paint. We came back and the walls we painted white were yellow again- the smoke bled right back through. Powerful stuff that nicotine.

I used the "where ever it opens " technique. I drop my bible on the table and start reading..... . I'll try other techniques as I go along. think I'll call it the "Drop-N-Plop". Today it opened to Psalms 139 and started there and got stuck on vs. 5 where it says " You hem me in-behind and before..." . There is a stop smoking commercial on tv now where a guy or girl walks around in a cloud of smoke and it's like they don't even know. But everyone else does. So this image is going through my mind and DAD says "that's you. Or could be you. I have surrounded you like that cloud of smoke. I hem you in- behind and before. And everyone notices". But what do they notice?

Have you ever met some one so like God that you feel like you just met Jesus? I've met a few and have left their presence and I feel like I smell like God. I've painted in smokers homes and when I come home Terri asks if I've started smoking. Being in the presence of smoke make me smell that way. That's the way I want it to be with my DAD. I want to have such a special friendship with him that there would be this mysterious cloud around me that everyone notices and says " Wow. That smells nice".

I think I'm found in a cloud of my own making though. I let too much of the world cover this work of art from my DAD has started. But He still seems to bleed through no matter what I cover myself with. I sure hope I can stop messing up His good work. I so want to smell like Him. Maybe I should Drop-n-Plop more....