Cigarette Smoke

I love the smell of cigarette smoke, particularly Salem cigarettes. I think it's because my mom smoked that brand when I was a child (she quit after we started doing the 'stop, drop, and roll' bit every time she lit one up) and the smell reminds me of being a kid.
It's funny how the societal perception of smokers has so drastically changed over the last couple of decades. Now when I walk past the designated smoking area in the airport, I immediately rush to hyper-judgement of the 'dirty' smokers with their 'dirty' cigarettes huddled together in their glass chamber of addiction. In our modern caste system of addictions, cigarette smokers are at the bottom of the pile...the lepers.
I have a pretty good idea of how God feels about cigarettes overall but I suspect that there is one particular type of cigarette smoke that God may actually like. It's the cigarette smoke that you smell outside of an AA meeting. Every Tuesday night, I lead worship for our college worship service and as I'm leaving, I always see the AA crew hanging out in the parking lot of our church because they have just wrapped up their meeting. Not everyone is smoking but someone almost always is and I love the smell because of what it represents. It's a step forward...it represents getting up one more time after getting knocked down... it represents the transition of going from a greater and more destructive addiction such as cocaine or alcohol to a lesser and more non-consequential addiction such as cigarettes. I know that God's ultimate design is that we not be addicted to anything but, in a fallen world, sometimes, we just have to take it one step at a time. I'm sure, in their journey to freedom, there will be a place where they realize that they need to be free from their addiction to cigarettes but for now, the smell of their smoke will be the smell of little and daily battles fought that lead to life changing victories.