A Church Challenge Changed My Life: Cold Turkey After 25 Years

I never thought I was the kind of person who could quit cold turkey. I had tried it. It lasted three days and ended badly. I thought cold turkey was for people with more willpower than me, people who were wired differently, people who weren’t carrying a 25-year habit.

Then my pastor announced a 40-day health challenge and something shifted.

How It Started

I grew up in Memphis and I’ve attended the same church since I was a teenager. My pastor, Pastor Elkins, tends to use Lent as a season for practical growth, not just spiritual observance. Previous years he had organized challenges around food, screen time, financial habits. The year I quit, he announced that the 40-day challenge would be focused on health: each person would identify one health behavior they wanted to change and commit to working on it from Ash Wednesday through Easter.

He was clear that this wasn’t about judgment. Nobody had to announce their challenge publicly. But he set up accountability pairs within small groups — two people who would check in with each other weekly, no details required if you didn’t want to share them, just the question: “How are you doing with your commitment?”

I had known for years that smoking was the thing I most needed to address. My mother had quit in her fifties after a COPD diagnosis and spent the last decade of her life on supplemental oxygen some days. I had watched that happen and still kept smoking, which tells you something about how deeply entrenched this habit was. Knowing something is bad for you and being able to stop are two completely different capabilities.

But Lent felt right in a way that a random Tuesday quit date hadn’t. It had structure. It had an end date — Easter, 40 days out. It fit into something larger than my individual willpower. And critically, I was not doing it alone. My whole congregation was doing something hard together, each person working on their own thing. That collective effort meant something to me.

Deciding to Go Cold Turkey

I thought about using the patch. I had the money for it. But I made a decision, maybe reckless in retrospect, to try cold turkey one more time — with a condition I’d never had before. The condition was accountability.

My accountability partner in our small group was a woman named Ruthanne, who has been in our congregation for as long as I have. She didn’t know I smoked. A lot of people didn’t. I’d kept it quiet for years because I was a Sunday school teacher and I felt the incongruence of it, even though no one had ever said a word to me about it.

I told Ruthanne what my commitment was. She told me hers, which was getting back to daily walking after a knee injury had sidelined her. Every Wednesday night at small group, she asked me how it was going. I asked her the same. That weekly check-in was a container I hadn’t had before.

Ash Wednesday

The last cigarette I smoked was the night before Ash Wednesday. I was sitting in my car in my own driveway at about 10 PM, and I smoked two cigarettes back to back, which I never did normally, which tells you something about the anxiety I was carrying. Then I went inside.

The first three days were the worst of my life, or at least they felt that way. I was nauseated. I had a headache that ibuprofen barely touched. I was irritable in a way that had no bottom — there was nothing anyone could say or do that didn’t feel like provocation. My kids, who were teenagers at the time, gave me a wide berth. My husband said he admired what I was doing and I told him, not kindly, that admiration didn’t help me. He gave me space after that.

Day four the headache eased. Day five I slept well for the first time. By the end of the first week, the physical withdrawal was largely over. The behavioral withdrawal — all the triggers, all the places and times where cigarettes had lived in my day — that took much longer.

The Triggers

When you smoke for 25 years, cigarettes become embedded in your day in ways you don’t fully appreciate until they’re gone.

My morning coffee was a trigger. My car was a trigger. Phone calls that I expected to be stressful — my mother-in-law called reliably on Sunday afternoons and I used to light up before picking up the phone. Being stuck in traffic. Finishing a meal. Stepping outside for any reason. The smell of someone else’s cigarette, which in Memphis in the spring is everywhere.

Each one of those moments required a conscious decision that week. Consciously not doing the automatic thing is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t done it. You’re not relaxing into a new habit. You’re actively resisting an old one, over and over, dozens of times a day.

What helped: I kept hard candy in my car and my purse. Not as a substitute for smoking, just as something for my mouth and hands. I started chewing gum during morning coffee. I called Ruthanne twice during week one when I was close to breaking — she picked up both times, didn’t make a big deal of it, just talked to me about ordinary things until the acute craving passed.

The 40 Days

Those 40 days of Lent had a rhythm to them that helped. I wasn’t just surviving day by day. I was moving through a recognized Christian practice, a season of self-examination and discipline with a clear culmination. Easter Sunday was the finish line. Every Sunday service during Lent felt like a checkpoint.

By week three, the craving intensity had dropped significantly. Not gone — I was still having strong urges, particularly in the car — but the worst of the white-knuckling was over. I was sleeping better. Food tasted more vivid. I could smell the jasmine tea I drink in the mornings in a way I hadn’t been able to in years.

Week five I had a bad night. A family argument that went sideways, the kind where words get said that take days to walk back. I sat on my back porch for twenty minutes actively debating whether to drive to the gas station. I decided to call my sister instead. She’s never smoked and doesn’t fully understand what quitting involves, but she talked to me for an hour and by the time we hung up the acute moment had passed.

That night convinced me something: the urge to smoke during a hard emotional moment peaks fast and if you can survive the peak — even just talk to someone through it — it passes. That’s something I hadn’t known in my previous attempts. I’d always given in before the peak broke.

Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday came. The challenge was technically over. My pastor gave a message that day that touched on resurrection, on new life, on what it means to become a different version of yourself. He never mentioned smoking or the health challenge specifically. But I was sitting in that pew having not smoked for 40 days, and the question settled over me: now what?

The challenge was over. I could smoke now and no one would say a word.

I did not want to smoke.

That surprised me. I expected the end of the formal challenge to feel like a finish line I could relax past. Instead it felt like a gate. I had come through 40 days. I was not the same person who had sat in the driveway smoking two cigarettes the night before Ash Wednesday. And I did not want to step backward through that gate.

I stayed quit. That was six years ago.

Six Years Later

I have not smoked since that Ash Wednesday. Not one cigarette.

I’ve had hard moments in six years. I won’t pretend otherwise. The death of a close friend three years ago brought the strongest craving I’d felt in years — an almost physical pull, grief looking for somewhere to go. I was in my car on the way to the funeral home and the urge was specific: cigarette, now, here, before I walk through that door. I drove past two gas stations and made it to the funeral home and walked inside. That was a hard day.

But I’ve also had easy stretches of months where I barely thought about cigarettes at all. The calculus shifted. What had been a constant presence became a ghost that showed up occasionally, always recognizable, never able to take anything from me anymore.

Ruthanne and I are still accountability partners. The structure of our Wednesday check-ins outlasted Lent. We’ve taken on other things over the years — she walked a half-marathon last spring. I started a garden. We still ask each other “how are you doing with your commitment?” every week, the commitments having evolved considerably since the original ones.

My kids, who are adults now, have told me they’re glad I quit. My daughter said she was afraid to say anything at the time but had been worried about me. I hadn’t known she’d noticed. Kids always notice.

What Made It Work

The cold turkey method worked this time because I had something I’d lacked in every previous attempt: structure and accountability that existed outside my own willpower. My willpower is finite and unreliable. A congregation full of people working on their own hard things, and one woman named Ruthanne who asked me every week how I was doing — that was more than willpower. That was structure I could lean on when I had nothing left.

If you’re thinking about quitting, find your structure. It doesn’t have to be religious — it can be a quit-smoking support group, a friend you trust, a commitment to someone you care about. But it needs to be external. Your internal motivation will ebb and flow. External accountability holds you steady when it ebbs.

To You

If you are still smoking and you’ve tried before and it hasn’t worked, I understand that place. I was there for 25 years. I know what it feels like to believe you are the exception, the person for whom quitting is just not possible.

You are not the exception. There is no such person.

You haven’t found your structure yet. You haven’t found your Ruthanne, your 40-day container, the specific set of conditions that make quitting finally stick for you. But that thing exists. Other people have found their version of it and made it through 25 years and 30 years and more.

You are not alone in this. In Memphis and everywhere else, there are people who were exactly where you are and found their way out. Not because they were stronger or more disciplined or spiritually superior. Because they found their structure, held on through the hardest days, and made it to the other side.

The other side is real. I live here. Come find it.