Can I stop?

One of the delightful pleasures of having babies around is watching them sleep, and one of the sweetest things they do in their sleep is practice their sucking. They’ll suck on bottles, pacifiers, their own tongues, or on mommy, all while unconscious. Sucking is their greatest skill, and we now know they do it even in the womb.

Experts debate about how much sucking is necessary for babies, but all agree it is beneficial. Somewhere along the way, though, all this sucking becomes a negative. Parents of pre-schoolers who have become too attached to their pacifiers or bottles know the difficulty of taking these things away.

I sucked my thumb as a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, and even as a school girl. By the time I was 8, my parents had tried every-which-way to make me stop: pinning the ends of my PJs closed, painting my thumb with distasteful medicine, punishing me, and threatening me with braces. Even dangling rewards in front of me to make me stop didn’t work. I loved sucking my thumb and didn’t ever want to quit.

Eventually I “went underground,” hiding my thumb-sucking behind a book or a long sleeve while in school, sneaking it at home when no one was looking, freely sucking my thumb during the night. What finally made me stop was being caught (and teased) by my peers. The pain of that outweighed the sting of not being able to suck my thumb, and one day I just quit, though the longing didn’t disappear for several years.

God understands how hard it is to break a well-entrenched habit and can see what’s going on in our heads when we’re tussling with our self-will. He thoroughly understands the complicated nature of our brains and appreciates the whole serotonin thing, but he still asks us to work on taming bad habits. “You don’t have to do it alone, though,” he says. “I’ll help you.”

Many bad habits get their start in something good that we’ve taken to an undesirable extreme. Then, when we try to reel it back to reasonable levels, we’re dogged by failure and conclude we’ll never be able to break free. Success can be ours, but probably not until we admit we need the help and cheerleading of someone else. We need “a higher power,” and that, of course, is the Lord.

Once we take advantage of his willingness to partner with us, we’ve taken the first step to becoming the person we wanted to be all along. And best-case-scenario, that habit we struggled to conquer will become only one small piece of a very distant past….

….just like the sucking of a baby.