I visited them. They had a guest whom I know at a distance. They prepared coffee for us. When the guest held his cup in one hand, he took out of his pocket, with his other hand, a pack of smokes. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it as if he was sitting alone on the balcony of his house or in a park! We were four adults and a child. I found it odd that the guest has not been considerate to anyone of us, old or young! I am not claiming that this scene is to be generalized. I am writing about it, just to demonstrate what addiction can do to us. No selfishness is more eloquent than for Man to become his own world. I have a close friend who smokes, and you do not know when he does, and when he quits smoking, you do not know that either. I once asked him about his smoking and his quitting. He said: \u201canything that makes me feel that it is starting to enslave me, I try to prove to myself that I am stronger than it\u201d! Finally, my friend overcame this bondage. This is a tribute to the free people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I visited them. They had a guest whom I know at a distance. They prepared coffee for us. When the guest held his cup in one hand, he took out of his pocket, with his other hand, a pack of smokes. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it as if he was sitting alone ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[343],"tags":[2101,1619,1758,2293,2292],"class_list":["post-8678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-addiction","tag-freedom-in-christ","tag-orthodox-christian-living","tag-overcoming-bondage","tag-social-etiquette"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8921,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8678\/revisions\/8921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}