You do not have to convert anyone

You are at a table where everybody else is still smoking, and something starts building in your chest. It begins as concern for them and it comes out as a speech: what you learned, what it was doing to you, what they could have on the other side. You have felt it rising at a table before. Notice what that pressure really is. Underneath the concern there is usually a request. You want somebody here to agree with you, because agreement would steady something that is still slightly wobbling.

Watch how people behave about things they are genuinely settled on. Nobody who has never gambled works the room about gambling. Certainty does not campaign. It has nothing to prove and no votes to collect, so it can sit in a room full of people doing the thing and feel almost nothing about it. The urge to convert is not a sign you have gone soft. It is a sign that part of you is still looking outside for a confirmation you have not finished giving yourself.

The campaign also costs you the room. A speech makes everyone slightly defensive, which makes them argue back, which puts you in the strange position of defending your own life to people who never asked about it. Now it is the only subject at the table and you are the one who put it there. Meanwhile the person who might have quietly asked you something later, in the parking lot, on the way to the car, will not, because you turned it into a debate instead of a door.

So try the quieter version next time. Say no in four words, answer any question honestly and briefly, then change the subject and actually mean it. Let them watch you enjoy an entire evening without it, which is the only argument that has ever converted anybody. You are not a spokesperson for anything. You are a person at a table. Ask God to keep your peace independent of the room, because a peace that needs the room to agree with it is still being rented.