I dwell off a gravel street within the floodplain of the Mississippi River. No levee protects my facet of the river in southwest Mississippi, and floodwater inundates my property each spring with melted snow and rainwater from up north.
When the Mississippi River is at flood stage in Cairo, Illinois, my neighbors inform me, my four-acre yard will likely be flooded ten days later. To date, my neighbors have been proper.
Nonetheless, my patch of earth was dry final February, and I made a decision to construct a fireplace within the fire to keep at bay a slight chill rising from Lake Mary. I chosen sticks and twigs from the kindling basket on the fireside and constructed a small pyramid of dry wooden that turned the inspiration for a crackling fireplace of oak and pecan logs.
All went properly, and my lounge was quickly suffused with a heat glow and the nice aroma of woodsmoke. Ah, the nation life!
Sadly, my kindling basket contained a piece of poison ivy. Once I acquired my little nook of southern Mississippi two years in the past, lots of the bushes on my property have been strangled by poison ivy vines. These vines can develop 15 ft excessive within the alluvial soil and are as thick as my wrist.
I severed these monstrous vines from their roots with my mini chainsaw, and all of the poison ivy died. Drawback solved, I instructed myself, and watched the lifeless vines drop from my bushes over the approaching months.
On the bottom, nonetheless, these lifeless vines appear like tree branches. I carelessly sawed them up for kindling together with branches from the oak, hackberry, and pecan bushes that populate my woodlot. Then I put these noxious vines in my kindling basket together with the opposite sticks and twigs.
As I constructed my fireplace one winter night time, a poison ivy department brushed my proper leg. By the top of the night, my leg regarded prefer it had sustained a second-degree burn. And my leg itched maddeningly, inflicting me to involuntarily scratch so onerous that I broke the pores and skin, which drew blood and made the poison ivy burn worse.
That was February 1st. The subsequent day, I visited Our Woman of the Lake pressing care middle, the place an in a position physician gave me a steroid shot and prescriptions for an anti-itching capsule and a medicated ointment.
My issues are over, I instructed myself as I drove residence. Certainly, the itching subsided, and the drugs allowed me to sleep.
I used to be flawed. The blistering unfold to my left leg, and two months later, my poison ivy burn has but to utterly heal.
God made the world, and I am ever grateful for the gorgeous Lake Mary sunsets and the flocks of waterbirds that collect within the sloughs alongside Lake Mary Highway–the nice blue herons, snowy egrets, ibises, and the improbable pink roseate spoonbills.
However did God go too far? Did he need to create alligators, moccasin snakes, and poison ivy? In that case, why?
As my poison ivy burn regularly fades away, I’ve concluded that God made poison ivy to remind us to watch out as we make our approach by way of this troubled world.
Evil is all over the place, and essentially the most vicious evils do not come from God. They arrive from the hearts of women and men pushed by the lust for fame, energy, and cash.
I am provincial sufficient to imagine that a variety of the evil that plagues America comes from Washington, DC, and the city lairs of the coastal elites. I am not so naive as to assume I can escape this evil by dwelling on Lake Mary Highway in rural Mississippi.
No, evil can attain me anyplace. Thus, God left me a message within the type of poison ivy to look at my step.
