On our farm in Ohio, poison ivy was a serious scourge, and I'm so allergic to it that the minute I see a small spot I have to run to the emergency room for a cortisone shot. By the time I get the shot, perhaps a couple of hours from noticing the spot, it has usually quadrupled in size and swelled up a quarter inch from my skin. Here in Kentucky, poison ivy can still be a major problem, but I am blessed to have only a small amount of it scattered on my acres. A few spots of it are in the labyrinth. It's the one thing I will use serious poison herbicide on.
When I wrote the tweet last year, I was simply thinking of persistent bad habits or besetting sins we try to root out of our lives. If we try that in our own strength, it doesn't really work at all. If we do our best to cooperate with God and allow the grace of the Holy Spirit to rid us of them, that's effective. Yet still, when we think they're "all killed," they're likely to pop up again unexpectedly.
It's a funny thing, really, as I think about it now, for a longer devotional. Probably the most besetting, persistent, unkillable sin that has bedevilled me for years and decades and half-centuries was anger. I was so often irritable, so angry. Everything made me mad, it sometimes seemed. I learned, thank God, about ceasing from one's own efforts and turning character development over to God at 18 years old. But you still have to cooperate with that, turn instantly to God the second the temptation arrives, submit fully to the leading of the Spirit. . . you know what I mean. I hope you do! And still. . . poison ivy all over my soul. I can begin to describe how many oceans of tears I cried over this, especially when it hurt the people I love most. I thought I was the most unregenerate sinner that ever lived.
When I moved to Kentucky, as I've described before, my husband was well into his last illness, and I sometimes felt that the anger and impatience were in as full a sway as they ever had been. Enter a certain loving and beloved pastor. When I poured out my heart to him, he did not counsel me to submit more fully to God. He did not pray earnestly with me that God would have full control in my life. He could see clearly, God bless him, that I was already wholeheartedly devoted, determined to live as a child of God. He knew God had, in fact, sent me to him to help God do some deeper surgery. He said, "There's more underneath this. You need to come back."
I did. He listened. I talked and talked, pitching incoherent bits of my soul out on the floor of his study as Bert and Ernie pitch out toys until the get to the bottom of the toy chest. He listened. He loved. He asked questions and listened some more. We prayed, but not as often formally as simply in the actions of talking and listening--the holiest of holy communions.
Within three weeks, my anger faded away and I was able to be patient and kind at home, even though it took us three years to get to the bottom of the toy chest. I'll never forget the epiphanies, especially the one overwhelming, life-changing one when I finally, for the very first time, saw clearly the particular, specific background atmosphere of my childhood (unintended by the adults who caused it, I hasten to add) which had controlled my entire life for . . . well, as I said, years and decades and half-centuries. (One half century, anyway.)
I'M FREE, I'M FREE, THANK GOD I'M FREE!! So today, looking at that line about poison ivy in my labyrinth and realizing that here, in Berea, I only have small bits of it, when in Ohio I had acres, that has serious meaning for me. I pray for you a listener such as I found, to help you translate what God is really trying to say and do in your inner life.
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