In clearing new land, not only do you need to watch and pay attention to where the poison ivy is, but there are other precautions to be taken. Some days after my incident of inattentively wading into the poison ivy vines on one of the trees that I cut down, we decided to pull the briars and vines down that had grown up and accumulated in the trees. You know, we want the clean tree look in this new area we are clearing instead of a bunch of old briars and vines hanging down. A lot of those vines, with some hard jerking effort, will come right on down. But some of those vines are as big as your thumb and well attached to the tree. One vine, even with the effort of jumping up and grabbing it with all my weight coming down to jerk it loose, would not budge. In fact, instead of me jerking it, I guess it jerked me. The next morning, after I had gotten up and gone to work, suddenly a pain came into the lower right side of my back that I am still dealing with at this writing. It became so painful I could not work. This merited another opinion as to what is going on. I have jobs to do, I must keep working. So after taking a healing word from the Bible to stand on, I went to the doc and he confirmed it as a bad case of pulled muscle that with no work activity will take days to heal, and even then the work must be handled gently. So here I am, recuperating, jerked by the vine.
Sometimes life jerks us around. Our first line of defense and remedy is to take the word of God. His word carries his life into our life. Jesus is the Word and the life of God that is come in the flesh (John 1:14). Through faith, that living word comes into our flesh and mind with healing, comforting power, and into our spirit with eternal life. As we continue in faith we will be led in a pathway of healing and peace ranging from remedies devised by man to miracles performed by God himself. Either way, God provides abundant life for us through Jesus Christ. Do we get jerked around by our own or others bad choices? Yes. Is there a refuge and remedy in the Word? Yes. Our part is to apply that word and follow the promptings of the Spirit and reason as we walk in God’s pathway of provision. His word is the “doctor” that provides assessment and remedy. As we “follow the doctor’s orders” we can victoriously work through our situations in life that come to us from getting jerked by the vine.