[Attention! Important! If you read the Bloodroot post of April 8, defnitely read this one!]

I could have dyed! Again! Only this would have been a lot worse than my misadventure with the goldenrod!

I’m glad I looked before I leaped, and, in researching bloodroot as dye, “happened upon” how Bloodroot can make you die, a not-nice death. (A lot of articles I read failed to mention the danger!)

It’s been a week of near misses. Things that might not kill, but would inflict… pain, if not nasty illness.

The early morning hour my stocking feet stepped all around that dim-lit bathroom floor before I noticed right between those feet, that dark irregular spot that moved, and proved to be a hornet. (Hornet stings make nasty for anyone, but misery for sensitive types like me.)

Then there was that little thing I suddenly noticed, suspended midair, right by my Bible-reading eye during morning devotions. Brownish spider, inches from my face! A brown recluse? I don’t know, I smashed it so fast between clapped hands!

Then later, in bedroom, a seeming bit of fuzz on brass coaster’s camouflage, right by where my face would lie asleep: another such spider! Again, not your benign Daddy-long legs. Spider bite made deathly ill a former (full-grown, male) occupant of this house, and I (with aforementioned sensitivity) shiver a bit each time I see what might be one of these beasties.

But Bloodroot tops the week’s list of near-miss dangers. Thank God I “happened upon” this article where (in the excerpt) Rita Buchanan describes her experience on simply carding a bit of wool dyed with it: horrible!

With my (now usual) April asthma, what would it do to me? This could have been it, folks! My next-to-last post about the mild-looking enemy that did me in. (Or, I could have ended up wishing I were dead.) But God…

All this reminds me of flashier near misses. The careening eighteen-wheeler I would have met head-on at that road curve but for my laughter at radio comedy slowing me down. The time a friend and I went flying airborne off that isolated icy road (as I prayed probably the world’s shortest prayer), near-missing huge tree to the left, steep ditch to the right, and precipitous ravine just ahead, by fallen log catching rear tires, stopping the pickup short. And… and…

Sometimes it’s preventive forethought. But often it’s so-called “co-incidence.” But I don’t call it that. I call it God’s intervention. And thank Him profusely for it.

Man knows not his time (nor does woman). Anyone reading this could depart earth in seconds. But He knows every hair on my head and every thought in it, and I believe that until He’s ready for me to go, He’ll keep me here, for whatever obscure purpose.

But who wants to mess about, tempting fate and inviting pure ugly misery, with deadly poison? Not I! So — while enjoying at safe distance its undeniable beauty — “Bah!” to bloodroot for dyeing!  

(And there’s a spiritual lesson in this somewhere, isn’t there?)

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