The Peace of Our Children

On peace, and courage, in "prepping"

This post is a response to a comment, left on a previous post regarding making preparations for our households. I appreciate the opportunity to reply here.

I do want to learn more on these topics. As thank you for the links. Prior to getting pregnant I was trying to delve into the world of alternative ways to support myself should the world go awry but had a hard time trying to balance what it meant to be prepared without being paranoid and obsessive over it all. Out of the list you made the only one I’m confident in is my foundation in God. Now that I’m raising a baby I just feel accomplished if I was able to be present with my child all day and have dinner ready for my husband at 5pm lol. Where did you first start with all this without feeling overwhelmed? Did you ever struggle with fear, in regards to prepping, should there come a time we have to rely on means to survive?

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Back in the day, as the conversation at times must begin, I was a new mother with a new fire lit to labor for the good of my family and home, and I took those responsibilities seriously and earnestly. One of the first things I learned how to do was to cook from scratch, brown rice first, as that sounded the most wholesome-natural-foods-vibe that I could dream of. By the time baby number four arrived, seven years later, we were well committed to not only eating clean, but to using health care and medicines that respected the brilliance of how the body was designed. It was a large learning curve, and my family still remembers many of the different diet variations we rotated through, but as I had to prepare three meals a day anyway, it didn’t seem overly daunting other than in finding quality cookbooks that didn’t have processed foods or ingredients only available in places like Morocco. The internet wasn’t a thing in our household; searching meant pulling books off shelves in either Barnes and Nobel or in gloriously musty used book stores.

But as it does, the world does seep in, and soon enough I became educated on the Real State of Things. The grocery store, was in fact, full of laboratory experiments marketed as stuff for human consumption…and by no mistake, had a pharmacy within to offset the side effects of eating said products. I learned about pesticides, GMO’s, CAFO’s, EMF’s, and the history of the AMA. I rode the wave upon wave of hoping for a political savior, especially as our own business and property saw pseudo legalized theft (taxes) increase seemingly all the time for supposed programs designed to make things better/safer/fairer/just(er). I learned that, actually no, I don’t get to choose to make my own decisions on how to use my property or what food I want to have access to or even how devoid of fake clouds I desire my sky to be. And, if you can believe it, I learned all this without a TV running in my house, a newspaper on my table, or NPR squawking in my kitchen. It was a whole lot of observation, followed by curiosity, followed by questions, followed by conversations, followed by research and reading (where, I discovered, I actually CAN understand medical abstracts and a lot of scientific papers).

Perhaps you can imagine how big my eyes grew, and how my heart fainted within me. I clutched my babies a little closer and became more focused upon solutions, mainly for their sakes and for the country and world they would inherit. It was a whole lot of “so what” and “what can I do about it” and “I’m here today for a reason and maybe this is it”.

So I planned and planted a garden. And then I brought home goats and milked them. And then I planted an even larger garden. And we raised chicken and ducks and ate their eggs and eventually their meat. We raised rabbits for 4H, brought home a barn-sized loom, and raised a livestock guardian puppy. And I maintained and grew a blog and then had more babies and then started a podcast and then started homeschooling more and took more online classes and then had our first child born with Down syndrome and then painted my whole kitchen and…maybe you know the rest.

After we closed it all up and downsized and lost all of our seeds (and most of our tools) to a flood and then almost died in our van and then had another baby born with Down syndrome (there are a whole lot of “then”, yes?), I think I just mentally, emotionally, and physically…crashed. And you know what, all that bad stuff I had been learning about didn’t stop growing; it just kept getting worse. But I couldn’t do a thing about it. In fact, the best I could do at that point was just wake up, take care of my babies, go to bed, repeat. It wasn’t until we moved two more times that I could even begin to seriously start taking care of myself, and by then I needed a nap, even after a full night’s sleep, by 10:00 in the morning.

I don’t think in all of this I felt overwhelmed at all. I actually felt confident, energetic, secure, and capable. But it WAS overwhelming, and at the end of it all, my body didn’t lie to me. I wish I had spent more time in prayer and less in preparation. I wish my chief joy had been in the security of God knowing every hair on my head and less on the feeling of accomplishment. I wish I would have walked more circumspectly in wisdom and less on my own cisterns of self reliance that were born out of worry and anxiety. At the foundation of all of that was my wandering heart not believing that God was good, all the time, and that He knew what He was doing by placing me in the time I was living, with whom I was living, where I was living, under what government I was living, and with the hinderances (or so I thought) He sought fit to challenge me with.

What are some hinderances you might be facing as you seek to better live and prepare in this corrupt and fallen world? Here are a few I can think of: lack of support from your spouse, shortage of financial means, lack of help, scanty knowledge (or even where to begin), health challenges (mental, emotional, physical), pregnancy/nursing/menopause (and how about just plain ol’ menstrual cramping), and then there are priorities of the urgent such as diapers, meal preparation, cleaning, and homeschooling. This is not to even mention the constant onslaught of media yelling about how horrible everything is (and I’m not denying that it is, just that we don’t need to hear about it All The Time).

In case we forget, things have always fluctuated between a-ok (like, when we’re nine and don’t know any better) and terrifying (think about getting hauled off to Babylon not by choice). And where is God?

That is the question, isn’t it?

Because if God isn’t with you, no matter what, and if God isn’t good (no matter what), then there is nowhere else to go except to idolatry of some kind. But having a proper understanding of His sovereignty and provision DOES allow us to build houses and plant gardens (and save food and raise livestock…) even in the worst of times (Jer 29:5), AND to still be happy in the Lord because HE is of the greatest value (Ps 144:15).

In the spirit of put off and put on (Col 3), let us put off unbelief, anxiety, fear, and distress. Let us put off soaking in the spirit of social media (or TV media or radio media or….). Let us put off self-anything, such as self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and instead recognize that God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble (Ps 46:1) and that it will be His grace, equipping and enabling that will help us to better take responsibility and serve our families and our communities. Let us put off comparisons and envy (for who can stand against envy, Pro 27:4), and commit to just doing what we can, when we can, with whatever means we can. Above all, let us walk in love as imitators of God (Eph 5), regardless of whether it’s legal or popular to do so.

You know, I bought The Prepper’s Blueprint by Tess Pennington (affiliate link) back in 2014 thinking I could check off every task quickly. Nine years later, I still have only bits and pieces of it completed. I still have hinderances in my life. It’s ok. At the end of the day, redeeming the time (Eph 5:16) doesn’t just mean canning all the food I can from what I grew from seed in my own garden. It primarily means loving the Lord with all my heart, mind, soul and strength, and loving my neighbor as myself (Mark 12:30-31). If you can keep that perspective, then by all means continue learning and growing in all of the things you can. If that’s too much of a struggle, back up, go back to your Bible and journal and prayer, and set your heart at peace, first.

Courage, dear friends. The Lord is trustworthy (Pro 3:5), and ultimately your safety, and the peace of your children, is of Him (Pro 21:31, Isa 54:13).