On Prepping

Are you prepared?  For every conceivable contingency?  Are you ready?  For every inconceivable contingency?  Would you survive a riot, war, nuclear disaster, fire, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, virus, comet, or solar storm?  Or live through a confluence of all of these events?  Are you prepared?!?!

It is insatiable--our striving for security.  Once our belly is full, we fill our shelves.  It will not suffice to provide for today.  We must lay up stores for tomorrows--exquisite tomorrows--for distant heirs.  Once we have insured against disability, we might insure ourselves against a pet’s death.  But there is no mass-market insurance for what is truly hazardous--things like divorce, mental illness, long-term un- and under-employment, or incarceration.  However mightily we strive, perfect security eludes us--because we are human.  Of this striving, I suppose I am guilty as any--because I am human.

To some degree, our striving is prudent—the conduct of a sentient and insecure being.  But, at some point, isn’t it absurd?  For example, why are the top 20% of Americans still striving for something that cannot make them secure--when they already control more than 80% of America’s net worth?  Can their wealth ensure them against a solar storm?  And isn’t this vast disparity in the distribution of wealth fraught with peril for both the possessed and the dispossessed--doesn’t it pit the fewer and richer against the more numerous and poorer?  And doesn’t arbitrary redistribution by government make the rich more stingy and the poor less contented?

What does our frenzied, American pursuit for possession (ie. prepping and now redistribution) say about our faith and trust in God?  Have we placed our trust in the creature--and not in the Creator?  Wouldn't this naturally detract from our faith and trust in God?  Perhaps we blame Him for the insecurity we have fueled?  Or have come to consider His conditions unsustainable—come to the conclusion of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor:  real faith is untenable and immaterial?  Perhaps, like the Inquisitor, some seek to correct God’s work, to give men bread first and then demand their abject obedience?

Jesus sought to prepare others for the future but He was no prepper.  His preparations involved faith in God, not substance.  He considered survival and security to be inferior to, subordinate to, and distractions from true salvation:  “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).  He put faith first—even before fulfillment, even before preparations for the future:  “take no thought for the morrow”, He counseled.  Though He anticipated calamities, rather than warn His disciples to prepare for every contingency, he instructed them to “seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind…..For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: and your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things” (Luke 12:29-31).  He offered the Bread of Life to those who sought miraculous provision.  He warned the rich to willingly abase and not to exalt themselves “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:13-21); “go and sell that thou has, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven” (Matthew 19:21).  He counselled us all to “Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you” (John 6:27).  When we are alarmed or hear alarms, it might be best not to go to fetch or pen the golden goose but to turn to the God of Israel and his manna—Jesus Christ.