Lux Lucet

A decimated ash tree in my backyard, courtesy of Hurricane Ike.  September, 2008.

“For this afternoon, a high wind warning is in effect,” said the radio announcer. “Whatever,” I thought to myself and soon forgot the comment as I drove to church that Sunday morning. The date was September 14, 2008, and I was about to get a lesson in preparedness that I have not forgotten in over seven years since that time.

Driving home, it was a pretty typical late summer/early fall day in Cincinnati. I seem to recall that it was partly sunny and generally fairly pleasant outside. When I arrived home, my family and I ate lunch. And then things got interesting. Seemingly out of nowhere, strong winds began gusting from the south. As the gusts turned into sustained high winds and the tops of the trees in my back yard bent over so as to almost touch the ground, I remembered the high wind warning on the radio from that morning. Whatever indeed. After several minutes of this, the winds vanished just as rapidly as they had appeared. It was as if a hurricane had just blown through the area, which, as I later found out, is pretty much what actually what happened.

Now if you know anything about where Cincinnati is located – we’re about 550 miles inland from the Atlantic coast – you’d know that folks in this part of the country don’t really expect to see hurricanes. Ever. And yet the sustained winds that came through the area that day were over 70 miles an hour, meeting the definition of a hurricane. As it turned out, the high winds were the remnants of Hurricane Ike, a category 4 hurricane, which had struck the gulf coast of Texas a day before. After making landfall, the remnants of the storm headed northeast. Aided by what the meteorologists call a “shortwave trough,” the winds intensified, once again reaching hurricane levels as they roared through the Ohio Valley, causing massive damage to many major metropolitan areas in the region.

At my house, the winds knocked out power almost immediately. Power outages themselves aren’t uncommon as a result of storms. But this outage was to last four days, they longest by far such outage I’ve personally experienced. A large Ash tree in our back yard was snapped in two and had to be taken down. Just up the street, a neighbor was severely injured when a tree fell on her. I drove around in my car to see what things looked like, and was shocked to find out that the power was out for miles in every direction. Much to the surprise of everyone, all of greater Cincinnati was effectively was shut down by this one windstorm.

I realize that compared to natural disasters some people have endured, my story doesn’t rank as particularly noteworthy. The house didn’t sustain any damage. And the biggest inconvenience was having to stumble around at night by the dim light of a kerosene lamp. That, and the food in the freezer going bad. But all this it did get me to thinking. I came to realize that many of the things that I took for granted – the so-called “grid,” items such as electric power, phone service, running water, readily available food and fuel – could disappear in a moment.

At the same time and about 600 miles to the east, another disaster was unfolding. The 2008 financial crisis was in full swing that fall. I remember it quite well as at the time I was working as a telephone representative for a large, nationally known financial services company. Every day I’d get panicked calls from 401(k) investors asking about their balances. I’ll never forget one call. After quoting an account balance to a lady, I was greeted with stunned silence. Finally she said, “I just lost $30,000.” Tough times those.

That fall was quite a wake-up call to me. Almost simultaneously I had witnessed the failure of both the “grid” and the financial system. Perhaps my latent assumptions that things would always work the way they were supposed to were not really warranted.

Prepping: What is it?

As is the case with most people, up until the events of the fall of 2008 made me reconsider, I had never really thought about what could happen in the event a major shock disrupted the everyday, ordinary systems that I depended on, not just for my comfort, but for my life. Seeing two such significant disruptions in so short a time was startling. And it was then that I began to consider what I might do to put myself in a better position to deal with similar circumstances should they occur in the future. In other words, I began to think like about prepping.

Since this series of posts is about prepping, it might be good at this point to offer a definition of the term. One way of defining a term is to say what it is not. Prepping is not fear mongering. It is not about scaring people into action. Prepping is not disaster porn. We do not delight in destruction. Prepping is not the actions of some tinfoil hat wearing paranoid crank hiding out in his bunker. Prepping is not about being antisocial. Neither is it about cheering on the end of the world as we know it.

As Proverbs 22:3 tells us, “A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, But the simple pass on and are punished.” Proverbs 27:12 repeats this idea in almost the same words. For the Christian, prepping is simply the realistic assessment of potential threats to our well-being in light of Scripture, and then the using of those same Scriptures to develop a prudent plan of action for countering them. When I speak of prepping, this is what I have in mind.

Prepping: Why bother with it?

Why should Christians prep for possible disasters? After all, the money and effort that go into prepping certainly could be used for something else. Why go to all the trouble? The short answer is that Christians should prep for the same reasons they do anything else, to glorify God. That said, is it really possible to glorify God by making preparations for a possible breakdown in the fabric of society? It seems to me that the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Sometimes we read stories about people who die in foolish ways. Not far from me in Kentucky is a popular destination for hikers called Red River Gorge. I have not been there myself, but I’m told its quite beautiful. Yet for all its natural beauty, the steep cliffs and rock formations that are such an attraction also are quite dangerous. It’s not uncommon to see stories on the news about people being severely injured or killed while hiking the trails of the park, usually as the result of their failure to allow wisdom and good judgment to govern their actions. To put in another way, the deaths of these hikers are, very often, the result of their own foolishness.

Life is a precious gift of God; I know if no Christian who would argue that point. And if life is a precious gift of God, does it not follow that we glorify the giver by seeking to preserve it through all lawful means? And on the flip side, if a careful assessment of the world around us in light of God’s Word reveals a high probability of serious economic and social problems developing in the future, and if we do nothing to mitigate the threat facing us, are we not like the unwise hikers at Red River Gorge, some of whom have perished as a result of taking foolish risks?

But beyond honoring God by being good stewards of our lives, prepping also is an opportunity to be salt and light of the sort Jesus talked about in the Sermon on the Mount. If there is a major shock to the economies of the developed world, and in the opinion of this author such a shock is inevitable, people are going to need help and people are going to be in search of answers. As Christians, we can be in position to give help and answers only if we first have our own house in order. If in the face of an economic collapse we’re as financially destitute and intellectually confused as everyone else, we fail to be good witnesses for the Lord Jesus Christ. He has given us sufficient information in his Word to understand what is right, and has promised to give us the wisdom to apply that Word if we ask him. As Christians, we have the obligation to do just that.

Prepping: Is it Christian?

In some ways, answering this question repeats what I have already said, and I hope that I have made it clear that prepping is most certainly consistent with Christianity. But some might ask, Is not prepping showing lack of faith in God? After all, God has promised to take care of us. Christ himself told us not to worry about what we should eat or wear. Doesn’t prepping conflict with the Word of God?

The notion that prepping shows lack of faith in God reminds me of a story related by Gordon Clark in one of his books. Clark told of a friend who was riding in a taxi over a mountainous road in Turkey. The road was filled with hairpin turns and bordered by steep cliffs, but the driver raced the car along without any apparent concern for safety. When Clark’s friend suggested to the driver that he may want to slow down, the driver replied that if it was the will of Allah that they would live, they would live. And if it were the will of Allah that they would die, they would die. Such fatalism, the notion that God ordains the ends apart from the means, and that men are not responsible for their actions, is foreign to Christianity.

Christians are responsible to God for all their thoughts, all their words, and all their actions. Far from showing lack of faith, I would argue that prepping is actually a way for Christians to honor God. If a study of the Word of God leads us to conclude that, due to its own immoral, ungodly actions, the West likely will face severe economic and political problems in the coming years, and we as Christian do nothing both to warn people now and to prepare ourselves for what is coming, we will be held accountable to God for our silence and for our inaction. God has provided in his Word the both the means to recognize brewing trouble and instructions on steps we can take to help us through it. Further, he has called us to be his witnesses, his watchmen. And if we see trouble coming and say nothing, then that guilt is upon us. Ignoring God’s warnings, disregarding the help he offers us in his Word, and failing to alert others are not acts of faith. They are foolishness.

Conclusion

When sending out the twelve disciples on their first mission trip, Jesus warned them, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). Certainly Christ’s words can be applied to Christians at any time and place. Even in the best of circumstances, Christians live as pilgrims and strangers on the earth. But some times and places are more dangerous than others. In the opinion of this author, we are entering a new era that likely will be far more dangerous for Western Christians than anything most of us have experienced to this point.

Ignoring the Law of God and right reason, in the summer of 2015 the Supreme Court of the United States elected to call good evil and evil good when it declared state-level prohibitions on gay marriage to be unconstitutional.  

Christians in the West have been greatly blessed by several hundred years of peace and prosperity. But circumstances appear to be changing. Who would have thought that the day would come in America when Christian small business owners would be persecuted for their refusal to go along with the absurdity of gay marriage (see here, here, here and here). But this is now becoming a commonplace in the formerly land of the free.

Who would have thought that the wealthy and militarily powerful United States would find itself in a position where is has a collapsing economy at the same time its aggressive, unaffordable, unsustainable, neoconservative inspired foreign policy has it at war with much of the Islamic world and rattling sabers with Russia and China to boot?

Who would have thought that a nation founded upon the Biblical idea of limited constitutional government would ever find itself a bloated, inefficient welfare state, punishing the prudent while showering welfare queens both corporate and private with so-called entitlement payments, which largess has turned its federal government into the largest debtor in world history?

None of these things – vanishing personal freedom and property rights, a severe downgrade in public morality, a collapsing economy, an aggressive and dangerous foreign policy of world hegemony, and a crushing debt load – when examined in the light of Scripture bodes well for the future of the United States. Taken together, they are a frightening harbinger of serious trouble in the offing.

As Christians, we have an obligation to God, to our families, to ourselves, and to our unsaved neighbors not only to be aware of these circumstances, but to take effective action so that we are not blindsided when the chickens come home to roost.

[To be continued]