January 8, 2024
Hello my Beloved,
It feels so good to finally be caught up on my letters. I hope never to get that far behind again. This week has been good. In Carpentry, we worked on redesigning the layout of Thorne’s office and the shop. He liked most of my ideas. After tearing his office apart and rebuilding it according to our new design, he has a lot more room and things are much more organized. Years of loading trailers at UPS has taught me a thing or two about how to put a lot of things in small places.
We also did the same thing to our shop. I disassembled several things that we no longer used, reworked some others to make them more usable, and opened up a lot more room for students to work on projects. Thorne handed out brand new PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for everyone. I now have my own monogramed hard hat, goggles, and work belt. I look forward to the tear down and rebuild of the two small houses in the shop next week.
In the Prison Fellowship Bible studies this week, I finally got to engage Jason. I have had multiple people come over the past few months to try to set up a debate between Jason and I because of his forcefulness and unorthodox ideas. Until this week I had never met him. He is indeed a strange unit. So far, he has told me that he is a Christian, but he is not saved. Jason says that a person is not saved until they reach a point where they no longer sin. He also told me that we should only follow the commands of Christ. I’m not sure what he means by that. He claims he has pastored two different churches, started his own ministry, but only became a Christian a few years ago. He also claims to have discovered the ‘secret’ to salvation and it’s not the ‘Roman’s road.’ To understand these secret things, you have to know how to properly interpret the Bible.
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The funny thing is, he is the only one in 2000 years that has figured it out. He says he keeps trying to teach people these secrets, but no one seems to understand. Hmmm. Please pray that I will be patient with Jason and that I will have wisdom in my future engagements with him.
I watched a show on prepping this week. I was rather disappointed in the individual they featured. His prepping plan involved only himself. He had very little in the way of reproducibility. His skill set was limited, and he was going to rely on his house cats to help him hunt.
I have always found the idea of prepping to be a fascinating concept. It appealed to me for several reasons. First, I have watched multiple generations of my family, including my father and grandfather, live as self-sufficiently as possible. Second, it just seems natural that if I am going to love my neighbors, as Mark 12:31 commands all Christians to do, then I should equip myself to meet my family’s needs first, and then help as many as I can beyond that.
Prepping just means preparing to live safely through and emergency situation. It could be something as short as a tornado and a safe room to retreat to, or a year’s long scenario like the electric grid being destroyed or some form of catastrophic financial collapse. The first step in prepping is to decide what you want to prep for. Prepping to live safely for two weeks without electricity because of a hurricane is far different than prepping for the collapse of the electrical grid because of a Coronal Mass Ejection.
Regardless of what a person decides to prep for, prepping should always start with like-minded friends. Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 talks about the importance of having friends. Not only does a community of friends provide for a greater accumulation of skills and resources, it provides for a larger workforce to draw from for the many jobs that may need to be done.
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The jobs, skills needed, and resources needed tend to fall into several categories: security, food/water, shelter, medical, communication, transportation, government, and outside communities.
Most preppers place a heavy emphasis on security. They do this by buying large quantities of firearms and ammunition. While these thigs are helpful, security also involves repair and usage training for all firearms. Like any tool, a weapon is only as good as its training allows it to be. This includes the safe handling of the weapon. Security can also involve working as a team, intel gathering (personal and electronic), perimeter establishment, and plans to evacuate if necessary.
While security is important, so are the many other areas. You can only live a few days without water and a few weeks without food. There are two aspects when considering food and water preps, stored supply, and renewable supply. Stored supplies of food can include off the shelf canned goods, pasta, beans and rice, as well as freeze dried, dehydrated, smoked, cured, or salted foods.
At least 6 months of stored food is optimal. This allows time to shift to renewable supplies like chickens, rabbits, goats, and other animals and fish as well as the planting and harvesting of heirloom seeds for fruits and vegetables. While water can be stored in a variety of ways, it should be done with a small supply of iodine and or chlorine to make sure it stays safe. While water filters like the Life Straw allows you to draw water from any source safely, they are only good for a 1,000 or so gallons before they should be replaced, a shallow manual well will provide a near infinite safe supply, a deep well is even better.
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Along with food and water, the skills to maintain, cultivate, and prepare what you have is also important. That includes knowing how to ration your supplies.
Of course, shelter is always important. That includes not only a sturdy structure and a way to heat and cool it, it also includes the tools, skills, and materials to repair and build onto it, especially materials like nails, rope, screws, lumber, and metal. Clothing is also a type of shelter. Sturdy outfits designed for different seasons and weathers are a must. Skills like sewing and tanning can turn scrap cloth and animal pelts into nice clothing.
Sanitation and hygiene are also important. Providing for a way to stay clean and a way to remove waste from living quarters is essential to keep disease and poisoning to a minimum.
Having a way to light the inside of a shelter safely greatly increases it’s use during bad weather or darkness. Oil lamps and candles work well if you have the skill and material to continually procure wicks and fuel. Another option would be solar lighting. A solar generator is a huge bonus because it never runs out of fuel and can power small electronics and appliances all the way up to whole houses depending on the size of the generator.
One final thing when considering shelter, make it a place where you can continue to grow as a person. Intellectually, continue to educate yourself on a variety of topics. Not only are there good books on every aspect of prepping out there, but there are also many free electronic books, audio, and videos that can be downloaded to a cheap tablet. Emotionally, we need recreation or some form of entertainment. Music, are, games, media, or some forms of competitions are great for keeping stress levels to a minimum.
The medical aspect of prepping is always the most difficult. Primarily because both the materials and the skills needed to be successful in the area require special outlets and training facilities to acquire them. Granted, simple IFAK’s (Individual First Aid Kits) can be ordered through Amazon, but the tools and materials needed to permanently close a wound, fight infection, or treat a severe burn requires a professional.
The ability to communicate is also essential to prepping. Though there are many ways to communicate without using electricity, radio communications is the simplest and usually the most effective way to communicate with others. This will require some way to recharge whatever radios are used, though. Small UHF/VHF radios have a range of at least several miles. Granted, to use them in nonemergency situations, you need a license. A HF radio can send and receive over very long distances and are useful in acquiring news from the surrounding area as well as from far away.
The ability to travel can be tricky to prep for. If there is an EMP, there is a lot of disagreement on which vehicles will be affected and how badly they will be affected. Generally, pre-1980 vehicles are said to be the least damaged by an EMP. If there is a weather-related disaster, roads may be impassable. During an economic collapse, there may not be enough fuel or the price of it may make it impossible to afford. Different types of vehicles have different pros and cons. An older vehicle is easier to work on and repair. An electric vehicle can be charged through solar if the charger is large enough. Of course, horses work well over many types of terrain. Human powered transportation like bikes and canoes are also great options. I think the most important aspect of prepping is government. Not national, state, or county governments, but the structure and process that you and your friends put together that will make the short- and long-term decisions for your group. Regardless of the form of government you use, a constitution should be drawn up and ratified by everyone in your group.
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I would caution anyone that wanted to step away from the principles that guided the creation of our own constitution and country.
The Declaration of Independence says, “We hold the truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” It goes on to list some of those rights and then says that government’s job is to protect those God-given rights. This mirrors what Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17 says about God’s purpose for government, to promote good and to punish evil. Therefore, if God is real and the Bible is true, all governments and their laws and principles, should in some way reflect God’s moral law, otherwise known as Natural Law.
How would I apply this to a community in a long-term prepping situation? First, I would define my community. That would usually involve those families that lived around me, that were committed to working together with us for the common good of our community. Each family that owned land in the community would choose one member to serve on a governing counsel. The governing council would be the decision-making body for the community. They would not have the authority to vote to take someone’s assets or force them to do a particular job if they didn’t want to. They would vote on how to use materials and skills that were donated for the use of everyone as a whole. All laws promoting or preventing any sort of action would have to be grounded in God’s moral law. This is of grave importance because almost all of the problems we suffer in our country today can be traced back to some form of moral relativism.
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Relativism is a particular philosophical position on the usage of the word ‘truth.’ Another way to frame up the way a relativist see’s truth versus the way an absolutist sees truth is to say truth is subjective versus objective. A relativist sees truth as something that is entirely internal. Truth comes from within, not without. It’s the subject (you) that determines the truth of an object. Therefore, everyone has their own truth and no one’s truth is better than anyone else’s.
The correct way to understand truth is to understand it as existing apart from your perceptions. Meaning that truth is that which corresponds to the reality of an object, not in the perception of it. For example, I may perceive that a sliding glass door is open and attempt to walk through it. Instead of freely traveling through the opening, I walk into the spotless glass of the closed door. The truth of the door being open or closed did not rest in my perception of it, it rested in the reality of the door actually being open or closed. In this case, my perception and my belief were wrong about the door. Because I acted on that belief, I was painfully hindered from moving forward.
Now, take this concept and apply it to morality. Are sin and virtue subjective or objective? I would argue that God is real, and He has flawlessly communicated to us through the Bible. My conclusion is based on a thorough examination of the arguments and evidence, both for and against my conclusion. Therefore, when the Bible says in Mark 10:18 that no one is good except God alone, we must conclude that good/virtue can only come from God. This means that anything that we call good that doesn’t reflect God’s nature or will is not truly good.
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Since God designed His creation to live according to His will, which is good, to live against His will is to suppress the truth and to invite His wrath (Romans 1:18.) If I live a life that contradicts what God says is sinful, it doesn’t matter what I sincerely believe, I am going to suffer His wrath.
The majority of people in America today believe that right and wrong is subjective and live accordingly. That’s why moral positions in our country are always in flux. They are rooted in relativistic things like feelings and pragmatism. Therefore, right and wrong changes as quickly as a person’s feelings or desires do. Furthermore, there is no way to discern whose feelings or desires are good and whose are bad. That’s why our society is so divided.
Until we return to a society governed by God’s Moral Law, we will always be a society doomed to fail, nationally or in a prepping neighborhood. That’s why my communities Constitution would always be grounded in God’s Moral Law.
I love you very much my Beloved. Thank you for working with me to keep God’s Moral Law at the center of our family and friends.
Love,
Me!
SCRAP!
GELPOY!
LAAF!
ILYSOOOM!
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