It takes a lot to keep us alive*; but only one thing to kill us.
*Almost certainly; far more than you realize or could conceivably plan for.
The take-home message: Spiritual preparation is what is vital for all without exception and starting now; anything else is mere prudence.
13 comments:
One of the attributes that needs to be cultivated if you're going to survive the collapse is courage, but preppers appear to have a large amount of fear mixed in with their prudence and little enough courage.
Even though profane victory is impossible, it is better to struggle and lose than to surrender to evil.
@S - Well, despair is always bad; but my concern is with spiritual struggle, of which physical struggle is an optional subset.
It takes courage to prep. It means you are going to hold yourself-not anyone else- accountable for what happens. Those who avoid it are doing just that--- calculated avoidance of the issues which are uncomfortable.
Prepping isn't some big complicated thing-- there's a lot of basic common sense thinking ahead that can prevent a lot of stress in an emergency. The power out for a week with no clean water is pretty basic and happens somewhere in the US every year. Even the bible says something about being watchful.
People who prep are taking responsibility for what happens--including the possibility they will have prepared wrongly--but that is an actively step, rather than the passive step of blindly letting come what may without foresight or planning.
Food, water and shelter - all of which God provides in abundance.
IMHO, awareness of and gratitude for God's generosity in this garden realm is a key component of spiritual growth. Not coincidentally, those things also form a key component of an attitude of physical survival - the essentials of life are everywhere, but materialists may not be prepared to recognize that fact.
@cecil - As I said - prudence.
But I infer that the *motivation* behind the volume of discourse dedicated to the subject, the way it has become A Thing, means that we are dealing with an ideology (and a fantasy), not mere prudence
@Ben - True enough.
I think the difference now is the effect of an extra 6 or 7 billion people since the industrial revolution, dependent upon sustaining a high degree of technology/ transportation etc. - including how these extra billions of people will react to a terminal collapse.
My understanding is that civilisations which die first become spiritually rotten and then are finished off by something fairly predictable like fire, sword or starvation. It is their insane response to the impending situation that kills them in the end, e.g. building yet another identical giant statue in the case of Easter Island.
So, paradoxically, if enough people prepared spiritually for the collapse, we might avoid it!
Thanks for all the helpful posts for me personally. I wonder what you think it looks like to spiritually prep? Because you once posted warning against "imagined sin." If one were to imagine terrible things and one's reaction to them in an honest way, surely a lot of sins would be imagined. Wouldn't it be enough to lean into the experiences God gives us for spiritual growth, infrequent though they may be?
@Ron - Maybe, although I believe that enough damage has been done (eg demographically) that collapse has been unavoidable for at least a couple of decades, maybe more. But then, I have been expecting imminent collapse since about 2011, so what do I know?
@Mia - " I wonder what you think it looks like to spiritually prep?" - That's what most of this blog is about.
I can't remember the imagined sin post; but I'm sure that what we ought to be doing is in our current lives and situation, and we don't need to go hunting for it.
I think I will die in a collapse of civilization scenario, because I'm not a "push hard" person and probably will be pushed back by the people who are socially competitive and sick for the status(and power). So, I hope civilization will go on!
@Alexey - I would suggest that the core of spiritual preparation is to understand And believe (much harder) that there are worse things than death-now - and those will probably be the toughest temptations.
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