COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
Over the past six years that launched with pandemic lockdowns and empty grocery store shelves, the issue of “disaster preparedness” continually asserts itself. Living adjacent to the San Andreas Fault in California, Richard and I have become accustomed to the public service announcements reminding everyone to keep a supply of water and food sufficient for two weeks on hand. Earthquake awareness is the price we pay for living near the mountains where the winters are lovely. Yet something different happened with the pandemic.
Even though the urgency has abated somewhat since 2020, a new normal settled into many people’s awareness. I watched people take up backyard farming, raising chickens and gardens. YouTube channels featuring “preppers” showing how to prepare and store food and resources, even ammunition, in case of an emergency—any kind of emergency—caught the attention of many people who already had a love for living on the land.
There was a certain romantic overlay to the idea of people raising and preserving vegetables and buying freezers to store the grass-fed beef from the cow they shared with another organic-committed family. Homemade bread and backyard chickens offered independence and control over what one’s family was eating.
I admit that a certain part of myself was drawn to this do-it-yoursef food prep lifestyle.
I admit that a certain part of myself was drawn to this do-it-yoursef food prep lifestyle. I grew up with parents who had survived the Great Depression. My dad’s family farmed in Minnesota, and he had an innate green thumb and the soul of an experimental horticulturalist. A physical therapist by profession, he nevertheless planted enormous gardens each year, and my sister and I grew up eating his planting experiments: purple potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, popcorn, new strains of sweet corn, tomatoes, beans, apples from the branches which he grafted onto existing apple trees, and so forth. He even ventured into bee-keeping and raising sheep.
My mother, a nurse by profession and the daughter of Romanian homesteaders from Saskatchewan, Canada, grew up on an Angus and wheat ranch. Her parents butchered their own meat every year, and my mom learned early how to preserve food for the winter. My dad’s garden kept my mom and us girls busy every summer, and winters were secure with a full freezer and basement shelves lined with canned beans, tomatoes, peaches, and applesauce.
All to say, the surge of prepper popularity that peaked shortly after the pandemic and has never really subsided felt somehow familiar and just a tiny bit nostalgic. But it didn’t draw me in.
The Work Prepared
God has given me a different life from the the ten-acre Oregon farm of my childhood. Through circumstances I did not desire or manipulate, I found myself where I thought I’d never want to be: in Southern California at the age of 29. Southern California is truly nothing like the rural Northwest. The culture shock was disorienting, but the Lord knew what He was doing.
Eventually He provided Richard and me with a house, and then He systematically led us out of Adventism and gave us faith to believe that the Lord Jesus had already completed all we needed for salvation. Not only did He lead us to Himself, He provided for us as we extracted ourselves from our embedded Adventist lives. Truly, leaving Adventism was the most identity-shattering event of our lives—and we had walked through some pretty destabilizing changes.
I remember the day when I realized that if I didn’t leave Adventism, I would betray Jesus. I knew I had to walk away, and the feeling of loss and depression overwhelmed me. Richard was strong; he knew we had to leave, and I realized then why the New Testament said that the husband is the head of the wife—the husband is the spiritual leader of the family. I realized I could walk away from all I knew because of two things: the Lord was leading me out, and I could trust Him, and Richard was leading us through the details of extricating ourselves. I could lean on his strength.
Only the Lord could have designed our starting a weekly Bible study for former and questioning Adventists, and only the Lord could have brought Proclamation! magazine and Life Assurance Ministries to us. He prepared us for this work as He had led us to edit and design magazines before leaving Adventism—but finally we had a publication to produce which actually published truth. We could clearly state the gospel and expose the deceptions that shaped the lives of so many people who share our background.
So what does this background have to do with prepping?
Extrication Complete!
It happened in 2006. We were solidly OUT of Adventism and involved in a local Christian church. I was editing Proclamation!, and Richard was designing it in his off-hours. He was still employed at Loma Linda University. The dean for whom he worked knew he was no longer Adventist. In fact, Richard had told the dean when we left that he was no longer Adventist, but he assured Richard that was not a problem.
Now, however, Richard’s involvement with Life Assurance Ministries and Proclamation! had become a problem. In June, he was terminated. He couldn’t be employed by LLU and also produce Proclamation!.
Now we were totally disentangled from Adventism—but we had lost our major source of income. Every step of following Jesus alone seemed to bring a new crisis of faith—and with it, a new discovery of how little our own free will could control our circumstances. God, we were learning, is sovereign—and He began to teach us that our security would come only from Him. His word would tell us the truth, and we were to believe it literally.
We had always known of Jesus’ assurance that people are not to worry about what to eat or drink. Matthew 6:25–34 was used even in Adventism to admonish us that if we were seeking His kingdom by sharing the Three Angels’ Messages of the seventh-day Sabbath, the hour of His investigative judgment, and the warning to come out of Sunday-keeping Babylon because Jesus was coming soon, God would provide what we needed.
Within the context of Adventism, Jesus’ words were blurred by the lens of our great controversy worldview.
Within the context of Adventism, Jesus’ words were blurred by the lens of our great controversy worldview. His reminder that the of birds of the air and the lilies of the field were objects of His care were poetic metaphors designed to mildly shame us into not being like unbelieving Gentiles. We were not to spend our energy making money and moving to better neighborhoods; we were to sacrifice for the sake of “the kingdom”. After all, Jesus would not come to take us to His kingdom until we “finished the work” and helped take the good news of Adventism and the Sabbath to the whole world.
Until that pivotal month of June, 2006, Jesus’ words in Matthew 6 were proverbs to me rather than promises. Proverbs, I had learned, were truisms: they reflected general reality that did not necessarily equal literal promises. I related to Matthew 6 as truisms, but I did not perceive them to be direct promises of God.
Yet when Richard came home with no work in sight, the Lord began to show us how much we had underestimated His words. Richard taped a running tally on the wall of our home office on which he recorded our bank balance. Always careful with money, he kept track of our spending, but we were not depriving ourselves of necessities. As his four-month enforced unemployment proceeded, he said to me one day, “Our bank balance has been staying stable in spite of our income being cut in more than half.”
I remember the astonishment I felt, and I realized for the first time that Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:25–34 were promises, not truisms. We were meant to read these words literally, not merely as metaphors designed to soothe us, like a parent saying, “There, there, it’ll be OK…”
General soothing never worked well for me unless I knew HOW things would “be OK”. And now I was seeing that Jesus was telling us HOW to trust Him. His words were not idle truisms that we were supposed to help Him fulfill. Here is what He said:
“For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, [as to] what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, [as to] what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and [yet] your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single cubit to his life span? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is [alive] today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, [will He] not much more [clothe] you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For all these things the Gentiles eagerly seek; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”—Matthew 6:25–34 LSB
That summer I began to understand that Jesus’ literal words meant literally what He said. He wanted us to trust Him literally. If we were trusting His leading—as Richard had in refusing to stop his involvement with Proclamation! and Life Assurance Ministries even though it meant being terminated from his job—we would see that the Lord Jesus who had saved us and who had given us the grace of reaching back to help those still caught in the false gospel of Adventism would provide for us. Literally.
It seems too obvious—but realizing that Jesus was PROMISING His people that He would always see them and provide for them if they trusted Him with the work He gave them to do changed something inside my head. Watching the Lord keep our bank account stable when we couldn’t account for the stability showed us personally that it is the Lord who is our Sustainer. He didn’t just provide income; He kept us stable in ways we could not explain.
Four months after being fired, the Life Assurance Ministries board asked Richard to become a supported leader of the ministry. This provision was the Lord’s.
Jesus literally promises to provide what we need when we trust Him. He keeps His promises.
But What About Prepping?
As the background noise of pandemics, wars, restrictive legislation and escalating costs swirls around us and threatens to alter life as we know it, I am convicted by Jesus’ words.
Recently I have been studying the gospel of Luke. Once again I realize how often Jesus told His disciples not to worry about their sustenance. Luke 12 records the same reassurance that Matthew recorded in chapter 6. In fact, in Luke Jesus not only tells his disciples not to worry about what they will eat and wear, but He tells them not to SEEK after their food and drink. To emphasize His point, He uses the ravens and the lilies as examples.
His point is that the neither the ravens nor the lilies can do anything to help God provide them with nourishment or with their protection. It is God alone who cares for them—and they thrive in beauty and freedom because God takes care of them.
My marching orders are to do what He puts in front of me to do. I cannot be distracted by worrying how we will survive the unknown.
My marching orders are to do what He puts in front of me to do. I cannot be distracted by worrying how we will survive the unknown. Jesus—God the Son—has promised to provide, even if we cannot see how it will be done. After all, He sent ravens bearing food to Elijah. He provided homes to support the 12 and the 70 when he sent His disciples into the cities of Judah. And He kept our bank account stable during the months after Richard lost his job at Loma Linda.
My great surprise has been realizing that when God makes us His own, He not only brings us the work He wants us to do, but that work comes with His own benefits package, if you will. He literally keeps His promises and provides what we need!
I am not saying we shouldn’t have enough water and food on hand to last for two weeks should a crisis occur. What I am saying is that the Lord has convicted me that His word is literally true. When He says He will do something, He will do it.
I do not see a large garden in my future nor a cache of preserved food (although I admit to making my own sourdough for the sheer fun of it!) What I do see is my need to give up my sense of being able to control the future and to trust my Father instead. He knows me, and He knows Richard—and He has been faithful all these years. He is already in the future, and in Him we are secure. †
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