Starting Preparedness Goals

Here are some of the goals my husband and I have discussed for working towards becoming prepared in as many ways as we can.

• Spiritual Preparedness - I plan to increase my scripture study.  We are going to be making sure we attend church weekly as much as our health allows.  We plan to increase our temple attendance, and to work towards generally increasing our obedience and fortifying our lives and our family.  We plan to make this a family oriented plan so it's not just adults participating.  We also plan to finish the Book of Mormon study with our family, and to shield our family with family prayer and family home evening.  Hubby and I plan to study all the prophesies of the last days as well.
• 72 Hour Kits - Also commonly called "bug out bags".  We just want to have these emergency bags put together for our family so if we need to grab them and survive off of what is in them for 3 days we could do that.  We have a good jump start on that, and just need to complete it.  It might take a little time, but at least in the beginning we now have an inventory, and the next step is to create a list of what else we need.
• Water Supply - We would like a 2 week water supply for our family.  Since that is about 1 gallon per person per day, that comes out to 84 gallons of water.  This can be accomplished in a few ways but we decided a 55 gallon bulk barrel and then some smaller storage containers would be good.  We also want to have ways to purify water and to keep what we have good while rotating it out yearly.
• Eliminate Consumer Debt - This one may take a small amount of time as in a couple years.  We have not a lot of consumer type debt, but not as much leeway in our budget, and as some preparedness stuff is our priority, we'll get it paid off as quickly as we can, but it needs to be determined as to a debt elimination schedule yet.  We probably have around $7,000 in consumer related debt.  That is manageable to pay off since it's in three chunks.
• 3 Month Food Supply - The first step in this one is to inventory what we currently have and to put it all in one location making sure it's labeled properly.  The next step in this category would be to create a 7 day meal plan with ingredients measured and calculated per week, and then work on acquiring items to total up to the 3 months rotatable food supply.
• Emergency Plans - We need to first learn about how to cope with earthquakes and floods as natural disasters for this area.  Our home sits right on the fault line area of a major fault in Utah.  We also need a communication contact plan, and a house fire plan - then we need to teach this to our children so they know what to do.
• Medication & Vitamins & Toiletries - This needs to be added to our over all 3 month or more preparedness amounts.  We have a little bit of a start with the first aid kit, and my dad donated some anti-biotics to our supply as well.
• Digitizing Documents - Our important documents, and photos, and journals need to all be digitized and saved on the flash drives we've purchased for that very thing.  We also need to make sure our real documents are easily grab-able if we need to up and leave quickly.  This will need to be updated every so often, perhaps monthly with additional photos, documents, and journal entries as we go.  Thankfully, my journal is the one that contains the most and it's already digital, just needs to be downloaded and saved.  The photos need organized, and the other documents need to be scanned.  We also intend to take gedcom files of our family history as well.
• 1 Year Food Supply - This is less of a priority than some of the others, but we can always work to acquire items here and there to build this as much as we can.  This is a lot of bulk items like flour, wheat, sugar, rice, beans, honey, powdered milk, dried fruit, and so on.  The church has some amazing resources for this as well as some of the other resources in this area for non-GMO wheat as well as some raw, local honey.
• Additional Items - If we do have time and resources to do so, we plan to work toward some other things like cold weather sleeping bags, waterproof boots for all, and thermal underwear, all the sorts of things that would help in very cold weather if we were not in our home.

Oil in Our Lamps

I am a part of some really lovely Facebook groups that have amazing ideas and discussions.  In one of them there was a video posted as a reminder of the parable we have been given about being prepared for the return of the Bridegroom whom we know to be Jesus Christ.

It really made me realize how important preparedness is - both types: Spiritual & Temporal.  I decided to get off my duff today and to start to inventory what we have.  I went through and inventoried what comes in the 4 pack of 72 hour kits that my in-laws gave us for Christmas so that we knew what we should add or how to go about putting together kits for the younger two children.  Naturally there are things we need to add such as clothing and a few other hygiene items, but to figure out what else we will need is going to be a process and a learning curve.

I went through our various first aid kits and combined about three of them into one.  This involved throwing out some expired things, and sorting the remainder into types of items to store in Ziploc bags inside the kit bag.  There may yet be a few items we add to that.

I couldn't find our wheat grinder that my parents gave us a few years back.  Our unorganized storage room is a bit of a mess, and that's one small box.  I also have not inventoried things like our over all food storage down there either.  That's something that will be up and coming.

Our Brass Plates

Our budget for this journey is somewhat limited, particularly in embarking upon it at Christmas time which always puts a strain on our finances anyway.  Thus, we are opting to start small for now, but do a lot of research, and planning.

One thing we decided was urgent, and there happened to be a really good sale for, were pocket scriptures, the smallest ones the church makes.  We found a set of them for $7.25 each.  We purchased 2 of these along with a pocket sized Children's Songbook.  We currently have two pocket sized hymn books to add to this.  I have one additional Book of Mormon in this pocket size.  We plan to shrink and laminate our patriarchal blessings, and the proclamation to the world on the family as part of our complete set of "brass plates".

In the Book of Mormon these plates were so important to Lehi and his family that the Lord instructed them to go back to the city to get them from a man who had hold of them.  He was a wicked man, and they risked their lives to get a hold of these scriptures without which they feared they would dwindle in unbelief and their faith would be lost through the next generations. If the word of God was so important to risk their lives for, it surely is one of the most important things for us as well.

And so it begins...

I figured I'd write about going from not having almost anything or knowing much through all that we learn as we go along.  I find blogs like this encouraging and perhaps it would encourage someone else.  We have grown up in the LDS church (both of us), but have struggled our entire adult and married lives to have much in the way of preparations because of tight tight budgets dealing with school and various medical needs.  We now have a little more leeway than before and would like to prepare.  Better late and something than nothing and never at all.

Hubby and I have felt a real urgency after spending some time reading scriptures as well as hearing various things, and reading various books.  Some were not official LDS doctrine, but some of the quotes are.  There are so many good quotes from prophets all the way through the modern era about these kinds of preparations.

And so we begin!

We visited my family and parents for Thanksgiving and had good conversations with them about their preparations and where to start.  We both have very faithful and prepared parents.  We will begin working on these things pretty quickly.

We heard that the two first things to do are to build a supply of water, and a 3 month supply of foods we typically eat.  That is where we will start.  Because I don't keep track of this kind of thing, this will involve some paying attention as well as menu planning and finding items to store that are less perishable.

“Should the Lord decide at this time to cleanse the Church ... a famine in this land of one year's duration could wipe out a large percentage of slothful members, including some ward and stake officers. Yet we cannot say we have not been warned.”

- Ezra Taft Benson (General Conference, April 1965)