If thou art prepared, thou shall not fear

Sunday before last what was left of Hurricane Ike blew through here. That was 9 days ago - some are still without power. Some only lost it for a day and some never lost it. Large trees were blown down and fences, siding to houses, roof shingles, etc were blown away or down. The damages here were extremely minimal compared to those in Texas - and our prayers are with them. I heard many comments around about waiting in line for hours at the few restaurants that were open that first night because of the power outage. Many grocery stores and gas stations were closed. That made it a run on those that were open and the gas prices went up in some places because of that run. It made me very thankful for the counsel of the church to be prepared. The focus is to have 3 months of food, a financial reserve and water supply. This has been something they counsel in easy times as well as in times of peril, but they also counsel not to go into debt over it. My testimony has grown over this concept that if you do what you can with what you have, then what you have stored will be what you need. We have been blessed in this area many times over the years. You can go to this website to find out more information about how to be prepared for whatever may lie ahead - natural disaster, chemical accidents, financial burdens, etc. It doesn't matter what the tragedy - you can have a little bit of peace knowing you are trying to be prepared and the Lord is mindful of you.

On a little bit of a fun note - the one thing we were missing was our miniature marshmallows. We started a tradition in Maryland to roast miniature marshmallows on toothpicks over candles when the electricity goes out. I went and bought some and spruced it up a little with chocolate chips and Teddy Graham crackesr for mini s'mores and we did it even though we had our electricity back on. We now have an extra bag in our food storage for the next power outage.