Not a Prepper. It's just Life

 Nothing like a Pandemic, supply line issues, and inflation to motivate Prepping conversations.  Why you can't sling a 50 lb bag of flour without hitting someone on YouTube talking about prepping.  Actually it's hard to sling a 50 lb bag of  flour without hitting something!  

All this prepping stuff got me to thinking.  Would people think We're Preppers?  They might, I guess, but we don't really think of ourselves that way.  To us this is just how we've chosen to live our life.  

It's to help our children should they need to shop from our pantry

It's to Feed our family healthier (in our opinion) food

It's to save money

It's to fight inflation

It's to protect us in the event of an unexpected illness, layoff, or pay cut.  

It's to help when we have an unexpected expense.

It's to be as self reliant as we can be to limit how much we need big business.  

Every one of these reasons has taken place this year!  Every one!  We didn't have the ice storm, snowed in thing, but if it had happened this year; it would be nice to not have to get out in it to get milk, eggs, and bread.  Aside from that little caveat, we've used our pantry for every one of these reasons THIS YEAR.  It's helped.  It's nice to be able to be able to bypass grocery shopping for a month or so in order to make ends meet.  In the beginning of the year DH lost hours at work both because of work issues and because of his back.  Then he was out for 4 weeks after back surgery.  Then we had hospital bills to pay off.  We had loved ones shop from our pantry.  Both of us had Covid.  Then I got to go to the hospital. The inflation stuff needs no explanation.  

We do not, nor plan to have 25 years worth of food shoved into Mylar bags with O2 absorbers and in 5 gallon buckets.  We do not have MREs.  We don't have security plans.  We do have extra set aside to help in the event of an emergency; your everyday emergency.  We have Matches, candles, batteries incase of a power outage.  That's about it.  

To be honest, the idea that everyone can put aside 25 years worth of things to survive an end of the world as we know it scenario is naïve.   That doesn't mean don't plan for a rainy day, but many don't have the time, money, or space to put up 25 years of stuff.  

I learned a long time ago, there are things we can and should do, but when it all comes down to it, we do what we can and where we can't God can.  We have to leave this in His hands.  It doesn't mean we don't do our part to be prudent, but we can't do it all.