Living off the land. What does that phrase invoke in your mind? Just recently my daughter and I found two Little House on the Prairie books gathering dust on our bookcase. As I spotted them, I pondered how self-sufficient the early settlers of the United States were.
They knew how to grow their own food. They knew animal husbandry. They knew how to prepare for long, cold, hard winters. What skills they had that we, as modern-day folks, have lost!
One of my family’s favorite documentaries is the PBS special, The Frontier House. It ran a number of years ago, featuring three families who had been chosen because of their willingness to homestead as families did back in the 1800s.
Everything was different for these modern-day adventures as they slipped into the clothing AND the lifestyle of their 19th century predecessors. Not only were they faced with having to cook from scratch over hot pot-bellied stoves, but they were having to figure out how much grain to plant, how to handle harvesting it, when to begin that harvest, etc.
Not only were they having to ration their food supplies, such as honey, eggs, etc., but they were having to deal with not having hot showers or face-to-face social events with thriving towns. Wal-mart withdrawals, indeed!
I’ve pondered on their skills and my lack of them. I barely know how to read a cookbook. It’s a good thing that my husband is a culinary chef and extraordinaire in the kitchen! Oh, I can cook, but if I had to be thrust back to the past, I think I’d get skinny real fast!
All this bothers me. We live in a fragile economy. Should the food go missing in the stores (think 1930s and the depression – it’s not really all that far fetched), would any of us understand gardening and the ability to grow our own foods? If a drought hit, would we be able to adjust, getting creative with crops we planted – ones that are hardy and drought resistant?
There are so many factors. These things aren’t learned over night. The daunting nature of it stares me in the face. And yet we’re told, both through Biblical prophecy and modern-day prophecy, that times will get tough before the coming of Christ.
We’re told through prophecy about future famine, of drought, and of many forms of challenge. Long-gone will be the convenience of grocery stores and “jumping in the car to go get a quart of milk.” Will I be ready? I don’t know. But I’m certainly working to learn.
There are many areas that can be studied. We’re not meant to be experts in everything. But if I learn how to forage edible plants in the wilderness, and you learn nursing skills, and another learns emergency child birth skills, and another learns to hunt – if things got really scarce and hard, just think of the community we could make.
So I ask, what things interest you? That might be the best place to start for each one of us. After all, preparedness is a lifestyle – not a one time event. And the areas that interest us most as individuals is probably where the Lord is calling us to study.
I may not yet be ready to live off the land. I kind of hope I never need to. But if that time ever came, I want to be as successful as those individuals in The Frontier House. I want to survive the experience – having turned to God for His help and having used skills I’ve begun to hone now – while there is time.
