As a youth in the 1930’s and 1940’s, preparation never crossed my mind once. Even though it hadn’t crossed my mind either as a word or as a process, I was able to watch it happening on a day to day bases, without realizing it. We had a large family with eight children. I watched my mother prepare for the hard Winter months by canning fruits and vegetables. It was a grueling task for her, waiting for the right time for things to ripen, gathering them in her apron or in some cases a pan or clothes basket. Preparing it all for storage was a big job. She had to shell the peas and shuck the corn or remove the stems and cut out the bad parts, etc. from all of the other garden or fruit products. Then she would spend weeks canning over a hot stove with steam coming off the canner hitting her in the face. When the fruit was ripe the whole family helped pick grapes, chokecherries, cherries, apricots, plums, peaches, and apples. Some of the fruit was wild and some we got from neighbors who had more than they needed. She canned everything that she could get. By the end of Autumn our cellar was full of canned goods and then we could watch it slowly being used, by late Spring it was mostly, gone and the process started all over again. The process of preparation was: digging up the garden plot, fertilizing, turning the soil over, planting row after row of vegetables, cultivating or weeding and then harvesting and canning.
Things are different now but the idea is still the same. Rather than each family doing all the preparation separately, now we all just prepare a list of items we need at a given time and we take the list to the grocery store.
Dad’s preparation included going to the woods behind our house and finding dead trees to cut down and then cut the logs into about one foot sized chunks that would fit into our stoves for firewood. We had two stoves in the house. One was used for cooking and the other was designed to keep the house warm. We called it a potbellied heating stove. He cut wood for the stoves, year round for mother’s cook stove. In the summer, he chopped and just threw the pieces in a loose pile. The wood that he cut for Winter, he would stack in such a way as to make sure it would dry out good. He had rows of stacked firewood for Winter because in Minnesota the winters were very cold and the snow was so deep that there would be no opportunity to scavenge for wood. He had to prepare enough during the summer to last all Winter long. For meat, we had a chicken coop and probably thirty chickens that provided eggs and chicken meat. Too, Dad hunted pheasants, ducks, geese, in season; he also hunted rabbits on a fairly regular basis. We had chicken for supper at least one night a week and always on Sunday. He also bought liver at the local meat market because it was cheap and nutritious.
Preparation was then, as now, and always will be, a matter of survival. At that time, there was no government welfare office to go to and apply for a monthly stipend to buy food or provide any other need, for that matter. Knowing your options and what must be done to survive this world’s annual seasons, even it’s very rotations (days and nights), a lot of preparation was needed. Preparation was always a matter of survival for each family.
We live in a different world now, survival isn’t always on our minds. We are not always thinking about what we are going to eat in the coming months to survive.
Today, our survival thoughts are more like the story told by Lloyd D. Newell. He told of a high school student who learned a valuable lesson as he took a college entrance exam. “The night before the test, he read through the instructions he had received. He verified the time the exam would start. He sharpened his pencils. He put his calculator in his backpack. He felt ready for the early-morning test. The next day, as the test began, the teacher invited the students to use their calculators on the math section. The young man pulled his calculator out and pressed the power button. But the screen remained blank. He tried again. Nothing. And then the shocking reality hit, the batteries were dead, and he had no replacements! He would need to do the math section the old-fashioned way-with paper and pencil. He learned something that day and it had nothing to do with math, science, or reading comprehension. He learned about the value of complete preparation.”
Unlike my youth, there is still a preparatory responsibility for most everything we do in our modern day. However, survival now looks very much different than it did in my youth. We are all cautioned to use good judgement in what and how much we store and how we plan to use that storage in case of emergency. It is taught very plainly by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that we must share our substance with those in need. Probably our most important preparation will be for our life after mortality, for eternity. For those of us who think only of earthly preparation, Bruce R. McConkie paraphrased Jesus by saying; “Woe, unto the rich whose hearts are set on the things of this world; on the gold in the mountains and the cattle on the hills; on the merchant’s goods and the spices coming in on the thousands of ships–for they have their rewards of this life, rather than the riches of eternity. Woe, unto those whose bellies are full; who have laid up provisions in granaries and storehouses; who have been concerned only with feeding the body–for their spirits being unfed, shall hunger. Woe, unto those who laugh now, as they rejoice in the things of this world—for they shall mourn and weep in the day of judgement. Woe, unto those who are held in high esteem by worldly and evil people; who revel in the praise of ungodly men; who gain the plaudits of carnal people—for in such manner were the false prophets treated in days of old. (The Mortal Messiah)
In reality, this life is our preparatory time, our time to prepare to return to our Father, the author of our existence. Using a term I have used before: return not as an empty cloud but one that is full of water, having fulfilled our very purpose for existing.