Are You Ready to Lose Conveniences?

The other day, our microwave just stopped working. It was kind of weird. I tried to heat up something and it just didn’t want to go. After messing with it a bit, it started up. But then my son was cooking over the stove and all of a sudden, the microwave just turned on. It didn’t have anything inside of it, it just turned on. And what was weird, is it kept going, even when I opened the door. My son was a little concerned that he was going to get radiation. I got it to turn off and unplugged it. I didn’t want it turning on in the middle of the night.

We went a couple of days without a microwave. No big deal! We have a stove and an oven, right? But the microwave is very convenient! Heating something fast isn’t convenient in an oven or on the stove.

So we got to the point that we wanted to buy another microwave.

The thing is that we’re so used to conveniences in our lives. We usually use a lot of things for convenience’s sake. For instance, our water! We always talk about how convenient it is to go to the tap and to turn on the water and we feel those things whenever there is an outage, like the freeze in Texas this last Winter. You start to feel those things when you go without.

What happens when we get to an SHTF point in our lives? There’s going to be a lot of people who don’t realize how much time things are going to take, how much extra time!

Think about cooking! Think about those people that even if they know how to cook, don’t realize how much time it is going to take.

If you’re cooking for a decent sized family, you might have to start breakfast in the morning and then as soon as breakfast is over, get lunch together and then as soon as lunch is over start working on dinner.

What about water? We take for granted water, being able to turn on our tap, being able to take a shower, and being able to flush the toilets. But what if you were in a true situation and you needed to get water? Think about how much time, effort and energy that’s going to take! If you’re lucky, you have, a source at home. But even if you have a well, if there’s no power, and you don’t have a manual way to draw water, you are going to be in the same situation as everyone in the city.

Hauling water from the nearest place around you is going to be time consuming. People in the suburbs have these big retention ponds, but you don’t want to try and filter that water. That water is filled with chemicals, metals and who knows what from all the run-off.

I think it’s a really good exercise, every once in a while, to think about how blessed we are to have conveniences in life that makes it easy for us to be able to do what we need to do quickly and efficiently.

And then, we need to be prepared to adjust and be flexible if we ever get to a point where we are going to be in an SHTF situation. We really need to understand that things will take longer and we need to give ourselves time and have people that can support us. Because there’s just not enough hours in the day and we’re going to have to be doing things old school.

But we can still be grateful for the things that we have now and if we are honest, after SHTF too! When we have to go without right now, for whatever reason, it is a good reminder of how blessed we are compared to a lot of people in the world.

I mean, there are people that live in the world right now, who we would consider are living in an SHTF situation. They haul their water every day. They are cooking over an open fire all the time. So it’s possible to live like that.

But it’s not what we’re used to. Will you be ready?

What will you miss the most in an SHTF situation?  Drop it in the comments!

Peace,
Todd

This was the topic of a recent Prepvotional, a podcast episode I record while I drive to work.  Take a listen to the short episode below.