When Disaster Strikes How to Stay Prepared and Safe

None of us have any real insurance against disaster.  For decades now, most of us in so-called developed nations have felt reasonably invincible.  With peace, we’ve had the resources to focus on humbling disease, improving laws, growing wealth, educating ourselves and making life “easier” in every way. 

But bombs are suddenly international for the first time in nearly a century.  Men with stealth planes and nuclear buttons are jostling for power.  We know that tiny viruses can escape a laboratory and bring the entire planet to a standstill in a matter of days.  Ordinary families in wealthy nations are visiting foodbanks to feed their children. Royal families battle cancer and family breakdown in the public eye.   We have a generation of children under 10 who are utterly reliant on electricity and the internet. 

When Microsoft rebooted its servers last year, many lost transport, bank accounts and more for a significant time.  If reports are to be believed, there are stealthy digital timebombs of all sorts woven into new technologies that serve us all.  We cannot imagine what is coming until it arrives.

In my home, New Zealand, natural disasters such as earthquakes are so likely that every householder is advised to have an emergency supply of basic essentials to carry people through the first days of peril:  water, food, and warmth.   

Maslow’s hierarchy shows that self-actualisation depends first upon our basic needs being met.  Society’s basic needs have been met increasingly since the 1960s when war moved to the background and wealth joined countries together increasingly as a common interest.  But somehow, we have not moved as a society to the higher levels of the pyramid.  We are still fighting at the security and power level. 

A google search about help in trouble reveals mostly references related to Christian faith.  Unparallelled among the advice is apparently the Bible:  an ancient mixture of history (revealing the rise and fall of empires over millennia - Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, and Rome), human wisdom (human nature doesn’t change it seems) and Godly instruction. 

The challenge seems to be the same one we face as our lives end.  None of the external stuff of our lives truly matters if we aren't here to give it meaning, memory, significance.  We are mortal.  The people we love and who love us are our priority after we’ve “fitted our own oxygen mask”.  We are at the mercy of circumstance.  But we always have the freedom to choose. 

What would we choose today if we knew disaster was coming to us?  What would be in our emergency pack?  What offers a profitable response once the “I wish…” and “if only…” has been uttered? 

I accompany people as they find spiritual direction, which in turns guides their life direction.  Freedom to choose is sacrosanct.  Unconditional positive regard is a holy duty, mirroring our Creator’s own respect for us (however religion might try to pervert this truth).  The desires of our hearts are our best compass providing they are healthy, tested in self-awareness, accountable to others and ideally, sanctified by a Creator who made us, each one, uniquely creative. 

Godliness with Contentment

1 Timothy 6:6

Of course, godliness with contentment is great gain.  For we brought nothing into the world, so we cannot carry anything out of it.  But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.

Those who want to be rich, however, fall into temptation and become ensnared by many foolish and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction.  For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. By craving it, some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.

But … pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance, and gentleness … in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who made the good confession in His testimony before Pontius Pilate.  Keep this commandment until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ, which the blessed and only Sovereign One—the King of kings and Lord of lords—will bring about in His own time. 

Source: Psychology Today