Changes happen quickly in our lives. And if we are not careful, those changes will drag us in a direction we never wanted to go.
Many years ago, a short month to the day after we got married, I was laid off. One minute, I was gainfully employed with no question on how to feed us. Next, how do we make our mortgage? It was a scary time for Ashley and me.
That one event has set the course for the rest of our lives. It was the catalyst that created our first move to the Washington coast. We opened our business because of the poor job economy in 2009. And over many years of time has led us to this very newsletter and our homestead life.
We don’t know which direction a single change will take us.
The loss of a job could have easily directed us to another job and the same city life we had before. And it’s also possible to have taken a horrible turn and damaged our marriage.
When things change, it’s easy enough to make rash decisions and drive your life into the deep. The thing here is scale is not always important. A lost job is big scale. And the changes that come with it also happen at a big scale.
Yet little things every day drive the direction of our lives.
For example, a frost warning at 4pm will quickly turn our tasks to garden rescue if we are not ready for poor weather. Add enough of these together and eventually you might not want to garden in September anymore. Or even deal with homestead life.
The blink of an eye can change our day and the direction our life was headed in.
If we don’t recognize where the blink could take us, it might lead us away from the goals and visions we set. Not saying that’s a bad thing. Maybe Heavenly Father is trying to steer you in the right direction as you drift off course. If you don’t take the time to reflect, how would you know?
Sometimes you need to go with the flow. Other times you should really question why you are even flowing in this direction.
Preparedness comes when we are ready for outside forces that change the world in the blink of an eye.
It’s not always the nuclear bomb, but the little things. In the latest episode of government shenanigans, it’s a shutdown that cancels food for 40 million Americans and stops the pay for hundreds of thousands more. Life for those families was thrown upside-down and backwards. No matter where you sit on the issues, you can’t deny innocent people will suffer.
A successful prepared homestead uses their vision of the future to stay on course. Ideally with a lot of help from the Lord. The key here is to stop and smell the proverbial roses. Pausing for even a second can let your life catch up with what happened in the darkness of a single blink.
From the military and preparedness world comes these two terms:
- Stay Frosty – Keeping calm when all might go sideways in a hot second.
- Keep your head on a swivel – Staying vigilant to the changing surroundings to you don’t die or lose your way.
If we simply adapt these terms to our lives, we will be ready for anything that happens in a blink.