Be Prepared

This post is very different from my other ones but I truly believe it is the most important one I have written so I hope most of you will read it to the end. This is the post that I have been meaning to write for several months now. Every time I sit down to write it some stunningly bad or absurd event occurs in our country which pushes this post down so I end up writing about whatever is going on. I now understand that was not a coincidence: posts like this one are not what the other side wants me to write about.

This past year, the “COVID Year,” was an eye-opening one if there ever was one. The COVID plandemic, the lockdowns, and the election all combined to intentionally create the perfect storm. It was the opportunity for dark forces to promote fear through the virus, irrational behavior and accusations as a response, and blinding hatred all throughout (but particularly during the elections) using lies and deceit to achieve their purposes.

Despite all of the ugliness of the Covid Year, many of us made the decision not to live in fear and, instead, enjoy our lives. While so many people wasted their lives cowering in fear or pointing their fingers with mouth-foaming irrational accusations that showed the true ugliness within so many, some of us saw COVID as the opportunity to learn the truth, see the Light and get prepared. We went out, we traveled, had gatherings with friends and family. In other words, we kept on living. Along the way, we tried our best to strengthen our God-given immune systems, tried to exercise more, eat better and, above all, not let the fear overtake us. Rather than live in fear, many of us used this year to prepare, survive, and thrive.

Some of the preparations were obvious. Inspired by the lockdowns and the empty shelves that are still plaguing our stores across the country many of us got serious about having more food stored and growing our own. Chances are that these empty shelves will be around for a while, not because of COVID but because of the Democrats’ socialist agenda which discourages work in favor of welfare and capitalism in favor of more government control. I had started a small garden, mostly herbs, a few years ago but never took it seriously until this past year. Now was time to get more serious about growing food so I started an “experimental” garden, which gave us (and continues to give us) plenty of cherry & Roma tomatoes, green peppers, jalapeños, pepperoncini, basil, strawberries, yellow squash, zucchini, onions, Bibb lettuce, raspberries, corn, green beans, and sunflowers. In addition to learning how to grow these and when to harvest them, I’m also learning how to save the seeds and what perennials, like elderberry, to add to the garden.

Since I’ve always been interested in alternative medicine and more natural ways to heal our bodies, I also started learning about medicinal herbs around the property, otherwise known as “weeds.” I was surprised to see how many of those annoying weeds where actually beneficial either edible or medicinal. Perhaps not coincidentally, most of them are beneficial for respiratory ailments and to strengthen the immune system, almost as if God Himself had given us in nature the ingredients to deal with COVID and other similar respiratory issues. And so I’ve spent a great deal of time learning how to recognize these herbs, when to harvest them, how to create tinctures or how to dehydrate them to make medicinal teas and salves. It takes time but it is fun and absolutely fascinating.

Our household was fairly well prepared for the lockdowns, including having plenty of toilet paper which we had stockpiled over the previous 5 years or so. Long ago, we had gotten into the habit of picking up an extra few rolls when they were on sale knowing that they would never go bad and that we were most likely going to use them at some point anyway. This meant that we didn’t have to panic, count toilet paper squares or use plant leaves during the plandemic. We also had sufficient food, water, batteries, flashlights, etc. After all, this breakdown of our society has been a longtime coming- it was a major driving force for us looking for our current home about 10 years ago!

Still, the lockdowns were a great time to reassess how we had prepared for emergencies and what areas still needed some help. For example, we didn’t have enough meat. While we have plenty of wild game around our home which borders a national forest, we didn’t have enough meat on hand for long-term survival. Sure, we had a good amount of frozen meat but what if we lost power? Add to that the fact that man-made climate change zealots on the Left have vowed to shut down meat production and you know that meat will become harder to find and certainly more expensive. You can already see the results of their zealotry in meat prices that have doubled, sometimes tripled. And this is only the beginning.

The solution for us came by looking to the past: canning meat. This meant not just learning how to can meat and our harvest surplus, but also being able to get the materials needed do accomplish such canning, as jars and lids have been almost impossible to find during the past 1 1/2 yrs. We are also learning about other ways of food preservation, such as dehydrating food- which meant buying a dehydrator and learning how to use it. That dehydrator has now replaced some of the appliances that once sat on our kitchen counter. The learning curve for me learning more about all these methods was a steep one. After all, I don’t come from a farming family, an agricultural background or even a family that knows anything about surviving without government help. Frankly, it’s been fun for me to learn, kind of like having a hobby that is actually useful.

But everything I have discussed so far is part of the preparations that we have learned to make for the physical, short-lived world we live in. Eternity, however, is forever. So why would we prepare for the few short years we have here on Earth and completely ignore the eternal life that lies beyond it?

This is why the last few years have become about much more than preparing for empty shelves and the rapid decline of our country and civility: it became the wake-up call to open our eyes to the reality around us and to prepare not just our bodies but our souls. It became the invitation to develop a closer relationship with God, through Jesus and the teachings in the Bible. Because one thing has become crystal clear to me, especially this past year: the battles that we are currently fighting in this country and all over the world are no longer political battles. Perhaps they never were. This is not about Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. regressive , white vs. black, rich vs. poor. What we are witnessing is the ultimate spiritual battle between Good and Evil. It is the final battle, at whatever stage it may be, between our God of Light and the Prince of Darkness.

As a life-long Catholic, I was never really encouraged to openly speak about these things. Instead, I was raised to keep our Faith private and to respect all other religions, no matter how different or deviant they were from our Christian Faith. I was also taught that “good deeds” would be the key to my soul’s salvation as if God applies some kind of heavenly equation to see whether our good deeds cancel out our bad ones. I wonder how many good deeds must a person perform in order to have their support and advocacy of abortion forgiven?

I now realize how wrong most of those ideas are: what God actually tells us in the Bible is to stay away from sin, to be open about our Faith and share the Good News, encouraging others to follow. The Bible isn’t just the book of instructions for our salvation, it is also the almanac which has already described everything that we are going through and what is to come. Once you begin to understand those teachings and prophecies, everything about the world start to make much more sense.

Although I still attend Catholic Mass from time-to-time, I was fortunate to have found an amazing non-denominational Bible-based church several years ago. I highly recommend this church to anyone I come across who is interested in learning or understanding more about the Bible and its teaching. This church, Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia is led by the phenomenal Pastor Gary Hamrick, who can make even the most complex issues easy to understand. For those interested, all their teachings can be found in the “Teaching Library” tab of their website http://www.cornerstonechapel.net. You can also find them on YouTube. I can honestly say that I learned more in that first year of attendance at Cornerstone than in 45+ years of Catholic education and Mass attendance.

But this isn’t meant to be an advertising for our church. As our church studies the Bible cover-to-cover in chronological order, it was purely coincidental that the study of the Book of Revelations began a few weeks before the COVID plandemic hit. Talk about timing! Not surprisingly, the general atmosphere in the country (and the rest of the world, for that matter) made the study of the Book of Revelations not just plausible but very real. Suddenly, Revelations changed from being this weird, esoteric book that many (especially the Catholic Church) avoids ever reading, much less discussing, to this mostly realistic prophecy of things to come. Some of the revelations appear to be happening right before our eyes while others can be seen in their forming stages, ready to explode in the worldly domain.

I’m not going into a biblical discussion of Revelations (that’s for Pastor Gary and others to do) nor am I saying that this IS the End Times, even though it sure does feel like it. Maybe the world will end tomorrow or maybe it will somehow last another 1,000 years. But regardless of what the timeline may be, the COVID-era became an eye-opening moment for many people, myself included, about what is really going on in the world and in the spiritual realm.

Ironically, it was COVID, a virus many of us believe to have been engineered by man and designed to destroy the world as we know it, which has actually brought many of us closer to God than ever before. And it was the aftermath of COVID, including the election cycle which was part of it, which brought everything into a sharper focus, as if a veil has been lifted which reveals the true identity and intentions of people. Suddenly, our eyes are open and we things more clearly than we ever did before: we begin to understand that when things happen that are so absurd that they don’t belong in a rational world it is because they don’t belong there. Instead, they belong to the realm of the demonic, which feeds on people’s fears, insecurities, and lack of Faith. And if you are a Christian you know that this is what will transpire in the final battle between Good and Evil.

As the veil has been lifted you start to better understand how so many ideas pushed by the Left can only be explained in the context of darkness and evil. The Left has declared an open war on Christianity for years, methodically removing prayers, any reference to God and Christian holidays from just about every aspect of daily life but also sought to force Christians to act against their religious teachings (like forcing Catholic hospitals to perform abortions or force Christians to take vaccines made from aborted fetal tissue and/or their cell lines) and reaching the extreme of criminalizing pastors for opening their churches during the plandemic. But these attacks are the easy ones to spot.

Many other parts of the Leftist agenda are more devious in their attempts to renounce God and His Creation. These are ideas that are clearly wrong and absurd, and yet the Left pushes them in an attempt to confuse and distort reality. Like the idea of gender confusion. A normal, rational human being understands that we are born with one of two sexual genitalia to identify our genders, with the extremely rare cases of hermaphrodites. But this movement of “gender confusion” which has become all the rage in recent years has nothing to do with people born with both sexual organs: this movement is about claiming man’s superiority over God in deciding gender. No longer is gender determined by the sexual organs the person is born with, it is determined by whatever the person decides his/her/its gender to be. It is a statement that refuses God at its very essence, seeking to make God irrelevant and non-existent.

The gender confusion movement is possible thanks to the equally ridiculous man-made climate change movement. We all know that the climate changes and most of us understand that climate has been changing since the beginning of time, well before the advent of man. It isn’t just the different seasons; we understand that some years may be colder, others may be warmer. We believe that the Earth we live in today is very different to the Earth as it was once created. I’m also willing to bet that it will look very different to the Earth as it will be in the moments leading up to its demise. Heck, most of us understand that similar changes have happened and are happening in planets and stars where man will never drive an SUV or will build McMansions on.

So how did we ever get to the point where so many people believe that we, humans, are responsible for our planet’s changes? We aren’t talking about pollution, which is a whole other story; we are talking about people who reject the idea that our planet changes naturally and, instead, seek to portray man as this powerful being who can alter hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and even solar flares. It is puzzling that people, many of them highly “educated,” can be so naive or ignorant. you even have scientists who publish “scientific papers” that swear that man-made climate change first began when prehistoric men started using hand tools for gardening. For many, it is easier to believe that man can control the universe and to believe that God exists and created such universe. I understand: the magnificence and magnitude of God’s Creation can be incredibly overwhelming and certainly mysterious. But the bottom line is that when you begin to believe that climate is changed and manipulated by man, you are again eliminating God from the equation: you are giving man the powers that only God has.

And the common denominator that drives the Leftist ideology? Fear. There is also chaos, confusion, lies, and hatred but at the bottom of it all, it is fear. They disseminate terror laced with hatred and try to disguise it as lofty ideals. They promote discrimination in the name of racial justice. They advocate for the killing of innocent babies in the name of women’s rights. They seek to suppress speech and the freedoms of speech and religion by pretending it is for the common good. And they seek total dominance and control under the banner of equality. Yet, when you peel away all the layers, the disinformation, and the lies, you see their agenda for what it really is: an evil agenda that seeks to destroy, enslave, drive us away from God, and more dependent on the worldly domain.

The earthly is the Devil’s domain. This is the place where we are put to prove ourselves worthy of salvation. And we know that Satan will prevail on Earth because the Book of Revelations tells us so. It details his rise and what we, as Christians, must do in order to get ready. We know that the Prince of Darkness will some day rule the world, that many will adore him and willingly take the Mark of the Beast thus supporting his rise. I wonder if the Mark of the Beast will come in the form of a vaccine that people will willingly take and rejoice upon receiving? Truth is, many of the Antichrist’s supporters will be so-called Christians. But we also know that while Satan will win many battles, our Lord and Savior wins the war for eternity. The question is, what side will you be in?