ENOUGH and MORE

My trip to the Storehouse, mentioned in the post below, was enlightening in other ways as well. A senior missionary couple runs the Storehouse with the help of a senior service mission couple and other local volunteers. At lunch time, the sister missionary in co-charge cooked us a wonderful lunch, all from basic items that came from the storehouse shelves. And it was gourmet quality!

The point here is two-fold. First, the Lord asks that we help Him provide for the needs of his children not with cast-offs and crumbs, but with the best of what He has created. And secondly, when we know what to do with what He has provided, we can do very nicely on basics.

I've been blogging about food storage down in the right corner. Each week, I'm posting an item we should buy and add to our storage. In 52 weeks, if we follow the list, we should have a balanced, inexpensively-acquired supply of food storage that can be incorporated into our menu planning and therefore, easily-rotated. We don't need to store only vacuum-packed or freeze-dried food. We just need to rotate what we buy by incorporating it into our daily meals.

The reasons for having a food supply are many. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been doing this for decades, responding to the counsel of living Prophets who have warned us to lay in store for times of need. But any person who reads the papers or listens to the news can surely see the wisdom is storing extra food against times when storms prevent us from getting to the store, or as a hedge against inflation, a bridge between jobs or when extra bills upset the family budget. By having some storage, we can wait to purchase items when they are on sale because we can do without until the price comes down. And when reports of tainted foods are raised, we can fall back on food that was packed before the outbreak occurred.

Tom and I pull from our storage regularly for this or that. But we have relied on our food storage exclusively a few times when we were between jobs and what little cash we had was needed to meet the mortgage and utilities. I canned back then--a hundred quarts each of peaches, pears, applesauce each summer, and a freezer stocked with vegetables put up from a summer garden. We ate well, and because we had the foresight to also store five pounds of chocolate chips and nuts, there were delicious cookies and cakes to make the meal special. Instead of a poor man's diet, we were still dining. And I believe that made a major difference in my husband's attitude as he headed out the door to apply for work. He was down, but he was not out, because he knew he was still providing for his family from our previous abundance.

There is peace in preparation. I don't can the way I once did. We buy cases of what we enjoy now, and buy in bulk when things are on sale. But we don't need to have a Costco in our cellars. A few basic items, paired with the skill to prepare them, will be enough to weather the storms that threaten our families.

The Lord sets patterns. All we need to do is see them and follow. The Storehouse showed me yet another pattern of preparation, that storing simple foods and having the skill to prepare them will see us through.