Back in 2014, I moved to Truro, Nova Scotia, for the summer. I couldn’t find an apartment right away, so I decided to stay at a motel for a while. The suite had a full kitchen and bath, a separate living room and bedroom, and standard TV, internet and phone. About a week after I’d moved into the motel, a summer storm was forecast to hit the next day. I didn’t really think much about storm preps, as all my emergency supplies were in a storage unit on the other side of town. I thought I’d just ride it out with the supplies I had (meaning, just the food and water I had in the fridge).

The next day was a Saturday, and the storm hit as scheduled, but it had been upgraded to a hurricane. The wind was ferocious, uprooting trees and hurling the motel’s flower pots and Adirondack chairs across the parking lot, but thankfully the power didn’t go off and my internet stayed connected. I did, however, lose the phone and TV. I don’t watch TV, anyway, so I didn’t care about losing that, but the phone I did miss.

After the third day of no phone service, I walked over to the motel office to try to find out when the phone would be back on again. The guy who owned the motel told me that the phone would only come back on when the power came back on, and that likely wouldn’t happen for another few days.

I looked at him for a second and said: “The power’s off?”

He said: “Yeah. It’s been off since Saturday.”

I said: “But I have power. My power never went off.”

He said: “That’s because you’re in a power default. It has something to do with the convergence of power lines. You just lucked out with your unit.”

“So the rest of the motel doesn’t have any power?”

“Nope. The power went off during the storm and hasn’t been on since. It probably won’t be back on until Thursday.”

For three whole days and nights since the hurricane hit, I had been blissfully unaware that I was the only guest in the entire motel who had power. Everyone else had lost everything in their fridge and had no stove, no air-con and no lights, while I was sitting well-fed and cool in my bright little self-contained unit, completely insulated from the darkness and misery around me.

I remembered this tonight when I was watching the first few minutes of a doom-and-gloom YouTube video about the coming “dark winter”. Yet another false prophet was urging viewers to prep materially for power outages and food scarcity. And then I remembered the Hebrews when they were in Egypt just before the exodus, and the plague of darkness that left all the Egyptians groping in pitch black, while only the Hebrews had light in their homes.

And that’s when I thought about what Jesus says about prepping. He tells us not to worry about food or anything else, because God knows what we need even before we do and is preparing it for us now. God is doing our prepping. Jesus tells us instead to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and everything we need will be provided.

I’m not going to say that what happened to me at the motel in Truro is an instance of God doing my prepping, but it sure looks like it. God takes care of his children today in the same way he took care of the Hebrews during the plagues of Egypt nearly 3500 years ago. The Hebrews didn’t prep materially, but they still had everything they needed and were well-protected. God will look after us, too, if we do as Jesus says (seek God’s Kingdom and his righteousness).

Keep in mind that God’s prepping is supernaturally perfect, and that we can never prep better than God, no matter how many batteries and cans of beans we stash away.

I don’t know about you, but I follow the advice of Jesus, not the advice of YouTube doom-and-gloomers, most of whom just want to sell me something. If Jesus says only to prepare for the needs of today, then I’m only going to prepare for the needs of today. If Jesus says to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, then I’m going to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, confident that if I do what Jesus says, God will provide whatever I need when I need it.

Amen.