Do We Ever “Arrive” in or Finish Prepping?
By Cindy Lewis Dake
For the first few years of my prepping journey, my experience was been leading me to think that I would never feel like I had done enough to stop worrying, at least at some level. There would always be the sense of “I need more of this” or “I really need to add this item/appliance/tool to my preps.” It was a maddening, nerve-frazzling, fear-based quest that had no satisfaction because there was no light at the end of the tunnel.
As I have poked around and observed in numerous prep-minded groups, there is a tendency to feel like we have to be prepped-and-ready for E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G that might come at us.
That level of preparedness is simply impossible. We may never finish prepping.
If you can’t prepare for everything? How do you decide what to prepare for? 
You have to pick-and-choose the scenarios that are most likely to be your region’s emergencies/disasters. For example:
I prep for tornadoes because every spring and fall, we have very active storm seasons.
But I don’t prep for hurricanes.
I prep for short-term, utility-debilitating cold fronts like we had in February 2021 and for long-term, sweat-inducing heat waves like we have every summer.
But I don’t prep for months of being buried under snow drifts.
I prep for electrical outages, breaks in the waterline, breaks in the availability of natural gas, and supply chain breakdowns.
That’s enough on my prepping plate.
The line must be drawn here. This far, no further!
(Karen’s commentary – In my best Captain Picard voice)
But where do I draw the line and say I’ve got a solid supply, and I can work on just maintaining it?
Years ago, I read this:
There is a human tendency to think that if we just have twice as much of something, we will be okay.
It doesn’t matter what it is or how much we have of it; there is a universal quirk that makes us think that twice-as-much is that mystical point at which worries stop.
This isn’t just related to preparedness. It’s not just how many beans and band-aids you have on your shelf. How many of us think if our bank account could be just a little more padded, we would feel so much more secure?
A multi-millionaire being interviewed about his financial success said if he just had twice as much in the bank, he could relax. I had to rewind and listen again, and yes, that was exactly what he said. If he had twice his multi-millions, he felt he would be okay. One layer of multi-millions wasn’t enough to feel secure — for him.
But digging further, I’ve found comments around the web where people of much more humble means said essentially the same thing. “If I just had twice as much money, I’d feel secure.”
It began to dawn on me that —
… the problem isn’t in how much we have, but in where we find our security when turbulent times come.
Let me give you an example from the Bible 
If you don’t mind, I’ll pull in an ancient example here. In the biblical book of Exodus, chapter 16, when the Hebrew nation was making their long journey from Egypt to the Promised Land of Canaan, God provided manna every morning for decades to the traveling millions in this nation-in-transit. The people were to gather just what they needed for that day — except for the Sabbath (Friday sunset to Saturday sunset). God allowed them to gather twice as much once a week. Miraculously, the “manna from heaven” didn’t spoil or go rancid over the extra day of storage on the Sabbath each week (verses 21-24). But if they got greedy (or insecure about how much they had on hand) and gathered more than needed on any other day of the week, it would begin to stink, and maggots would infest it (verse 20).
Their tendency to want to gather more on a non-Sabbath day was indicative of the human tendency to always want more, just a little bit more, as a safety backup.
Where our faith comes in…
Admittedly, I’ve watched a lot of prepper videos over the years. I’m sure you have, too. For the prepper who had three months of food, he would comment if he just had six months, he’d feel okay. Then there was the mega-prepper who has an online business that sells prepper food and gear (so he technically has a warehouse of goods under his control), he commented in a video that if he had twice as much, he would feel ready.
The point is: Enough is never enough.
But that, my friends, is where our faith, our practicality, our hard-earned wisdom has to be put into motion. The fear of the unknown can never really be extinguished; it has to be kept in perspective and it has to be managed.
It took a while, but my faith eventually helped me find the balance I need on this journey. I accepted that I can never be as prepped as I feel I need to be. I can never plan a series of strategical responses that will absolutely keep my family safe no matter what scenario erupts. My quest shifted gears once I realized these truths because we will never finish prepping.
Yes, I still add to my preps — but at a much slower, completely non-panicked pace than at the beginning of my journey. Higher on the priority list is learning how to use what I already have, pushing myself to see that LEARNING is the real jewel of the preparedness adventure.
We can never prep ourselves into peace. 
We can never prep ourselves into peace and contentment for every scenario, because we can never be totally in control of the factors that press, bump, invade, flood, shake up, or negatively influence our daily lives and routines. Too many factors are simply outside of our control.
Granted, it’s taken me a few years to understand that, but once I did acknowledge that prepping was not going to change the factors outside of my control, I realized what prepping couldn’t do, but also what it COULD do. Prepping could give me more control over how I responded to those external factors. But the factors are never going to disappear. Weather events are always a risk (and around here, those weather events can blow away your preps in under a minute). Maybe it’s flooding risks where you are. Societal upheavals in major cities are examples of uncontrollable factors, as are wars, EMPS, or CMEs. No matter how much rice and beans I store, I can’t control any of those external factors. I’ll do what I can to prepare, but then I simply have to trust God with the rest.
This one ‘Aha’ moment…
This one “aha” has helped me rein-in my “panic prepping” that dominated the first stage of my preparedness journey.
Now, as I interact with new preppers in other groups, I can tell who’s new simply by their comments — they’re the ones who are in a panic and trying to buy, buy, buy in a mad rush. Something has happened (like a geopolitical shift of power, a coming storm, a threat of economic downturn, or lately, a solar eclipse), and now the threat has risen enough that it made it onto their radar. And that drives them to want to “stack it to the rafters” … but it doesn’t take away their panic.
That’s why I’m thankful for groups like Karen’s Facebook Group this where we can learn methodical measures for prepping.
We can take a rational, balanced approach to the task of caring for ourselves and our loved ones as we think through a variety of emergency scenarios. And in this group, we can collaborate and increase our skillsets by learning from each other, by bouncing ideas and questions around the chat threads, and by making progress toward goals that are do-able when we break down the big problems into smaller, more easily tackled chunks because we never finish prepping.
So what about you?
How about you? Have you had some “aha” moments in your prepping journey that could help someone else in the group? I’d love to hear — and learn — from you, too!
Cindy is a wife and mom – and former homeschool mom – who writes, ponders, plans, and preps deep in the heart of Texas.
And before you stress out over your preps, remember ….
You’ve got this, Mama!
Great advice. Thank you.