Better Stock Up

by Donna Poole

We couldn’t say we didn’t know it was coming.

The meteorologists had been predicting the giant snowstorm for days, so John went to the store to stock up on a few things just in case we couldn’t get out for a few days. He did a good job of getting almost everything on the list and bought something not on the list he finds it intolerable to be without.

 Mustard.

It didn’t matter that we already had two other containers of mustard; what it the snow trapped us inside for, oh, I don’t know, a year or so, and we ran out of mustard? What then? People might die from mustard shortage!

When I was a child, I didn’t worry about running out of anything in a storm, especially mustard. Looking back, perhaps I should have been concerned because we never had much food in the cupboards. Mom and Dad shopped once a week when he got paid and bought only enough to last until the next paycheck. They didn’t have enough money to buy more.

I’m sure Dad was concerned when blizzards came. Sometimes the pipes under our house trailer froze, and he had to thaw them without burning down our dwelling place. Snow piled up by the foot when we lived in snow country in Taberg, New York, and Dad had to shovel it off the trailer roof. He also had to put chains on the car tires and try to get to work whenever possible.

But I was a kid. When blizzard winds howled, and sleet and snow pellets hit my bedroom window at night, I smiled and snuggled deeper under my blankets. This was going to be fun!

When morning came, I yelled, “Wahoo, no school!” collected a sister or two, and headed for the sledding hill. Storms were fun.

As I got older storms showed me the other side of their face. We lived in Maine, New York, when I was a teenager, and I was trying to navigate my nemesis, my untrustworthy fifty-dollar Renault, down Twist Run Road in an ice storm. That little car slid first one way then another. Finally, I managed to pull into someone’s driveway. A sweet older lady let me use her phone.

“Dad, please come get me. I’m on Twist Run Road, and I can’t drive this car home. It’s too icy.”

I refused to listen to any of Dad’s calm logic on how I could manage to drive home, and frustrated with me, he finally agreed to bring someone with him and get me home. In the amount of time it took him to get to me, it warmed up, and the ice melted. I didn’t realize it until we headed home on clear roads. It took me a long time to hear the end of that!

I’ve never gone hungry in a storm, although in the blizzard of 1978 we ran out of everything except the wonderful half a beef a kind church family had put in our freezer a month before. We ate beef three meals a day.

Our Angie voiced a complaint I’d never heard before and haven’t heard since, “I’m tired of steak! I want a casserole!”

Ready or not, storms will come, and often they blindside us. It’s then the things we’ve stockpiled help us survive.

You guessed it; I’m about to get all metaphorical on you. Along with God, the family and friends I’ve “stockpiled” through the years are my shelter in life’s storms. I know they’re praying for me. The Scripture I’ve read and learned by heart comes to my aid too.

As blind Fanny Crosby said shortly before she died, holding a Bible close to her heart, “This book has nurtured my entire life.”

I love to read and have saved hundreds, probably thousands of quotes on three by five cards I keep organized by subject in my antique library card cabinet. I’ve memorized so many of them, and they help me.

Quotes like this give me courage: “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” –Helen Keller

We had a college professor who said “G.I.G.O.” ad nauseum, but guess what? I still remember it; so, he achieved his goal, at least with one of us. It stood for Garbage In, Garbage Out.

The opposite is true too. Good In, Good Out. Let’s stockpile our souls with all good things that can come out to sustain us when we face the blizzards of life, because oh, my friend, we will face them. If we’re prepared, we can be like the “householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.” –Matthew 13:52

Don’t despair if you haven’t put many good things into your cupboards and your spiritual pantry is bare. It’s never too late to start. I have a wonderful promise for you to stockpile, and it’s one that will carry you through all of life’s storms and into eternity: “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” –Romans 10:9-10

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, our promised storm did come. And we didn’t run out of mustard.