I believe I would be acutely irresponsible if I didn’t take steps to prepare for life-threatening scenarios such as those posited by Y2K. As a husband and father, I am responsible not to keep my family in toys and luxury but to do all I can to provide them with the basic necessities of life, such as water, food, heat, etc. But as a Christian and a minister, my responsibility goes far beyond my own household. Whether it’s the threat of Y2K or any other possible calamity, our concern must always be for our community—for the church and for my neighbor. Joseph made provision not only for himself and his family, but also for his countrymen. When calamities occur, local or national rugged individualism or isolationism simply won’t do.
We cannot control the future; it belongs to God. This is His world. Our confidence for tomorrow must rest in Him. What we can control is our behavior in the face of danger. We can be prudent or we can be fools.
I see no simple solution to the problems ahead. Every option we have has risks. It can be painful and expensive to prepare for difficult times, but it can be far more painful and far more expensive to fail to prepare for difficult times. The problem is exacerbated by the relentless reality that to make no decision about this matter is to make a decision. The decisions we make today will have consequences tomorrow. This is why I ask my friends and acquaintances to, at the very least, get informed about the possible perils of the days ahead. To be uninformed is to be unprepared. My concern is that most people will be like me in that they will take no cautionary action until they move through the stages of awareness-concern-alarm. Please do not assume that history is linear and uniform. Nothing disproves that assumption like history itself.
This article originally appeared in 1999 here and is used by permission.
. He never tired of quoting this text to me when I was a boy. Yet my father did take thought for the future.){kind=link}