Emergency Coffee

I do not drink coffee but I love how it smells.  My husband however, has to have it every morning. Well not just in the mornings but actually in the middle of the night too.  Every night he wakes up around 2 AM and has what we jokingly call his "coffee break"  and then goes right back to sleep. Several years ago, when it was  "coffee break" time, the coffee can was empty.  Gasp!  So the next day when I went to the store (bright and early) I put some coffee in a zip lock bag, put it in the freezer and so we began to refer to it as the "emergency coffee", in fact I even wrote it on the bag with a Sharpie.  There is one rule, you only use the emergency coffee in case you are totally out  and can't make it to the store:  i.e. road washed out from flood, ice storm making roads impassable, or an inch or more of snow (for all of my northern friends, that's an Alabama thing).

Isn't it ironic that I NEVER have any batteries or candles in the house when the power goes out but yet I have stash of coffee?  The coffee then begat, emergency food, MRE's to be exact, just like the soldiers eat.  So if there is a disaster and we have to shelter in place, we are going to be eating a lot of pepper steak with rice.  Now please don't think I am one of those doom preppers with a school bus buried out in the field and two years worth of food stock piled, we could last a few days at best. (No offense to those type of people, if you are one of those, tell me now so I'll know where to go.)

I used to have a stash of emergency toilet paper but desperate times call for desperate measures and so I digress.  Then there was the emergency set of clothes kept in the trunk of the car, which I recently gave to charity because they'd been in the there so long I couldn't even get the pants on past my knees anymore.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine who travels a lot for her job shared with me the contents of her emergency kit that she keeps in the back of her car.  It was quite impressive:   sleeping bag, bottled water, first aid kit, flashlight with extra batteries, emergency flares, high calorie/high protein bars, this chick is prepared to live in her car for at least a week.  Now that I think about it I had a home emergency kit at one time, but when the TV remote needed batteries I robbed it and it all  just went downhill from there.

After spotting the "emergency coffee" in the freezer recently, I decided I might should re-think the whole emergency kit here at the house and I started to wonder what was the most important thing I would need in case of an emergency  (insert light bulb here)........  God.  God.   I thought about the scriptures written in the back of my Bible and I realized that those are my "emergency kit".  They are verses that I have gone to over and over in times of need and crisis.  Some of them I've gone to so much that my Bible opens to them automatically, like the worn pages of a favorite recipe in your grandma's  cook book.

Psalm 57:1

2 Corinthians 12: 8-10

         

Psalm 73:21-26

Psalm 56:3-4

1 Timothy 1:14

I was probably in distress when I underlined these from the looks of my squiggly lines.

Like the emergency coffee in the freezer, my emergency scriptures are always there when I need them.  They never get stale, they never go out of date , they are warm and comforting like the smell of the roasted coffee I smell perking at 2 AM every morning.