Part of that passage in Matthew 6 is quoted in the column.
It’s relative.
My great greandmother, wife of a Southern Baptist deacon, would hardly have considered herself a ‘prepper’ or not relying on God’s providence for her support. In fact, she would have been quite offended had you suggested such.
I have the leather bound ledger in which she kept her household accounts. All moneys spent and what they were spent on.
Her ‘pantry’ at any given time (not counting what they always had growing in the field or kitchen garden or henhouse, pigsty, cow pen, pretty much all year long) could have *easily* kept her family decently fed for at least a year.
She wasn’t any different from another of my great great grandmothers on the other side of my family. One of my great aunts has HER ‘kitchen ledger’ from the 1890’s. She had 12 kids at home at any given time and could have easily fed that entire crowd for 9m-1yr with no resupply.
If you had asked them to rely on less than a month’s food supply and be ‘responsible wives and mothers’ with such they’d have had you banned from the sewing bee. And if you’d suggested their pantries represented ‘unbelief in God’s providence’ they’d have given you a piece of their mind on the topic.
Did God’s providence feed the people in New England during the year without a summer?