Today I want to share with you an email I received from a visitor that I think has a fantastic spin on the rule of threes. I am posting the email, with his permission, below. My take on it is added afterward.
From Mike from Mass
“Hi Chris,
First off, thanks for this site. it has been a good resources for our family, mostly in confirming our lifestyle when juxtaposing our preparedness with scripture, as well as lots of practical info…great stuff.
A quick story: years ago, when our family was first starting down the “prepper” road, I had spoken to a guy who told me about the “rule of Three’s”. Years later I had googled it and found a completely different “rule” than what I was told by this gentleman. The traditional “rule of three’s” deals with the “3 minutes, 3 hours, 3 days etc.” but what I had been taught was basically this: Make sure to have 3 ways to provide for each basic human need. The first way is what we do every day; ex. food: grocery store (or farming/gardening, if you already do it).
The second would be ready to come into play if the first failed, the third way if the second failed, etc. so for food, one might set up their rule of three like this:
1. Grocery Store/Pantry
2. Stored/canned reserves
3. hunting/gardening
or for water:
1. Faucet
2. Stored water
3. Rain water/river collection followed by boiling/filtration
I used this format recently (applied to your listing of the 5 basic human needs)in a preparedness workshop I did with my church homegroup.
I only mention it to you because I haven’t seen or read much on this approach to preparedness. It may be a good blog post for you to put up there. I know that it’s been a very good model for our family. For each person/family, their “three ways” are going to be different. For instance, someone living in an apartment will have to prepare differently than someone living in a home with land.
Anyway…Thanks again, brother, for using the gifts God has blessed you with to give info to others. Keep up the good work.
Mike from Mass “
My Take
First, thank you for sending this email Mike. It will be great food for thought for the rest of the community. I also want to thank you for the compliment. I am glad that you found the site and that it has been helpful with the cognitive dissonance you felt between your preparedness lifestyle and Scripture.
I love this spin on the rule of threes. It was a wise man who taught you that and you were smart to follow it. I have mentioned a few times that having redundancy for things like backup power is important but this takes it to another level.
Ensuring that you have three ways to meet all of the basic human needs is a high level of redundancy and will make sure your family has their needs met. I also think that if you apply this to your skill sets, you will have a deep pool of knowledge. For example, if you only know one way to make fire and you lose your lighter, you might be up a crick. If you know three ways and lose your lighter but know how to use a bow drill, you can go about looking for the right pieces of wood.
Thanks again Mike from Mass for sharing!
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