It's The End of The World - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/125/apocalypse

It's the end of the world as I've known it, and I've known that for a long time.

It's one of the weirder parts of being Mormon, but the church firmly believes that we are living in the latter days (the last days). I mean, it's in the title of our church, that we think that we are the last generation of true believers here on Earth, until the apocalypse happens. To those inside the church, it's totally normal, and almost accepted to talk about when Christ comes, and how we'll be when it happens. It's nothing weird at all to hear people talk about their emergency preparedness kits because when Christ comes things are going to get hectic, and they're going to need supplies to survive.

It's to the point where it's fairly frequent that there is an individual in the ward, who has a job that is to get everyone in the ward prepared for an 'emergency' (read: apocalypse). We're the proud owners of gallons and gallons of powdered foods sitting in our pantries and under our beds. We're the weirdos that have large plastic containers in our garages so we can have clean pure water when the water supply goes bad.

The thing that I've never realized is just how weird it is to have an active belief that the world is going to end, and I have a decent chance to see it. No one knows the date or time it's going to happen, so it could happen next week, or it could happen 1,000 years from now, the only thing that I believe (thanks to my religion) is that my church is going to be here on the Earth when it does happen, and we're not going to leave until it happens.

The funniest thing growing up with an emergency prepardness kit and a food storage that included things like 20 pounds of barley, was when things started to get old. Each year during summer we would pull out our kits and try to eat lunch off of what was in them.

It was never good.

Then came the awkward times when my mom would buy something for our food storage. For the most part they were good ideas. Getting a giant 5 gallon plastic bucket of rice - great idea, we loved rice and ate it all the time. Getting a 5 gallon  bucket of pinto beans - not the best idea because who uses dried beans that often? This lead to things sitting in storage for a long time, and then one day my mom noticing that things were getting close to their experation date, so we'd start to try to use that food in our meals.

There's a reason that no one eats barley any more.

The same goes for an excessive amount of dried beans. They're good for a small bit, but a small bit goes a long way. Seriously, you can buy a gallon tin can of beans and use them for about a year and not run out, and that's assuming that you're semi-active in trying to use them. Those things go a LONG way, and we were stuck with massive amounts of them just sitting there in our pantry waiting for us to use . . . or for the apocalypse to happen.