How God Provides (1 Kin. 17:1-16) > Part 2

In the last post I suggested famine could strike America.  The following is excerpted from an article called "Famine in America? Why 99% of the U.S. Is in Danger of Starvation."  You can find the article here.

          "Nearly everyone recognizes that the U.S. may be in for very hard times in the near

future. Some economists are predicting financial collapse as catastrophic as the

Great Depression. With a significant number of people now living in cities, far

away from their food sources, one may be left to wonder if the degree of famine

this time around may result in the starvation of the roughly 240 million Americans

who are incapable of growing their own food.

        The idea isn't as farfetched or alarmist as it may seem at first glance. At the turn

of the 20th century, more than fifty percent of the American labor force earned a

living through direct involvement in agriculture, but this number decreased to just

2% by the year 2000. Even more frighteningly, only .8% of Americans are involved

in the industry full-time.

        This transition is a distressing one indeed. While demographic shift from rural to

urban lifestyles may seem like a blessing to many who loathe the hard labor

associated with rural, agrarian life, it may spell disaster for those who are struggling

through life in the Big City, hundreds or even thousands of miles from their food

sources.

        During the Great Depression, formerly wealthy executives stood in line for hours

waiting in ragged clothes for a hand-out of hot soup, while the rural "poor" went

about life as usual, barely noticing the Depression. Survivors of the Depression who

lived in agrarian regions often joked that they were "too poor to notice the stock

market crash", but they were, in fact, better off than the majority of inner-city workers

in that they never went hungry. As a result of this, the one-half of Americans with

access to their own home-grown foods were exempt from the horrors of the Great

Depression.

       Now imagine that, instead of 50% of the population suffering from the woes of

an economic collapse, it was the 99.2% who are not involved in agriculture full-

time. The comparison makes 1929 look like a walk in the park. Worse still, our

food transportation services are now fully dependent on massive amounts of petroleum

for transport, and the distances of food transportation have increased from tens

of miles to thousands, which makes the modern grocery network look even more

fragile by comparison."

 

That article was written in November, 2008.  The author did a great job helping us see that, indeed, we are vulnerable to famine.  With that in mind, we are ready to delve into today's Bible story.  The backdrop for the story is, to no one’s shock, famine.  Unless we identified with the famine, we could miss the passage's impact.