I am Peter Thompson. I write this site.
I am not a survival expert. I have no credentials to wave at you, no certificate that says I know more about staying alive than you do. What I have is a household I am responsible for, a few years of taking that seriously, and a habit of writing things down as I work them out.
That is the whole of my authority here, and I would rather say it up front than let you find out later.
Why I wrote a book about this
In 2020 I found out that being prepared and feeling prepared are two different things. I had done the practical work. Food, water, a plan. The supplies held up better than I did.
That gap bothered me for a long time afterward. I kept meeting people in the preparedness world with impressive setups who were quietly miserable, running on fear, adding to shelves that never felt full enough. I understood them, because I had been doing a version of the same thing. What I could not find was anyone writing about the part underneath, the part that decides whether all the preparing leaves you steadier or just more anxious.
So I wrote Spiritual Survival, because the book I wanted did not seem to exist. It makes the case that faith and readiness belong together, and that the armor Paul describes in Ephesians 6 is a practical framework rather than a metaphor to admire. The personal side of that season is in there in full. I have kept it out of here on purpose, because this site is meant to be a set of tools rather than my diary.
The book makes the argument. This site is where the argument turns into something you can use.
How this site came about, and why it took so long
I registered this domain on New Year’s Day, 2024. That tells you everything about my intentions and very little about my follow-through.
I even listed it in the back of the book as the place to go for more tools. Then I did not build it.
Not for lack of trying. I bought a theme. I installed plugins. I installed more plugins. I spent evenings adjusting layouts and moving blocks around and choosing between fonts, and at the end of most of those evenings I had a slightly different looking page with nothing on it. I published a handful of posts. Three of them went live as templates I had not filled in yet, and they sat there saying INSERT CHECKLIST HERE for the better part of two years without me noticing, because I had stopped looking.
The site was also set to hide itself from search engines that entire time. A box I ticked early on and never unticked. So nobody ever found any of it, which in hindsight is the kindest thing that could have happened.
I am telling you this for two reasons. The first is that if you have ever started something with real intentions and watched it quietly stall, I am in no position to look down on you. The second is that it explains what this site is now trying to be. Every hour I spend fiddling with a layout is an hour I am not spending on the thing you actually came for. So the design here is deliberately plain, the structure is meant to be boring and predictable, and the effort goes into the lists.
Why any of this matters
There is a great deal of preparedness content and most of it is built to make you afraid, because fear moves product. It works. It also leaves people worse off than it found them, and it never lets anyone finish.
I wanted a resource that does the opposite. One that tells you what enough looks like, helps you get there, and then tells you that you are done and can go and live your life. That is what the Readiness Ladder is. Five rungs, each one finite, each one completable, starting with the one that costs nothing.
The faith part is what gives the gear a limit. If your preparing is grounded in something steadier than fear, you can stop once you have enough. If it is grounded in fear, you cannot, and no amount of shelving will fix that.
What I do not know
Plenty.
I have not tested everything I write about, and where I have not, the page says so. Some recommendations here come from using a thing for years. Some come from other people whose experience I trust, and I name them. Some are me explaining which specifications matter and why, with no claim to having held the product. All three are honest, and telling you which one you are reading is the least I can do.
I am also still working on most of this myself. The ten minute morning routine on the Armor of God page is real, and I manage it most days rather than every day. My own kits are not finished. Things have been cycled out and not replaced. Things have been used up and I have not got round to restocking them. If you were expecting the person writing the checklists to have a perfect garage, I would rather disappoint you now than pretend.
When I get something wrong I would rather fix it in public than quietly hope nobody noticed. If you find an error, telling me is a genuine kindness.
How this site makes money
Some pages carry affiliate links, mostly Amazon. If you buy through one we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That is the whole business model, and the details are on the affiliate disclosure page.
What it does not buy is my opinion. Where the cheaper option is the better option, this site says so. A good number of the items on these checklists carry no link at all, because the honest answer is that you probably already own one.
Start here
If you are new, the Readiness Ladder is the place to begin. It starts with the free rung.