Every September, those of us in emergency management spend a lot of time talking about preparedness. Make a plan. Build a kit. Know your risks. Talk to your family. Have enough food and water to get through the first several days after a disaster.

I have repeated some version of those messages more times than I could count over the last twelve years. I have worked disasters from inside an Emergency Operations Center, helped coordinate resources and information, sat across from survivors in Disaster Recovery Centers, and watched communities begin the long process of putting themselves back together. I know what can happen when people are prepared, and I know how quickly an ordinary day can become anything but ordinary.

And yet, if you asked me this morning where our family’s go bag is, I couldn’t show you one.

If you asked to see our written family emergency plan, I couldn’t hand you that either.

That may not be the admission you expect from someone who has spent more than a decade in emergency management, but maybe that is exactly why I need to make it. Preparedness is one of those things many of us know is important while still finding reasons to put it off. We get busy. We tell ourselves we will take care of it later. Somewhere in the back of our minds is that familiar thought: It probably won’t happen to me.

National Preparedness Month has me thinking differently about that this year—not only because of what I do for a living, but because of everything life has taught me since I first stumbled into this career I never planned to have.

A Career I Never Saw Coming

Emergency management wasn’t on any career plan I had made for myself.

My degrees were in biology, and before emergency management I had mostly worked in laboratories. Then I found myself between jobs and saw an advertisement for a FEMA Local Hire position following a recent disaster. I applied, was hired quickly, and began working at the Joint Field Office.

At the time, it felt random.

I knew very little about emergency management. It wasn’t within my education or previous experience. But while working at the JFO, I met staff from ADEM in the response and recovery fields and began sitting in meetings where I could hear how disaster operations actually worked. Something about it caught my attention.

Eventually I applied for one of the few open positions at ADEM at the time, an Administrative Specialist position in Finance and Administration. I started February 10, 2014, thinking I had accepted an administrative job.

Almost immediately, I began hearing about required emergency management training and EOC responsibilities. I helped with the Homeland Security Grant Program and with coordinating the state workshop, and the more I saw, the more interested I became.

Then came Sunday, April 27, 2014.

We lived close enough to Vilonia at the time that we could hear the sirens. After the storm passed, a coworker called and asked if I could come into the Emergency Operations Center. I had never worked in the EOC before. I had not really been trained for it yet.

They needed someone anyway.

So I went.

That evening I found myself working in Planning while information poured into the EOC following the devastating Mayflower-Vilonia tornado. I can still remember the rush of hearing the conversations around me and beginning to understand everything that was happening at once. Agencies were coordinating. Information was moving. Decisions were being made. Problems needed solutions, and behind every report coming into that room were real people who needed help.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I knew.

This is where I belong.

Looking back now, I don’t think that FEMA advertisement was random at all.

I couldn’t see where it was leading when I applied for it. I didn’t know those meetings would spark an interest, that one administrative position would lead me into the EOC, or that years later emergency management would become such an important part of who I am. I certainly didn’t know I would eventually be in positions where my experience, decisions, and ideas could help shape how Arkansas responds to disasters.

But God knew.

There have been many times in my life when I couldn’t see what He was doing while He was doing it. This is one of those stories that became clearer only when I looked backward. What seemed like an unexpected job opportunity became a career, and what began as something completely outside my wheelhouse became something I now see as a calling.

I stay in emergency management because I want to help the citizens of Arkansas. I want to make what we do better than it was before, to improve processes, encourage innovation, and be willing to change when change makes us more effective. No disaster is exactly like the one before it, particularly in a state like Arkansas. Tornadoes, floods, winter weather, severe storms, extreme heat and other hazards mean you rarely walk into an EOC knowing exactly what the day is going to bring.

That’s part of what I love about the work.

But the EOC is only one side of emergency management.

After Everyone Else Moves On

When people ask what I do, I still sometimes struggle to explain it simply. The easiest answer is that emergency management helps coordinate resources and information during an event. We are not usually the people you see running toward the damaged home or putting out the fire. Our role is often behind the scenes, helping communities identify what they need and coordinating the people, information and resources that can help meet those needs.

The EOC can be fast-paced and mentally demanding. There can be dozens of conversations happening at once while you try to understand what has happened, what is happening now and what may happen next.

But some of the experiences that have affected me most have happened after that pace begins to slow.

I enjoy working in Disaster Recovery Centers because that is where the disaster becomes personal in a different way. I have sat across from people who lost everything. Not simply a house or belongings, but medications, medical supplies and important documents—the ordinary things we rarely think about until suddenly they are gone.

Those conversations remind me of something disasters have taught me repeatedly: life moves on very quickly for everyone who wasn’t directly affected.

A tornado dominates the news. We watch the pictures and videos. We pray for the community. We talk about the damage for a day or two.

Then most of us go back to our normal lives.

Emergency management can do that too. The immediate response ends, the EOC returns to normal operations, and people move back into their everyday responsibilities. Meanwhile, somewhere in that community, a family is still trying to replace prescriptions. Someone is still fighting with paperwork. Someone still doesn’t know where they are going to live.

I don’t say that critically because I am guilty of it too.

Maybe guilt is actually part of what keeps drawing me back to recovery work. Disaster Recovery Centers remind me that recovery does not end when the cameras leave or when the EOC quiets down. There are still people behind every number on a situation report.

That understanding has shaped the emergency manager I want to be, but I believe my faith has shaped it too.

I don’t walk around the office preaching. I don’t constantly talk about God while we are working an incident. Faith shows up differently in our profession. We open our emergency management conference with prayer. We pray before potlucks. During particularly difficult events, support may come into the building for our staff, sometimes through support teams or even therapy dogs.

For me, though, much of faith in the workplace is quieter.

I hope people can see it without me having to announce it. I hope the way I treat a survivor, the way I help a coworker, the compassion I show when someone is overwhelmed, and the desire I have to serve Arkansas allow some of His light to show through me.

I also believe God placed me here.

That doesn’t mean I believe every disaster outcome is God choosing to protect one community more than another. I am very careful with that idea because I have seen enough disaster to know how painful that theology could become. I would never look at a community that suffered tremendous loss and suggest they somehow experienced less of God’s protection.

Arkansas has simply been fortunate in many of the events I have worked that the number of deaths and serious injuries could have been much worse. But even that can create another danger: complacency.

When the worst keeps not happening, it becomes easier to believe it never will.

The Day We Leaned Forward

March 31, 2023, remains one of the clearest examples in my career of why preparedness matters before the storm arrives.

That week, the NEMA Mid-Year Forum was being held in Washington, D.C., and much of our executive leadership—including me—had been there. I flew home Thursday. We already knew Friday carried a severe-weather threat, so an on-call team had been identified.

At the time I lived in Heber Springs. Friday morning, I stayed home to rest. The forecast looked concerning but manageable enough that I laid down for a late-morning nap.

When I woke up, I checked the weather again.

The Weather Channel had raised its TOR:CON tornado-risk index to a 9 for a significant portion of Arkansas.

You don’t see something like that and simply shrug.

Part of what I felt was experience. Part of it was instinct. Either way, I reached out to leadership and recommended that we activate the EOC rather than wait to see whether things became worse.

The decision was made to activate at 2:00 p.m.

We weren’t in the EOC long before the Little Rock tornado struck.

After it passed, we began learning just how difficult access to our own facility had become. The tornado had caused significant damage along Military Road, and access around the front and back gates of the Camp Robinson became difficult. Had we waited until after the tornado struck to call everyone in, simply getting the team on post would have been much harder.

Instead, we were already there.

Our director was there. Our recovery deputy director was there. The team was staffed and ready to begin supporting Arkansas communities when they needed us.

I remember being incredibly grateful.

We didn’t stop the storm. We couldn’t control where the tornado formed or where it traveled. Preparedness did not eliminate the disaster.

It put us in a better position to respond when the disaster happened.

There is a phrase we use often in emergency management: lean forward.

You don’t always know exactly what is coming, but sometimes the information in front of you is enough to justify preparing before you have every answer.

That concept is remarkably close to something Scripture taught thousands of years before anyone developed an emergency operations plan.

Proverbs 22:3 says:

“A prudent person foresees danger and takes precautions. The simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences.” — Proverbs 22:3 NLT

I love that verse because it doesn’t promise that the prudent person will never experience danger. It doesn’t say preparation guarantees safety.

It says wisdom recognizes danger and responds.

That is preparedness.

At the same time, Scripture gives us an important balance. In James 4:13-15, James speaks to people confidently describing what they will do tomorrow and the success they expect to have. His correction is not that planning itself is wrong. The problem is believing our plans give us control over a future we do not possess. We make plans while remembering that tomorrow still belongs to God.

Emergency management has taught me both lessons.

Prepare for what you can.

Recognize what you cannot control.

Apparently, the Emergency Manager Needs a Plan Too

That brings me back to my own house.

For all of my experience, I am guilty of the same complacency I warn other people about.

We don’t currently have the family emergency plan we should have. We don’t have a complete go bag sitting somewhere ready to grab. Our important documents could be organized better for an evacuation, and our medications should be kept in a way that makes them easy to take quickly.

Our household has also changed.

Having a teenager at home adds another person to think about. He may be at school, church, work or somewhere with friends when something happens. We can tell him what he should do, but every parent or guardian of a teenager probably understands the quiet question hiding underneath that conversation:

Were you actually listening?

Then there are our animals.

We have always talked through what we think we would do if a confirmed tornado were coming directly toward our property. What would we do with the horses? How quickly could we gather the animals inside? Without a safe room, where is the safest place for us?

Those conversations become more complicated when I acknowledge something else that has changed—me.

Cancer has changed my physical capabilities. There was a time when my disaster plan in my head depended heavily on what I believed I could physically accomplish in a matter of minutes. Now I have to think about energy, fatigue and whether the plan I once imagined is actually realistic.

And then there is the possibility of stem cell transplant.

What happens if severe weather strikes while I am hospitalized? What if I am staying in an isolated apartment during recovery with my mother while my family is somewhere else? What happens when every part of me wants to be in the EOC helping Arkansas but my body and doctors tell me I need to stay where I am?

Those aren’t comfortable questions.

But preparedness isn’t about avoiding uncomfortable questions.

It’s about asking them before an emergency asks them for you.

Maybe that is what National Preparedness Month needs to mean for me this year. Not another checklist I share with everyone else. Not another reminder that other people should prepare.

A decision that my family should prepare too.

This month, I want us to start with three things.

First, make a family communication plan. Where will we meet? Who will everyone contact if we are separated? What happens if cell service is overwhelmed? Does everyone actually know the plan rather than assuming someone else does?

Second, build a go bag that reflects the family we actually have. That means the usual emergency essentials, but it also means medications, copies of important information and documents, and supplies for our animals. FEMA’s current guidance recommends preparing enough supplies for several days, and pets should be part of the plan from the beginning—not an afterthought.

Third, have enough food and water to be self-sufficient for the first several days after an emergency. Seventy-two hours is a good starting point, but depending on the disaster, help and normal services may take longer to reach everyone.

None of those things requires panic.

Preparedness isn’t fear.

I have spent more than a decade watching what happens when ordinary people suddenly find themselves living through an extraordinary day. Most of them didn’t wake up expecting a tornado, flood, ice storm or other disaster to change their lives.

They woke up expecting Tuesday to be Tuesday.

That may be one of the biggest lessons emergency management—and now cancer—has taught me. We don’t get to control everything that enters our lives.

We do get to decide what we do with the information and opportunities we have today.

Nearly thirteen years ago, God used a job advertisement I almost certainly would never have predicted for myself to lead me toward work that became a calling. I didn’t understand the path then. I can see more of it now.

Since then He has allowed me to sit in rooms where decisions matter, to work beside people committed to serving Arkansas, to listen to survivors whose lives changed in moments, and to learn again and again how quickly the world can shift.

I still don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

Neither do you.

Faith doesn’t require us to pretend otherwise. And preparedness doesn’t require us to live afraid of tomorrow.

Maybe wisdom sits somewhere between those two extremes: trusting God with what we cannot control while faithfully taking care of what He has placed in our hands today.

So this National Preparedness Month, I’m not only asking you to make a plan.

I’m making one too.

Because the storm is not the time to decide what we should have done before it arrived.