Civil War 2 Series Episode 4: Where You Live Will Decide If You Survive
When America Breaks, Episode 4
Christian Warrior Training | Christian Warrior Bible Study
Everybody who thinks about where they live thinks in miles. How far am I from the city. Miles is the wrong unit, and I measured it that way myself for a long time.
Two men live forty miles out from the same city. One sits on the interstate. The other is twenty miles off it on a county road. Same distance on any map, and completely different positions, because when a city empties out people leave on the highways and they travel the direction the highway points. Being off that road by twenty miles beats being on it by a hundred.
Eight out of ten Americans live in a city. That is the 2020 Census. Nobody voted for it and it is not anybody’s fault, and when that many people move they move along a small number of fixed lines that are already drawn on your map. The election-night map, the red states and the blue states, will not show you one of those lines.
Before I go further, I am not telling you to sell your house. I moved to Idaho and I will be honest with you later in this article about what that cost and how long it took, including the parts people do not want to hear. Anybody who tells you a zip code will save you is selling you land or selling you a course. Geography is a factor. Lot ran the geography assessment correctly and lost everything he owned, and I will get to him.
What your ground has on it
The rest of this is an inventory of your own address, and it runs on six factors. Two of them are water and food. I want to be precise about what I am asking there, because it is narrower than you think.
I am not asking how a city water system fails. That is next week, and it is a whole episode on its own. Here the only question is whether there is water on your ground you can reach without a wall outlet. Cases in the garage are a supply, and a supply runs out on a date you can calculate right now on a napkin. A well with a hand pump, a creek, a spring, or a lake inside walking distance is a source. Most men score themselves well on this factor because the garage is full, and the garage is not your ground.
Food is the same question turned outward. Not what happens when the shelves empty, which is also next week. What gets produced within a day’s drive of where you sleep. Farms, ranches, dairies, orchards, and you already know they exist, so that is not the question either. The question is whether you can name one of those people. Not the road they are on. A name.
The roads everything arrives on
Everything that keeps your town running arrives on a road, and it is a very small number of roads. The large chains supply hundreds of stores out of a single regional distribution center, which means one hub, one workforce, and one set of highways feeding an entire metro.
So look at your own town and count how many ways a fully loaded semi gets in. Not how many roads exist on the map. How many will carry the weight and the clearance. Most of you have a bridge, a river crossing, a pass, or one interstate doing nearly all of the work, and you have fewer real routes than you think you do.
Start with the distribution center that serves your grocery store. Ask a manager on a slow weekday morning. He will tell you, because nobody has asked him before. Then get a paper road atlas and mark the three routes between that hub and your town. An hour of work, and you have your supply picture.
What your sheriff has
This is the section I have standing to teach, because I spent about thirty years inside it.
It is two in the morning and there is somebody in your barn. You call it in. Dispatch takes the information and puts it out over the air, and tells you a deputy is on the way. Now count who is out there to take it.
Picture a sheriff’s office and most people see a building full of deputies. Three quarters of the sheriffs’ offices in this country have fewer than fifty sworn deputies, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the middle of the pack is sixteen.
Do that division with me. Sixteen deputies. Take out the ones running the jail. Take out court. Take out the detectives working cases. Take out days off and vacation, and take out whoever is on light duty. What is actually rolling at three in the morning across a county the size of a small state is two, and on a bad night it is one.
Now, that cuts both directions. Out in the county, response time is long and you are the first responder whether you signed up for the job or not. In a city, response is fast right up until the calls stack, and then every unit is committed and the queue is hundreds deep. I have worked those nights. The radio does not sound panicked, it just stops sending anybody.
There is a structural difference on top of the staffing one. Your sheriff is elected by the people of that county and he answers to them at the next election. Your city chief is appointed by a mayor or a council and answers to them tomorrow morning. That difference decides a great deal when hard orders come down, and Episode 3 is the whole conversation on it.
So go meet your sheriff. County commission meetings are public and they are half empty. Find out how many deputies work nights. Ask him straight out what his plan is if the grid is down for two weeks. He will answer you, and now you are a name he knows instead of a stranger at a roadblock.
The suburbs
This is the section I get the fewest questions about, which tells me something, because most of you live here.
You are not in the city and you are not in the country. You carry some of the density problem without the density resources, and some of the distance without any of the land. You are on municipal water with no well. You have a quarter acre. Your food comes from the same store the city people will be driving to, and you sit close enough to a population center to be on somebody’s route out of it.
But you have one asset that beats anything the man on forty acres owns, and it is that you already live within two hundred feet of thirty families. Learn which neighbor has a well. Learn which one has a generator, which one is a nurse or a paramedic, which one runs a diesel truck and can fix it, which one owns a chainsaw and knows how to drop a tree without killing himself. That is one Saturday afternoon of conversations and it moves your position further than any purchase you are currently considering.
Score your ground on six factors
Be honest when you do this, because a scorecard you cheat on is worth nothing.
Distance and direction from the nearest city of 100,000 or more. Direction carries more weight than mileage, because when people leave a population center they leave on the highways and they go where the highway points. The question is whether you sit on that road or off it.
Water you can reach without electricity. A well with a hand pump backup, a creek, a spring, a lake inside walking distance. Cases of bottled water in the garage are a supply, and a supply runs out on a schedule you can calculate.
Food produced within a day’s drive. Farms, ranches, dairies, orchards. The question underneath it is whether you can name one of those people.
Routes in and out. One road in is a trap if the wrong people control it and a filter if the right people do, and which one it turns out to be depends entirely on the sixth factor.
Who answers when you call. What your response picture is at three in the morning, and whether you have met the man responsible for it.
People who would stand with you. The number of households near you who would work with you, share with you, and take a shift on a cold night. This one outweighs the other five combined, and I will not be argued off that.
I built a one-page Location Assessment Scorecard for this. You score all six, add the column, and there is a section for working your weakest one. It is free and the link is at the bottom.
The man who got the geography right
Now go to Genesis 13. Abram and Lot have too many animals for one piece of ground and their herdsmen are fighting, so Abram tells Lot to choose first and says he will take whatever is left.
And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar. (This was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.) So Lot chose for himself all the Jordan Valley, and Lot journeyed east. Thus they separated from each other. Abram settled in the land of Canaan, while Lot settled among the cities of the valley and moved his tent as far as Sodom. (Genesis 13:10-12, ESV)
Look at what Lot evaluated. He lifted up his eyes and he assessed the water and the grazing, and he assessed them correctly. That valley was the best ground on the table and the text says so plainly. He ran factors two and three and he got an A on both.
There is not one word in that passage about the people. He never asked who lived in those cities, how they treated strangers, or whether he could raise a family among them. He optimized for water and pasture and moved his tent toward Sodom.
One chapter later, war comes through that valley, four kings against five, and when it is over the raiders carry off the goods of Sodom and they carry off Lot with them, because Lot was living in Sodom. He did not lose everything on bad ground. He lost everything on excellent ground inside a community he never assessed. That is factor six, sitting in the text about four thousand years before anybody made a video about it.
If you are not moving
Most of you are not moving. You have a job, a mortgage, aging parents, a kid two years from graduating, and a wife who is not selling the house to chase a scenario on the internet. That is not failure and God is not surprised by any of it.
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jeremiah 29:5-7, ESV)
Understand who is reading that letter. Those are exiles in Babylon, living in a foreign city they did not choose, under a government that conquered them and hauled them there by force. Their position is worse than anything any of us is looking at.
God does not tell them to run for the hills. He does not tell them to buy land in the country and wait it out. He tells them to build houses, plant gardens, marry, have children, and work for the good of the city they are stuck in, and then He gives them a reason that is entirely practical. In its welfare you will find your welfare.
On a Tuesday afternoon, this is the work. You cannot move your county. You can move your relational density inside ninety days without going anywhere. Your church is the fastest relocation available to you. Ten families in one congregation who know each other’s skills, who have each other’s numbers written on paper, and who have sat down and had the hard conversation will outlast one family on forty acres that the county does not know.
If you are moving
Move early. Moving during is refugee movement, and it means arriving as a stranger with a trailer at the exact moment a stranger with a trailer gets the worst read.
Move to a community and not to a parcel. Forty acres with no neighbors sounds like independence right up until you break a leg in February. What you are buying is people. The land is only where you put them.
I will be honest about Idaho. The land was the easy part and the property closed in about a month. Becoming a man the neighbors count on took years, and none of it came from the acreage. It came from showing up to fix fence, help move cattle, and pull somebody’s truck out of a ditch at one in the morning in the middle of a January storm. You do not buy your way into a community. You earn your way in, and the clock starts the day you arrive, not the day you decided to come.
Find the church before you find the property. If there is no congregation you can be part of inside a reasonable drive, you have not found your ground yet, no matter how good the well is.
Write the trigger down
Whether you stay or go, one piece of work is left, and Jesus gave us the template for it.
But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it. (Luke 21:20-21, ESV)
Read what He did there. He named a specific condition to watch for, armies around the city, and He named a specific action to take when it appeared, which was get out and do not go back in. He did not say leave now and He did not say ignore it. He gave a trigger and an action, and the believers who took it seriously got out.
That is the work you owe your family, and it is not a feeling. Things have been getting worse for a while now and you still went to work this morning, so a vague sense that the country is in trouble is not a decision tool. You need a written condition and a written action.
Sit down at the kitchen table this week with your wife, in the daylight, before anybody is scared. Write three conditions that would make you leave. Under each one, write where you go. Then the route. Then who you call. One page, in the binder. The alternative is making that call at two in the morning with the power off and the kids awake, and I watched people make decisions under those conditions for three decades. Nobody makes a good one.
The boundaries were already set
And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. (Acts 17:26, ESV)
God set the boundaries. Where you are living right now is not an accident, and it is also not your salvation. Idaho does not save anybody. Neither does the acreage, the well, or a full pantry. Those are tools, and you use them the way Nehemiah used a wall and a posted guard, while you pray to the God who holds the outcome.
Score your ground this week. Find the weakest of the six and work that one before you buy anything else. Next episode we go inside the house, because Episode 5 is infrastructure and the first thirty days.
Tell me in the comments which factor came back weakest for you, and whether you are staying or going. I read them. The straight answers in that section are worth more to the men reading this than anything I write.
DOWNLOADS FOR FREE SUBSCRIBERS
The Ground Truth Workbook — included with your paid subscription
Nine printable pages that take the six factors from Episode 4 and turn them into work you can finish this month.
✅ Six questions for your county sheriff, written so you can take the page to a public commission meeting and ask them without putting the man on the spot
✅ A household skills inventory with room for seven neighbors. Who has the well, the generator, the medical training, the ham license, and who has been through a real disaster and knows what the second week feels like
✅ A water source table that separates what you have stored in the garage from what you can reach when the power is off
✅ A producer log for the farms and ranches inside a day of your house, with a column for whether you can name them
✅ A route worksheet that traces the distribution center feeding your grocery store and the chokepoints between it and your town
✅ A staying or moving commitment page you fill out with your wife, including a line for who holds you to it
✅ A review log so you can rescore every six months and see whether the number moved
The free scorecard tells you where your ground stands today. This is the part where you go fix the weakest row.
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