Weathering and Waking Up from Winter

We are writing this article while pausing occasionally to look through our picture window into a frozen landscape, seemingly held motionless by temperatures around 0^o Fahrenheit (-17.8^o Celsius).  A trail of squirrel tracks in the snow and an occasional cardinal are the only obvious signs of life.  Like those of us who choose not to live in, or migrate seasonally, to a warmer climate, the cardinals, squirrels, and other “warm-blooded animals” must face the long, cold winter.  These animals depend upon the food chain to secure the food calories needed to maintain their bodies at a set temperature.  Although body temperatures of mammals and birds vary, they commonly range from 97^o to 108^o F.

Animals Facing Freezing Temperatures
Unlike animals in the wild, many of us are blessed to live in the comfort of homes where thermostats are set at or around 70^o F (21.1^o Celsius).  Our indoor comfort is provided by home heating systems that run on natural gas, propane, or other “fossil fuels.”  Or, if we rely on electric heat, our electricity is generated by utility companies that rely on fossil fuel combustion or nuclear power.  Thanks to subsidy programs, more and more homeowners are installing their our own solar energy collection systems for part of their energy needs.  Regardless of the source, we can live through winter as if we were in the comfort of Florida by simply adjusting our home thermostats to 70^o F or even higher.

Our homes can feel cozy in winter because we enjoy a relatively small “temperature difference” between our body temperature (98^o F) and our indoor surroundings (e.g. 70^o F), a difference of only 28^o F.  In contrast, let’s calculate the temperature difference for a cardinal or chickadee whose body temperature “thermostat” is set at 105^o F while perched on a branch on a 0^o day.  That would amount to 105^o minus 0^o or a temperatuer difference of 105^o F!!  Or, if we venture outside on the same day, our temperature difference would be 98^o minus 0^o F, or 98^oF.  

Amazingly, while we can “enjoy Florida” within our homes, the winter songbird must face nearly fourfold higher difference between body temperature and its frigid surroundings.  This great temperature difference encourages more heat loss from the animal.  It also places continual demand on the “metabolic furnace” of the warm-blooded animal to maintain its set body temperature.  In order to meet this great energy demand, winter active animals must expend considerable energy to obtain food in spite of adaptations to reduce heat loss—e.g. thick fur, subcutaneous fat, huddling behavior.

Animal Adaptations to Cold
Understanding the great challenges of warm-blooded animals in winter helps us appreciate the variety of mechanisms and behavioral traits God has designed to assure survival and reproduction.  Hibernating animals such as chipmunks, woodchucks, and black bears seek warmer microclimates such as burrows and dens where they can become inactive and turn down their bodily “thermostats.” The shelter-seeking behavior of these animals places them within a more favorable air temperature. This fact, combined with the animal’s physiological reduction of body temperature, serves to narrow the temperature difference; and hence, the resultant heat loss.  The inactivity and lower metabolism of the hibernator also eliminates the disadvantage of having to seek often scarce food sources in the dead of winter.

Frozen Animals
Many so-called “cold-blooded animals” like amphibians and invertebrates survive winter by burrowing down deep into moist soil.  However, some frog species including the Wood Frog and Spring Peeper, known for their choruses in Spring, find shelter under dead leaves in the autumn.  When freezing temperatures occur, these frogs allow as much as 70% of their body fluids to freeze! 

Upon closer examination, the frog’s freeze tolerance is contingent on one major condition:  Only the extracellular fluids (plasma) surrounding the cells of the wood frog can be allowed to freeze.  The cytoplasm within the cells must be kept from freezing!  When temperatures surrounding the frog drop toward freezing, the frog’s liver releases massive amounts of glucose sugar.  The sugars are transported into the cytoplasm of body cells where they serve as cryoprotectants—that is, the sugars act to lower the freezing point of the cytoplasm within cells just like antifreeze works to prevent freezing in our car engines.  In so doing, cryoprotectants preserve the cytoplasm and cell membranes from destruction by dagger-like ice crystals that would otherwise form in the event of freezing. 

While cryoprotectants protect the cytoplasm of frog cells from freezing, extracellular freezing is actually encouraged in the interstitial fluids.  Here, freezing is triggered by ice-nucleating proteins (INP’s) distributed in these interstitial fluids.   The role of INP’s was described in a previous Oikonomia (Click HERE).

Biologist Jack Layne at Slippery Rock University describes what happens when the wood frog’s blood plasma freezes: “The heart stops, the breathing stops.  For all practical purposes you’d assume the animal was dead.”  Brian Handwerk, writing in National Geographic News (March 1, 2005), describes the unbelievable result: “When the mercury falls, … [the wood frog’s] body temperature drops to between 21^o and 30^o F.  … its metabolism slows to a crawl, and …heart and brain cease to function.  …the animal becomes, to the eye and touch, a frog-shaped ice cube.”  [For more light discussion of freeze tolerance in frogs, click HERE.  For a technical treatment with interesting methodology and charts, click HERE.]

Prolonging Life by Lowering Temperatures
The results of research on how animals freeze, thaw, and revive has provided support for the science of cryobiology and its application in the cryopreservation of embryos and body parts.  Using freezing temperatures to preserve life forms or to prolong life by decreasing the rate of physiological processes like respiration and heartbeat points to the little-realized relationship between temperature and time. 

Slowing or cessation of physiological activity when an animal’s body freezes have the effect of extending the time or duration of the animal’s life.  Both hibernating animals and the frozen frogs utilize the temperature-time relationship to survive winter.  That is, their lowered physiological activity in response to cold temperatures “buys time” for these animals to get through winter with less food demand.  The science of cryopreservation of life forms applies the temperature-time principle when it uses freezing to produce suspended animation in order to “buy extra time” for surgeons to conduct risky surgeries on trauma patients (See HERE.).  Extending this temperature-time relationship to an even further extent leads us to the possibility of using freezing temperatures to extend the lifetime of a person indefinitely.

It should be evident that many fascinating scientific discoveries and related ethical challenges await the student of winter survival strategies among plants and animals.  Peter J. Marchand’s book, Life in the Cold (4^th ed. 2014) is a good resource for readers who wish to learn more about plant and animal adaptations for cold temperatures.

Narnia: Frozen World under a Spell
As I continue to write, while looking out our window into the white, frozen, winter world, I am reminded of how the season of winter pops up in classical literature.  In our December Oikonomia article we referenced C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (Click on “Advent of Lamb and Lion -- DWELL 3.0”).  Readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (See HERE) will remember how the Pevensie children pass through a mysterious wardrobe and enter the land of Narnia.  They discover this amazing kingdom locked in the perpetual cold of winter under the spell of the White Witch.  Eventually, the witch persuades the younger brother, Edmund, to betray his three siblings, and his own life hangs in the balance.  Then, Aslan, the creator and lion king of Narnia intercedes for Edmund by giving his own life on the Stone Table, symbolizing Christ’s death on the cross for our sins.

With Aslan gone, the wicked White Witch would seem to have prevailed as Narnia remains gripped in the cold of winter.  As Mr. Tumnus had said, “It is winter in Narnia, and has been for ever so long…. always winter, but never Christmas.”  But then, a rumor is heard in Narnia that “Aslan is on the move.”  The rumor of the king’s return is affirmed by the melting of the snow as Aslan’s kingdom begins to awaken from its long winter under the witch’s spell.
 
Narnia:  Aslan Turns Winter to Spring
Edmund, still a captive, realizes that “The witch’s magic is weakening,” and Lewis treats the readers of his Chronicles with a beautiful picture of redemption from sin’s curse.  The heart and soul of each person, frozen and lifeless without God, melts and springs into New Life through faith in Jesus Christ.  Lewis beautifully writes what some believe is a metaphor of his own conversion from atheism to a strong faith in Christ:

All around them, though out of sight,
there were streams chattering, bubbling, splashing
and even (in the distance) roaring.
And his heart gave a great leap (though he hardly knew why)
when he realised that the frost was over…
And much nearer there was a drip-drip-drip
from the branches of all the trees.

We began this article with a description of the fascinating ways animals face the frozen world of winter.  We described how certain frogs by design refuse to seek deeper, warmer locations in the wet soil; but instead, locate in shallow areas, resulting in freezing of over 70% of their body fluids.  Their risky approach to survival in winter yields some logical advantages.  When spring comes, Wood Frogs and Spring Peepers are already located near the surface, so that, when their bodies thaw, they can quickly move to vernal pools for mating and producing offspring—and sing their lovely choruses that revive our hopes that Spring is here.

From Frozen to New Life in Christ
What lessons can we learn from the parallel between frigid and frozen animals and the frozen kingdom like Narnia?  Maybe this comparison has already spoken to you about your own spiritual life.  If we are honest, all of us go through “seasons of winter” in our lives.   For some reason, or sometimes for no apparent reason, we experience periods of spiritual coldness.  Some may not remember a time you actually experienced real life and purpose for being.  Others may have experienced a cold, emptiness in your life which you tried to fill through various pursuits, none of which have satisfied.

Thankfully, as the Chronicles of Narnia remind us, our lives need not be trapped in a land of “Always winter, but never Christmas.”  In fact, C.S. Lewis is famously quoted as saying:  If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.  Lewis’s words and God’s revelation in Scripture have inspired many to realize that we have been created to aspire toward a world “beyond winter;” a world free from the curse of what the Bible calls “the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2: 2).” 

In Ephesians 2, the Apostle Paul explains that there are only two categories of people with respect to their standing before God.  In the first group are those who are dead in their trespasses and sins…children of wrath (v. 1-3).  Like the frozen Wood Frog, there is nothing within us while we are spiritually “frozen and lifeless” that can warm us up again.  Only the light and warmth of the sun can thaw the lifeless animal.  Likewise, only God can raise us from spiritual deadness. 

The second group are those who, because of God’s great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions [like the first group], made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)… (v. 4-5).  According to these Scriptures, we are either spiritually frozen and lifeless, or we are made alive through faith and acceptance of Christ’s substitutionary work of grace.

Elsewhere, Paul’s writing in Romans 8 explains the contrasting dispositions that separate people into the two groups noted above.  Members of the “frozen, lifeless group” seek acceptance before God based on the law of sin and death through dependence upon “the flesh” (our “old Adamic nature”) still under the curse of sin (v. 1-5).  Spiritually lifeless people seek God's acceptance by trying in their own strength to “be good”—e.g. doing good works, going to church, giving to good causes, trying to be “wok,” or supporting “Green Earth” causes.  Doing “good works” is commendable, but God wants our hearts first before our good works.  Members of the “alive in Christ” group have died to their old Adamic nature and are set free to set [their] minds on the things of the Spirit [resulting in] life and peace (v. 4-6); and good works motivated by Christ’s life and love within.    

Waiting Now—Spring is Coming!
The Bible reveals that all of us will live forever, but members in each of the two groups will have a very different eternal destiny (Matthew 25: 31-46).  For the time being, however, the Scriptures reveal that all of us are in a waiting period in the “winter” of a groaning creation (Romans 8:  19-23):

For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.  For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.

Each of us have the choice how we will respond to God’s Word and His Spirit who call us out of the cold and frozen world into new life with the Spirit in life and peace.  Jesus said, I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10: 9-10).

Look, the winter is past,
    and the rains are over and gone.
The flowers are springing up,
    the season of singing birds has come,
    and the cooing of turtledoves fills the air.
The fig trees are forming young fruit,
    and the fragrant grapevines are blossoming.
Rise up, my darling!
Come away with me, my fair one!
                    – Song of Solomon 2: 11-13 (NLT)

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ,
    he is a new creature:
The old things passed away;
   behold, new things have come!
                   -- 2 Corinthians 5:17

Comments or Questions?
As always, we invite your questions and comments.  Please use the “Comments” link below, or e-mail us at silviusj@gmail.edu.  If you want to know more about how you can find peace with God and newness of Eternal Life in Christ, click HERE to read a short online booklet entitled, “Have You Made the Wonderful Discovery of the Spirit-filled Life?”