Frogsicles
Each winter in Alaska, the common wood frog freezes solid. It quits breathing, and its heart completely stops beating. If you picked one up, it would not move. If you bent one of its legs, it would break off. But when the warm weather returns, its tissues thaw— and it miraculously comes back to life!
The wood frog has even been revived after being frozen for seven months at temperatures dipping as low as three degrees Fahrenheit.
These "frogsicles" can endure multiple freeze-and-thaw cycles in a season because the fluid in their cells contains high levels of glucose, a natural antifreeze also known as cryoprotectant, that lowers the freezing temperature of tissue. Scientists are interested in learning from these frogs in order to increase the shelf life of human organs for transplants by a process known as cryopreservation. Reviving organs after freezing them for a short period would enable them to be shipped around the world and save many more lives.
Did you know that God is an expert at organ transplants?
"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them" (Ezekiel 36:26, 27).
I Shouldn't Be Alive
There’s a great tv show called I Shouldn’t Be Alive. Have any of you seen it?
In every episode of the show, a person or group of people end up in some dangerous situation and struggle to survive, whether in a desert, or an ocean, or a jungle, or the like. And in every episode, the situation gets so bleak that the viewer would fully expect the person or group of people to die. There appears to be no hope at all. But then, against all odds, the person is either rescued or they somehow find their way back to civilization, and survive.
There were six whole season of these heart pounding, nail biting survival stories. Here are the synopses of some of the shows just from the first season:
- - Traveling to Idaho to attend a funeral, a family from California becomes trapped in a blizzard; while trekking off to find help, a wrong turn leads them deep into the unforgiving wilderness.
- - A crew of five aboard a luxury yacht sailing from Maine to Florida that sank in a storm, leaving the crew adrift on a lifeboat with no food or water and menaced by sharks.
- - Three adventurers are captured by the Khmer Rouge and must either negotiate their release or take their chances escaping into the jungle.
- - A Hollywood camera crew in a helicopter crash into an active volcano they were filming. Rescue attempts are hampered by lava, toxic gases and bad weather ...
- - A plane crash in the Kalahari Desert leaves survivors without food or water, and two of them try to find help for other passengers who are injured.
Now, we could look at this show and talk about how it’s like our situation before we knew Jesus, how we were lost in our sin and felt like we had no hope, but then Jesus came and rescued us.
But in actuality, this doesn’t even come close to our situation!
In actuality, our situation was much worse, because we weren’t just close to dead — the Bible says that we were already dead in our trespasses and sins!
So Jesus didn’t just rescue us when we were close to not being able to make it on our own. Rather He made us alive when we were already dead!
"As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins ... " (Ephesians 2:1, NIV).
"... [E]ven when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved ..." (Ephesians 2:5, ESV).
Wells of Salvation
Water sources are always precious, especially in a desert climate. According to Texas A&M Science:
Most wells don’t get their water from underground rivers, but instead get the water from aquifers. Aquifers are layers of rock and soil with water flowing through their small pores. Groundwater drips slowly and gently through the small spaces within rocks, between rocks, and between loose materials such as sand and gravel. In fact, water in aquifers can take years to centuries to flow back to the surface. A typical flow rate for water in aquifers is ten feet per year. For this reason, if a region experiences no rain for a few weeks, the wells will not immediately run dry. New water from rain and melting snow drips down into the ground through the pores and cracks in the rocks and soil. The well has to be deep enough so that it is below the water table so that the water fills up.
Those who are deeply rooted in Christ will experience sustainance and joy unspeakable from the salvation and security He provides, with plenty of "reserves" on hand rippling through and flowing up from the swell of the groundwaters of His grace.
"With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation" (Isaiah 12:3, ESV).
"[I pray that] that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:16-19, ESV).