40 days of survival

Last night Nora and I spent some time reading and discussing the first few verses of Matthew 4, the story of how Jesus was tempted in the wilderness (or, in Nora's Bible, the desert). I once watched the show Survivorman on The Science Channel. The show's host gets dropped in any number of severe circumstances and locations far removed from civilization and he has to find his way to civilization and survive without anyone's help in the span of seven days. He shows the viewers how to survive being stranded in circumstances hopefully far more extreme than any of us will ever encounter. But anyway, this man is absurdly fit for these life-or-death battles. In the episode that I'm now thinking of, he was caught in the desert and did things like steal eggs from a bird (how did he find the bird and manage to steal the eggs before some other desert creature could get it?), eat the first egg raw because he was famished and couldn't wait any longer, then cook the other egg(s) on the hot stones. At one point, he even pissed on his t-shirt and then wrapped it around his head to keep cool--despite its putrid urine smell, and he sipped out water through plant stems from mud to stay hydrated.

This has given me a slightly new perspective on Jesus' whole 40-day fast in the wilderness/desert (whichever one it was) thing. Even if we aren't sure how he kept himself hydrated while in the desert, we are sure it wasn't easy--but he gained his nourishment from God; the word of God sustained him. I mean, I don't think anyone doubted that it was a hard time for Jesus, but now I tend to think it was even harder than it first seemed...

Alas. My computer battery is almost gone. I had quite a bit to write today, but it's coming out slowly... running down the battery and... so it will wait. Hope all of you are well and nourished. Miss you.


Here's some info I copied from the website on Survivorman, if you're curious:

No food, no shelter, no fresh water — one man alone in the wild for seven days with only his wits and stamina to sustain him. Each episode of Survivorman finds survival expert Les Stroud abandoned in a remote location with little more than the clothes on his back — and his cameras.

Les not only needs to survive for a week with no supplies, but he must film everything himself, dragging 50 pounds of camera gear and batteries every inch of the way. Armed with a unique one-person camera rig and an abundance of wry humor, Les documents his struggles to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in climates as diverse as the Costa Rican rainforest, Georgia swampland, high Sonoran desert and Arctic ice floes. He even spends one episode splitting his time between a leaky raft and a tiny island — 80 yards across — in the Gulf of Honduras.