Lackeous Foodiferous

Suddenly everything was dark. It was as if I was fainting—only I didn't faint. The colors drained out of the scene and I felt unsure of my balance. I stopped moving to let it pass, but it did not pass.

I stumbled up to my Scoutmaster. "I feel dizzy," I mumbled.

It was the morning of my first Klondike Derby: February 1983. I had joined in the laborious construction of a snow cave the previous night—piling up snow, packing it down, hollowing out the cave one small shovelful at a time—but I wouldn't sleep in it because I felt claustrophobic in the little hole. Instead, I crawled into a tent, but I left my boots out in the snow and the rain. Now it was morning, and I was miserable. Cold. Wet. Wearing borrowed shoes. Standing by the fire.

My Scoutmaster—Ole Smith, a kind, funny man with mustache that always suggested he was up to mischief—offered me a sweet roll, but I munched on a piece of bacon instead.

My vision is what I remember most clearly now, 30 years later. The scene in front of my eyes took on the style of an Andy Warhol print—the colors exaggerated and blown out and posterized. A lot of bright yellow and white. I felt terrible. I was sure I had hypothermia. Later, others told me I had become as pale as the snow.

"I feel like I'm going to die," I moaned to Scoutmaster Smith. "Could you take me home?"

My Scoutmaster led me down the trail to the camp medic's lodge at the bottom of the hill. There, in the warm interior, they laid me on a cot and gave me hot chocolate and food. I slowly started to feel better, and soon the medic very solemnly gave his scientific diagnosis: I had Lackeous Foodiferous.

I think of that experience often during the bitter cold of winter, especially when camping with Scouts. In the dark, long, oh-so-cold evening of a winter camp, our instinct is to retreat into our coats and huddle up by the fire. We go into survival mode and avoid doing anything we don't deem absolutely necessary. We just want to outlast the cold, gloomy night, and we stare into the flames, longing for the rising sun and its promise of warmth. We don't want to move, we don't want to take off our gloves to open a granola bar wrapper, we don't want to eat.

The best way to stay warm is to generate your own heat.

This instinct to hunker down against the cold can be counter-productive. As I learned in that medic's lodge three decades ago, the most important source of heat on a winter camp is neither a fire nor a coat. It is our own metabolism. We speak of a nice warm coat, but the coat itself is not warm, of course; the coat is merely helping to retain the heat our body is producing. But to produce heat, our bodies need fuel.

A related principle is that movement—using energy from all that food you ate—generates heat. Sitting still by the fire means your muscles aren't producing heat and your heart isn't pumping warm blood quickly to your extremities. And when it is cold enough, the warmth from the fire simply cannot compensate for the lack of warmth inside your fingers or feet.

As an adult leader on winter camps with Scouts, I have often thought my most important job is being a cheerleader. I am the pep squad, the conditioning coach, the energizer. I try to get the boys eating, to get them moving. Get away from the fire, do jumping jacks, run around, play a game, drink water, eat food. It may not sound pleasant when you are miserable and cold and huddled by the fire, but it's the surest and quickest way to get warm.

The principle carries over into matters of faith as well. The most potent spiritual fire comes from within. In our figurative winters—during challenges and hard times—it is tempting to retreat from faith-building activity or religious effort. We want to hunker down and stop moving and stop eating and wait for everything to get better. But doing so only makes us get colder.

We can survive—we can thrive—in difficult times. But we must continue to feed our souls with prayer and the word of God. We must keep moving, keep active in our religious endeavors, including service to others. Doing so will feed our fire of faith and fan the flames ever larger, keeping us warm and helping us emerge stronger from the dark, cold night of adversity.

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