The Enzyme That Repairs by Light

Every moment of every day, your DNA is under assault. Ultraviolet radiation, toxins, even the ordinary act of a cell dividing can snap the rungs of your genetic ladder. Scientists estimate that each cell in your body sustains between ten thousand and one hundred thousand DNA lesions per day. By all rights, we should fall apart.

But we don't. In 2015, Turkish-American chemist Aziz Sancar won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping one of the most elegant repair systems in biology. He discovered that an enzyme called photolyase does something astonishing — it uses visible light to mend the very damage that ultraviolet light caused. The thing that was broken by one kind of light is restored by another. The repair doesn't erase the history of the damage. It reads the broken code and writes it whole again.

The Almighty built that principle into the fabric of creation because it is the principle by which He saves. We are people whose lives have been damaged — by sin, by grief, by the choices of others and our own worst impulses. Ten thousand fractures a day. And God does not throw us away and start over. He sends a different kind of Light into the broken place. The Light of the World enters our damaged code and rewrites what was destroyed.

You are not too far gone. The One who designed repair into every living cell has not forgotten how to mend a human soul.