The Enzymes That Never Stop Working

Every single day, the DNA inside each of your cells sustains between ten thousand and one hundred thousand lesions — damage from ultraviolet light, from metabolic byproducts, from the simple act of living in a world that wears things down. If left unrepaired, this damage would be catastrophic. Cancer. Organ failure. Death within hours.

But you never feel it happening.

That is because God designed an astonishing repair system. Enzymes like photolyase and the proteins of the base excision repair pathway move along your DNA strands like tireless editors, finding the errors, snipping out the damage, and stitching the code back together — thousands of times a day, in every one of your thirty-seven trillion cells. The biochemist Tomas Lindahl won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2015 for discovering these repair mechanisms, and what stunned the scientific community was the sheer relentlessness of it. The repair never stops. It never takes a day off. It works while you sleep.

That is a portrait of grace.

Before you were aware of how broken things were, the mending had already begun. Before you could name the damage, the Healer was at work. The apostle Paul wrote that where sin increased, grace increased all the more. Not as a reaction, but as a constant — like enzymes that were repairing the breach before you even knew it existed.

You have never drawn a single breath without grace already at work inside you.