The Repair Crews Written Into Your Code

In 2015, biochemist Aziz Sancar shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for revealing something remarkable about the human body: we are constantly breaking and constantly being restored.

Every single day, each cell in your body suffers between ten thousand and one hundred thousand instances of DNA damage. Ultraviolet light, metabolic byproducts, even the simple act of breathing generates molecular injuries to the genetic code that makes you who you are. By all rights, we should fall apart.

But we don't. Because restoration is woven into our very design.

Sancar mapped a process called nucleotide excision repair — tiny protein machines that patrol the three billion letters of your genetic code, recognize where the damage has occurred, carefully cut out the broken section, and stitch the correct sequence back into place. They work ceaselessly, silently, faithfully — tens of thousands of repairs every day in every cell you possess.

Here is what strikes me: God did not design a creation that would never break. He designed a creation with restoration written into its code.

And what is true at the molecular level is true at the spiritual level. The Almighty never promised us a life without damage. He promised something better — a love that finds the broken places and makes them whole. "He restores my soul," the psalmist wrote. Not once. Not occasionally. Ceaselessly, silently, faithfully — like those repair enzymes patrolling your DNA, the grace of God is always at work in you, mending what this world has torn.