The Repair Crews You Never See

Every single day, each cell in your body sustains tens of thousands of breaks and lesions in its DNA. Ultraviolet light, oxidative stress, even the ordinary act of breathing damages the molecular code that holds you together. By all rights, we should fall apart before lunch.

But we don't. In 2015, three scientists — Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar — received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping how our cells fight back. They discovered that specialized enzymes constantly patrol our DNA like microscopic repair crews, detecting damage, snipping out the corrupted section, and rebuilding it letter by letter. This process happens thousands of times per hour in every one of your thirty-seven trillion cells, and you never feel a thing.

Here is what strikes me about that: healing is already written into your design. Before you ever knew you were wounded, the repair had begun. Before you could name the damage, restoration was underway.

The Psalmist wrote, "He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds" (Psalm 147:3). Notice the present tense. Not "He will heal someday," but He heals — continuously, persistently, at a depth we cannot observe with the naked eye.

Some of you are sitting here today convinced that the damage done to your heart, your marriage, your faith is permanent. But the God who embedded repair into every cell of your body is not finished with you. His healing work is already underway in places you cannot yet see. You don't have to understand the process. You just have to trust the Healer.