A Million Repairs a Day

In 2015, biochemist Tomas Lindahl received the Nobel Prize for a discovery that should have been discouraging: human DNA is shockingly unstable. Every single day, the genetic code inside each of your cells sustains somewhere between 10,000 and 1,000,000 individual damage events — caused by sunlight, oxygen, copying errors, and the simple heat of your own body. By all accounts, life as we know it should be impossible.

But it isn't. Because the moment damage occurs, your cells dispatch an army of specialized repair proteins that locate the broken strand, excise the damaged section, and rebuild it — letter by letter — using the intact strand as a template. It happens constantly, silently, without your awareness or consent.

Lindahl's discovery reframed the question entirely. It's not "How does DNA survive?" It's "Why do repair mechanisms exist in the first place?"

Grace works the same way. The Scriptures do not pretend we are undamaged. Romans 3 is clear: every heart carries the marks of sin and selfishness, the inevitable wear of living in a fractured world. But the Almighty, who knows the precise count of our corruptions, has already dispatched the Repairer — not waiting for us to present ourselves in better condition, not requiring that we minimize the damage first.

He finds us mid-fracture. He rebuilds us strand by strand.

The question is never whether we are broken. We are. The question is whether we will stop resisting the Healer and let Him do His work.