Ten Thousand Acts of Repair

In 1974, Swedish biochemist Tomas Lindahl made a discovery that should have been terrifying: DNA — the very code that makes you you — is unstable. Every single day, each cell in your body sustains between 10,000 and 100,000 damage events. Chemical bonds break. Strands fray. Errors accumulate.

The finding raised an urgent question: how are we alive at all?

The answer, Lindahl discovered, is that your cells come equipped with a constant, tireless repair system. Specialized proteins scan your DNA around the clock, locate the breaks and errors, and restore the sequence — most of it before you are even aware anything happened. This work was so fundamental to human survival that Lindahl received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2015 for it.

We carry more damage than we know. And we are being repaired more constantly than we realize.

This is a picture of grace.

Scripture tells us that we fall short — not occasionally, but continually. Our hearts accumulate damage from pride, fear, bitterness, and selfish choices. Left unaddressed, those breaks compound. But the Almighty does not abandon damaged things. He scans, He finds, He restores. Grace is not a one-time event at conversion; it is a continuous, cellular work — God's tireless repair moving through us even while we sleep.

Lindahl's discovery reminds us that life itself depends on constant, invisible restoration. So does the life of faith.

You don't have to be whole to be loved. You just have to be held. And in Christ, you are.