The Burn Ward at Dawn

In 2004, Dr. Sylvia Martínez worked the overnight shift at the burn unit of Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Her patients — soldiers medevaced from Fallujah and Mosul — lay wrapped in gauze, their bodies ravaged by IED blasts. The ward smelled of iodine and grief. Through the long night hours, Sylvia changed dressings, administered morphine, whispered reassurances to young men who called out for their mothers.

But every morning, something shifted. As the first light crept through the east-facing windows, the ward grew quiet. Not the silence of despair — a different kind of stillness. Sylvia noticed that patients who had thrashed and moaned all night would turn their faces toward the glass, letting the warm light fall across their damaged skin. One sergeant, burned across sixty percent of his body, told her, "Doc, that sunlight is the only thing that doesn't hurt."

He was more right than he knew. Ultraviolet light actually promotes wound healing, stimulating vitamin D production and reducing infection.

Malachi wrote to a people burned — scorched by exile, by corrupt priests, by the silence of God that had stretched across generations. They had every reason to believe the night would never end. But the prophet promised that for those who revere the name of the Almighty, the Sun of Righteousness would rise with healing in His wings. Not decorative light. Not sentimental comfort. Healing that reaches the deepest wounds and makes broken people leap like calves loosed from the stall.