The Notebooks That Still Glow

Marie Curie spent years in a cramped Paris laboratory, hunched over vials of pitchblende, isolating the element she would name radium. She worked so closely with the substance that it seeped into everything — her lab coat, her furniture, her personal papers. Today, more than a century later, her notebooks are stored in lead-lined boxes at France's Bibliotheque nationale. Researchers who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing and sign a liability waiver. The pages still carry radioactivity.

Curie never fully grasped what her proximity to radium was doing to her. She carried glowing vials in her pocket, marveling at their blue-green light. She didn't realize she herself had become marked — transformed by the very thing she had given her life to study.

When Moses descended Mount Sinai after forty days in the presence of the Almighty, he didn't know his face was shining. The radiance wasn't something he manufactured or performed. It was the unavoidable consequence of proximity. He had been so close to the Holy One that God's glory had seeped into his very skin.

This is the quiet promise of Exodus 34: we become like what we draw near to. Time spent in God's presence doesn't leave us unchanged. The people around us may notice before we do — a patience we didn't plan, a kindness we can't explain, a light we never intended to carry.