When Light Touches Skin

At the core of the sun, hydrogen atoms fuse at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit — a violence so extreme that no human eye could witness it and survive. That raw energy, born in the furnace of a star, begins a journey. It takes roughly eight minutes to cross 93 million miles of empty space, traveling as invisible electromagnetic radiation — untouchable, intangible, beyond the reach of any hand.

But then it arrives. And something remarkable happens. That same fierce energy lands on the face of a three-year-old playing in a backyard in Tennessee. She feels it as warmth. It lands on a Kansas wheat field and becomes bread. It strikes the ocean off Cape Cod and paints the water gold at six in the evening.

The unapproachable becomes gentle. The invisible becomes visible. The untouchable, touchable.

John tells us that the Word — the Logos — existed before all things, was with God, was God. Through Him, everything that exists was made. He was the light shining in the darkness, the source behind every created thing. And then, in a stable in Bethlehem, that Word did what sunlight does every morning: He closed the infinite distance. He became flesh. He moved into the neighborhood.

The God no one could see became a baby you could hold.