Growing up, I had a love-hate relationship with the sun. The sun was my mother’s cure-all for headaches and head colds. Take your book outside and sit in the sunshine and read. You’ll feel better, and I did. However, I was the kid who wore a long sleeve shirt to the beach and was allergic to the sun, which produced a mild skin rash that I decoratively coated with Calamine lotion. Calamine lotion gave way to Coppertone, but unfortunately, my Coppertone tan did burn, and I went back to Calamine lotion and long sleeve shirts at the beach.

I am not the only one with this love-hate relationship. It seems as if all of Australia does, too. I read an article in Atlantic Monthly by Rowan Jacobsen, “Against Sunscreen Absolutism,” and he wrote that a 1980s ad campaign “advised Australians to ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’ if you had to go out in the sun, slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat. The only safe amount of sun was none at all.” In 2023, Australian public health groups issued new advice “that takes into account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions.”

One long-known contribution is that “sun exposure triggers vitamin D production in the skin,” and as Jacobsen points out that low levels of vitamin D are associated with increased rates of stroke, heart attack, diabetes and other diseases.

So naturally, people turned to daily supplements of vitamin D—all the benefits but none of the risks of the sun. Turns out that “Sunlight in a pill has turned out to be a spectacular failure: Vitamin D supplements have shown no benefits,” wrote Jacobsen. The article details specifics how exposure to the sun actually helps prevent and alleviate many autoimmune diseases.

Jacobsen concludes that “It’s not every day that science discovers a free and readily accessible intervention that might improve the health of so many people.”

This non-scientific person hates to break it to the scientific community that it didn’t discover this free and readily accessible intervention. The Creator spoke it into existence, along with the moon and stars, who talk back and proclaim his glory through all the earth, to the end of the world. Talk about readily accessible.

Next is the word “intervention.” From Old Testament prophets to aged Zechariah in Luke 1—from before the foundation of the world—intervention had been planned and promised, “the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:78-79)

It’s the intervention we sing at Christmas, and should be singing year-round:
Hail! the heav'n-born Prince of peace!
Hail! the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings
Risen with healing in his wings
Mild he lays his glory by
Born that man no more may die:
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth.

Those Australian researchers did overlook one hazard to prolonged exposure to the sun—one upside-down, counter-culture hazard that only exposure to the Son of Righteousness and his Word brings to reborn sons and daughters of earth, who now walk as children of light, in all that is good, right and true.

Exposure to this son is high risk. The rays from this eternal light can and will change us, mark us in ways that can never go back. What he does can and will mark us and change our lives forever. May it be so today in all we think and say and do.