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HERE COMES THE SUN

It’s probably not the most romantic place to spend Christmas Day . . . but if you want to savor every waking moment, it’s the perfect spot on Planet Earth to be on the 25th. Actually, Richard Byrd and his crew of 41 fellow scientists arrived at “Little America” on the 24th of December, back in the year 1928, and then enjoyed 24 full hours of Yuletide daylight as they had their eggnog and unwrapped the supplies for their 14-month scientific field stay at the South Pole. That time of year the sun is literally up and shining all day, all night, and all day again. Unless you look at your watch, you honestly cannot tell what time it is.

You may remember a fairly recent news item coming from way Down Under, when a Dr. Jerri Nielsen, stationed at the McMurdo Station there at the South Pole, was able to self-diagnose her own breast cancer, mail in specimen slides, and then give herself oral chemotherapy before she was finally air-lifted out in October of ‘99. There are just a few months out of the year when the sunlight creates conditions for flying in and out.

In his autobiography about the 1928 expedition, With Byrd at the Bottom of the World, author Norman Vaughan described what it was like when the sun went away the following April.

“Now only pale moonlight lightened the twenty-four hours of darkness,” he wrote. “The long night of continued and total darkness affects people differently.”

For almost five long months the sun was completely gone. The workers shuttled from one building to another connected by underground tunnels. They worked when the clock said to work, and they slept when the clock said to sleep. There weren’t any roosters around to signal when it was time for breakfast. And the morale of the men went down the tubes, just like the temperatures outside.

Finally, on August 20, the men could look out on the distant horizon of snow and ice . . . and sing “Here Comes the Sun.” And Vaughan, finishing up the thought, tells us how the scientists reacted again:

“How can I explain the joyousness of the first few days of sunlight? We felt like prisoners who had received commutation of our sentences. A brightness appeared on our faces. We walked faster and moved with an energy we had long forgotten.”

From a spiritual point of view, it’s very interesting that in the very third verse of Scripture, God has created light. In fact, it’s the first thing He speaks into existence. I love how the Clear Word paraphrase puts it:

“And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And everything was bathed in light.”

God knew there was a good order to Creation, didn’t He? Light on day one, and people on day six . . . not the other way around!

In the other book we’ve enjoyed studying during this radio series, entitled Live 10 Healthy Years Longer, Jan Kuzma and Cecil Murphey have a marvelous chapter entitled “Freebies For Your Health.” The first of those freebies is sunshine, and they go right to this South Pole saga to help us understand just how vital sunlight is for our physical AND emotional well-being.

“Sunlight provides the environment needed for our existence,” they write. “It plays a role in synthesis, which creates oxygen. Sunlight regulates temperature and humidity at life-supporting levels.”

In a moment we’re certainly going to talk about overexposure and skin cancer and the warnings shared by people like Senator John McCain . . . but first, let’s note that moderate sunlight is a huge plus for the average man or woman. Jan and Cecil teach us a new work: heliotherapy. That’s the principle of sunlight killing germs. Getting out in the sun can actually heal certain diseases and help prevent infection. The sun is also a provider of vitamin D. You get it in certain foods too, but if you just have your face out in the sun for a very moderate five minutes a day, your body gets the 400 units of vitamin D it needs right there. By the way, our bodies actually make this hormone chemical, which we call vitamin D, as sunlight touches our skin. And how much does it cost? Zero! Talk about a good freebie, as Jan and Cecil describe it!

Here’s another observation — and again, we keep in mind the health warnings. But proper amounts of sunlight will give you healthier skin too. It makes it smooth and pliable; a bit of tan in your skin will triple your body’s ability to kill germs. All the following diseases — acne, psoriasis, pityriasis rosea, and ulceration of the skin (varicose veins, insect bites, and so on) — are treated by what these two writers emphatically call GRADED doses of sunlight.

Again thinking back to that very long Christmas Day, and then the extremely short — in fact, nonexistent — Fourth of July at the South Pole, Cecil and Jan explain that sunlight is obviously something which positively benefits our nervous system. Have you heard of S.A.D.? Well, it actually does make people sad — because it stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder. It appears to maybe strike women a bit more than men, but if you get blue over endless days of gray, or if you get depressed and stop laughing even as the Seattle rain comes down during a TV comedy program like Frasier, then you know how days with minimal light can impact your nerves and your emotions. We’ve talked about the lift joggers and swimmers get from endorphins, and it appears that sunlight helps your brain increase its manufacture of those endorphins.

Back to the physical side of the pie chart, though, and Jan and Cecil tell us that sunlight strengthens the heart and helps improve a person’s circulation. Did you know that sunshine can lower your pulse rate? And it tends to pull your blood pressure, whether it’s high or low, toward the normal range. Sunlight also is a plus for your immune system, partly because it helps boost the ability of your red blood cells to carry oxygen from Point A to Point B.

One last HOO-ray for a SUN-ray: it can help you lose weight. Not just because we tend to become couch potatoes when it rains or gets snowy outside, but also because sunlight stimulates the thyroid gland to increase hormone production, which results in an improved rate of metabolism.

But now in our closing moments let’s get out that big red Wednesday warning sign and hold it up right there in front of your car. Yes, you can get too much sun. Yes, skin cancer is a very real danger. Yes, you can do long and lasting damage to your skin if you get overexposed.

I remember a cute line by baseball announcer Vin Scully, who’s been getting Florida sunshine at Dodger games for more than fifty years. The players might be out in the great out-of-doors for all the dog days of summer, but fair-skinned Vinnie isn’t out there with them. And he once remarked, very matter-of-factly: “The only sun block that works for me is a ROOF!” He knows full well that he just can’t sit out there along the third base line wearing a tank top and a pair of shorts and no hat for 50 years, and still be AROUND for 50 years. And so we have to be very, very careful. Jan and Cecil tell us the sober truth that one in six Americans will, at some point in their lives, be diagnosed with skin cancer. And the major risk factor is that big, burning yellow ball up there 93 million miles away.

Ironically, most of the 40,000 new cases that are diagnosed each year – and the 7,400 annual deaths – are eminently preventable, Cecil and Jan write in this book. It’s simply a case of guarding against overexposure. Our skin pigment, or melanin, helps provide some protection by filtering out the damaging ultraviolet light in the sun’s rays, but many of us need a lot more help than that. That means sun-block, for one thing. Including Vin Scully’s roof, if that’s what it takes. It means keeping an eye on your watch, and making sure you’re especially careful between 10:00 a.m. and three in the afternoon. And by the way, if you’re trying to build up a good, healthy tan, we read in this book that “shorter, multiple exposures are better than one lengthy exposure.”

By the way, friend, even though this is a long, four-week series on health principles, I don’t ever want us to lose sight of our moorings. We’re still a Christian preaching ministry. This is still the Voice of Prophecy. Our two-word slogan always has been, and always will be, “Jesus Only.” And I want to go right into the heart of the Gospels and read this for you from John chapter eight, and from The Message paraphrase:

“Jesus once again addressed [the crowd]: ‘I am the world’s Light. No one who follows Me stumbles around in darkness. I provide plenty of light to live in.”

Friend, if you want to permanently banish that SAD syndrome — Seasonal Affective Disorder — then having Jesus in your life is the only way to go. Even at the South Pole, He can lighten up your life 24 hours a day. He can build up your spiritual immune system; He can help protect you from the diseases of discouragement and doubt. His presence can guard you from the virus of vanity.

And just like that big yellow ball with the smiley face, He’s wonderfully and marvelously free. By the way, He doesn’t have to be 93 million miles away.