And God Saw That it Was Good
Can sun exposure cause skin cancer? Absolutely. However, appropriate sunlight actually prevents cancer. Exposure to the sun provides many benefits such as promoting the formation of vitamin D. (Dr. Joseph Mercola)
I don't put sunscreen on my kids. At least, not with any regularity. I think I put it on them twice a year, for the 4th of July and Labor Day, both of which involve celebrations where the children will be out in the sun longer than they are accustomed. I tend to avoid talking about sunscreen with other mothers because there are a lot of opinions about it and I prefer not to cause a stir.
Oh, but I do love to think about things, and so, in honor of the warm sun that is outside my window after a week or more of rain (yes, we basked in its glory without sunblock for a good thirty minutes yesterday afternoon--gasp!), I thought I'd analyze sunblock a bit, just for fun.
I must give the disclaimer that though I have recently read some research that supports me in my aversion to sunscreen, it was not research that originally influenced this behavior.
Sunscreen, and the excessive societal pressure to use it, bothers me a bit because it contradicts what God said about His own creation. On the fourth day of creation, God made the great lights, with the greater light (the sun) to rule over the day. He saw that it was good.
And it is amazing to see this play out within creation as we learn more about how things work. God created man, and when man worked in the garden (in the sun) the sunlight interacted with his skin to produce Vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is not the same as what you find in fortified milk and cereals (that is D2, a synthetic vitamin, much harder to break down into a usable form).
When Vitamin D3 is broken down and transformed by the liver and then the kidneys it becomes 25-hydroxyvitamin D. And this fancy word symbolizes much that is good: natural protection again cancer (especially female cancers), depression, fatigue, infertility, osteoporosis, some autoimmune disorders, multiple sclerosis, and the list goes on.
When God says something is good, He means it! Now this doesn't mean we should spend excessive amounts of time in the direct sunlight. (Sometimes I think sunscreen was invented as an attempt to avoid the consequences of two behaviors: immodesty and excess.)
And we do know a man who is allergic to the sun, and so the sun doesn't seem to be good for him. But a person being allergic to peanuts doesn't mean that peanuts are actually bad, and the fact that our friend gets a rash from the sun doesn't make the sun bad, either. Sunlight is a good thing.
It is always interesting to me that we can glorify God in literally every square inch of our lives. Sometimes it is as simple as rejecting society's assumption that something is inherently bad when Scripture explicitly says it is good.