Over 200 years ago, there lived a man by the name of Joseph Priestley. He was very interested in things of nature.
One day he came across some sap from a tree in South America. He discovered something special about this material. If you wrote on a piece of paper with a pencil and then rubbed this sticky sap over what you had written it could remove the pencil marks. So he called the substance "rubber."
That name has also been given to other things that are hard yet spongy — like the tires on a car, or the eraser on the end of this pencil.
Now, why would a person want to invent an eraser? One reason is that we all make mistakes and the eraser helps us to correct those mistakes.
Our faith in Jesus also gives us an eraser — the forgiveness of God. When God forgives our sins, He removes our past mistakes and allows us to start over.
The next time you pick up a pencil to write and notice the eraser on the end, let it remind you of how God's love and forgiveness can erase the sin in our lives and make us new in Christ. (Kenneth Mortonson is Senior Pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Macomb, IL)
