Chalk

I'm old fashioned- I love chalk boards. I love writing white on black, walking away with the hands of a phantom after finishing a problem. I am also very amused by the sliding boards in Phillips, revealing new parts of the board you had never seen before, black and clean, without any of the now illegible chalk writing that complicates the other boards. Plus, they're fun to throw around.

I also love watching my professors erase the boards. Which each swipe of the eraser, the numbers and symbols get distorted and smeared until a barely recognizable mess remains. One pass leaves a cubist equation, three leave ghosts.

Since I obviously pay no attention in my diff. eq. class, I got to thinking. (Well, honestly, there's only so many times you can solve higher order differential equations with repeated roots using matrices.) We always talk about clean slates and all sins being washed away and there's a good reason for that analogy. Our lives are the chalk board and sin the chalk. When we try to erase them on our own, they end up distorted, maybe causing more confusion and separation than before. Even after many attempts at erasing, we're still left with the ghost of unforgotten sin and that's as much torture as anything else. Our attempts at fixing our lives will never work. An eraser is never going to rid the blackboard of every little bit of chalk. It takes at the very least water. Lucky for us there's a never ending supply of the stuff, at least in the analogy. I'm told grace is infinite.