Your Name

Boring. Mindless. Clinical.

Exam rooms at the doctor’s office are sterile and painfully cheerless.

Have you noticed how every exam room has a note stating that the one chair is reserved for the doctor? Every exam office! Why? Because that chair is the only thing that can keep children entertained during the additional 36 minute wait for the doctor to come do the exam.

That was the scene. I was there with one of my daughters. She was young and there was no signal on my phone. We were desperate.

This was an ENT office, which meant there there were more instruments and tools than a typical exam room. Fun to look at. But stressful to have my young daughter in close proximity for extra time.

The saving grace? A Magna Doodle waiting for creativity. Magna Doodles are the next generation of Etch-A-Sketch. With a magnetic stylist you doodle on the doodle board and the filament becomes the ink. Instead of shaking to erase, at the bottom of the Magna doodle is a tab that you pull across the bottom and it erases all of your creative lines.

Emery and I played for a while. We did hangman and Pictionary and some other drawing challenges. It passed the time just how it was intended.

The best part about the Magna Doodle is the erasing. With a satisfying flick of the tab, down and back, you have a clean slate and a blank canvas again.

Sure, it erases everything that was on the canvas—but there is something so simple and perfect about a simple and freeing erasing of errors.

For Liturgical churches, yesterday was a bit of a cleaning of the slate. It was Christ the King Sunday—a time to highlight and celebrate the ongoing reign of Jesus.

It also marked the end of the liturgical calendar. The church is stepping into Advent and the beginning of a new calendar.

Certainly, this message comes earlier than the message of the world around us. Calls for clean skates and starting fresh are still a month or more away as December counts down to January.

As the church turns the page, it is worth you taking a moment and contemplating the work of Jesus that wipes your slate clean.

This is every week and every day in the life with Jesus. You are constantly being made clean. You are pure. The old is gone. The new is here.

Confession is a part of our worship services for this reason. It is a holy pull on the eraser to give you a clean slate.

In Jesus, you are clean. Fresh. New. The blot of sin has been removed. The splatter and smear of rebellion is wiped away. You are new.

The evil one knows your name, but he calls you by your sin. He whispers in your ear and plants seeds of doubt and dismay in your mind.

Jesus knows your sin—he knows the very worst things about you—but he calls you by your name.

There is something beautiful about God’s forgetfulness, right? In a world where your errors and mistakes stick with you… Jesus erases those errors. Your sin is like canvas of a Magna Doodle. By Jesus, your past sins have passed away. They are forgotten by the One who matters most.