One day a father was sitting in his study, attempting to work while keeping an eye on his young son. Looking around for something to occupy the boy, he tore a picture of the earth from the pages of a magazine. Ripping the picture into small pieces, he cupped the shredded blue and green papers in his hands and offered them to the boy as a gift.
“Here’s a puzzle for you to put together,” he said.
Trotting out of the room to reassemble the puzzle, his son seemed happy with his new assignment. Turning back to his work, the father smiled, confident that at last he could count on some uninterrupted work time. But his sense of satisfaction vanished a short time later when the boy walked back into his study, triumphantly announcing the successful completion of the puzzle.
“How,” the surprised father asked, “did you put it together so quickly?”
“It was easy,” the boy replied. “There’s a person on the other side of the page and when you put the person together, you put the world together.”
The boy’s unintended wisdom cuts to the heart of our quest for peace. Peace is not found in a place. Peace is not found in this world. Peace is found in a person–Jesus.
**This story is recounted in Catherine Whitmire, Practicing Peace (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin, 2007), 127.
