Source:  Three Queries on Peace – QuakerQuaker.

The author of the post above is David Madden. Please click the source above to see the entire post.  There are not many words in the source post (I will likely exceed his word count in just talking about it)  but they do inspire me. As is obvious from the link David is a Quaker and this article is based on Quaker thought and values.

There are three points of peace brought up in the post. I will briefly mention the first two and then will have some personal thoughts on the last one. It is not that the first two are less insightful, it is only that the third one strikes me closer to home right now.

The first element is about What is the meaning of peace? Of course the meaning has different aspects when expanded from a personal day-to-day peace all the way to world peace. The second elements is about what prevents peace from happening. This goes into the nature of man and how we keep the light of the Lord hidden under our personal baskets.

The final peace is a personal peace. Here is what David says about that:

A third element of bringing about peace is to search our hearts and minds for the disharmonious attitudes and behaviors we observe in others. We must always remember what Jesus told us: “…first take the log out of your own eye, then… take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”  What keeps me from realizing peace?

I am finding it personally difficult to find any significant peace lately. I think part of it is all the angry words that envelope so much of our social media. By social media I am including the news media (TV, Internet, and the like) as well as the interactive blogs and news articles and various social sites.  They are dragging me down somewhat lately. I am having trouble finding peace among all this chaos. I seem to now look upon all those I don’t know with some amount of skepticism instead of looking for the goodness in their hearts.  What happened? I have always tried to find that “piece of God” in everyone I meet. Lately that is becoming more and more difficult. Am I losing what little innocence I have left?  I will end this with the same sentence that ended the quote above What keeps me from realizing peace”. I need to gather the strength and conviction to find that answer.