Creating Ripples

A London newspaper once reported the fascinating story of a middle-aged man who regained his sight after being blind since infancy. The man, of course, had not remembered the visual images he had seen as a baby. But, in his blindness, he had formed some fascinating perceptions about how things looked. For example, he thought that most people were tall and slender. He imagined that the few who were not were shaped like bottles. But the most striking notion he had formed over his years of sightlessness was, as he put it, “That all human faces looked peaceful.”

Indeed, what that blind man felt in his innocence should have been so. Surely, it is reasonable to believe that human faces are meant by God to look peaceful.

You may not consider yourself a Scripture scholar, but you probably know the Old Testament word for “peace”: the beautiful Hebrew word, “shalom.” In the Bible, the word means so much in terms of human fulfillment that there…