Rest in the Word

( Isaiah 11:1-9) No peace in the world   Do you have peace? Recently I have been thinking of peace often. The definition of peace is a stress-free state of security and calmness that comes when there is no fighting or war, everything coexisting in perfect harmony and freedom . When I am in the middle of a conflict between two different sides, it is hard to have peace, perfect harmony, and freedom, especially when I am in the middle of arguing and fighting with my children. Our world is filled with genuine pain and trouble. We lost perfect harmony when sin came to the world in the garden of Eden. In 2003, journalist Chris Hedges set out to determine whether there have been any sustained periods of peace on the human record. Defining war as any "active conflict that has claimed more than 1,000 lives," he reviewed 3,400 years of history and discovered just 268 war-free years. In other words, approximately 92 percent of recorded history is marked by active conflict. How a