It has been an exceedingly busy week for me. My school is putting on a play, of which I am a part. This requires staying after school until after 10:00 each night. On top of this, I am taking the ACT on Saturday, which I need to do well on to get scholarships.

“Welcome to the world,” some would say. And how I have found the world to be so! Yet this overactivity wearies me.

It is better, for me, to be balanced than productive, to have stillness than progress. This, to me, brings out a glimpse of the peace in the world, a sense of order and beauty that is easily overlooked when moving too fast or making too much noise. And it is indeed hard to find a place that man has not lit up or paved or left any sort of this peace in.

Yet there is still a bit of it left in myself. And although the busyness of life treads upon it, I am able, at least there, to push it back.

Thus inside my local Starbucks, I caught this glimpse of shalom.