Note: This post is an extended version of the comments I made at church a couple weeks ago.

Many of us have heard of the “peace that transcends all understanding,” from one of the most famous snippets of the New Testament: “and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds…” (Philippians 4:7)

But I don’t know that we have a realistic conception of what that “peace” is. It’s not “peace and quiet,” as we often think in English. Not an inner calm, well not directly, anyhow. It can overlap with “peace and quiet,” because if you’re at peace, you’re not in turmoil. But most of the time in the Bible, when you read “peace,” it usually refers to something slightly different than “peace and quiet.”

Two of our friends from synagogue are among the 80 or so “pipeline” families, all of whom had been in the process of adopting orphans from Nepal, when the US government changed policy and left them in limbo, forbidding them to come back home with their newly adopted children.

As the friend of one such family explained, these Nepalese adoptions had been “already pre-approved by the State Department pending Embassy investigation. However, at this time, it doesn’t appear that this investigation is any more than paper pushing from one bureau to another. It seems very cruel to approve these families and then leave them abandoned in a foreign and unstable country with no options except to stay 22 months to obtain an Immediate Family visa.”

Here’s the email our friends Teresa and Mark sent out to all of us last week, which I got permission to share with you:

The words of the chorus are based on an old Hebrew prayer: Establish peace, goodness, and blessing, grace and kindness and compassion, upon us and upon all Israel, your people.

He turned it into a song for peace for the world:

Today, for Wishcasting Wednesday, Jamie Ridler asks, “What do you wish to make room for?” Like most people, I have so much stuff, both physically and figuratively, it’s hard to make room for anything. But what I really want to make room for today is the following blog post, which I’ve wanted to write. But I haven’t had the space for it.

So today, I’m giving up my typical Wishcasting Wednesday post in order to talk about the Mourner’s Kaddish as a prayer for the depressed.