As a little girl, I was taught to say prayers at night on my way to bed. Usually short rhymes I had learned. In the summer I knelt at the side of my bed. But in winter I prayed between the sheets! No heating in our house in those days!
For God, peace was the opposite of fear. Jesus wanted His disciples to be able to step out of their worldly situations and feel His peace, whatever their circumstances. He wants us to do the same. His peace has been given and it is up to us to receive it.
If you were to wish someone grace and peace today, they would think you were a bit odd. Old fashioned (at least in our western world). Peace we understand, or we think we do, but grace is an old fashioned word, and not one that appears in our daily conversations.
Some of us are so used to going to church that we cannot imagine it not referring to a building. But when Jesus created church it was just Him, and His disciples and anyone else who cared to listen in to what was happening. Back then, it was a community.
The seldom read book of Philemon is tucked in between the short letter to Titus and the long book of Hebrews. It has only 25 verses and is rarely talked about or used as a subject for a sermon in church services. It is a letter about a runaway slave.
Those early disciples on the Emmaus road were given a new birth into a living hope when they realised that the story was true. And that same hope is available to us today; but it need not be just a hope for the future. It can be a fact today.
When their unknown, unrecognised fellow traveller joined them on the road to Emmaus, there faces were downcast, full of disappointment and lacking hope. But Jesus, still unrecognised, explained the scriptures to them, and eventually accepted their invitation to dinner. Then their hopes were fulfilled and all doubts were chased away.
My eyes will never see happiness again! Job is really having a bad time. Most of us can understand. But at the very end of the forty two chapters we read that Job got a new very long life, with more sons and daughters and a very successful farming career!
This is a good verse to remember when we are feeling down or disappointed, when what we had hoped for has not manifested. But the word of God has the answer for every emotion that could take us down the road to self pity. This is one of those verses!
Praise God that many respond and take seriously the call to pray for those in leadership. But we are so concerned with our lives and the problems of our family members, that we take little time to pray for people in authority. That world seems far from our daily lives.
EN 
FR