I am delighted to invite you to join us at our Global Prayer Gathering, April 11-13, 2008, in the Washington, DC area. IJM field operations leaders from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Canada, the UK and the U.S. will gather with us for a powerful time of asking God to bring rescue to the oppressed. As friends and staff of IJM come together for prayer and worship, we will celebrate God’s goodness and righteousness and ask that He would continue to use us to fulfill His promises of justice. ... more

This year for Christmas I'm trying to get past the traditional consumerism of our culture by doing something a bit unconventional. Instead of doing the traditional splurge on buying gifts, there will be a new spin on it: we're going to purchase gifts to give to one another in the form of unique donations and fair trade items to benefit the poor, hungry and recently freed slaves in the world. So instead of giving someone your old stuffed goat, you can actually ''give'' a loved one or friend a real goat that will feed and economically sustain an impoverished family in the third world!

We know this is a blog and people from everywhere can read it any time they want, but an important event is happening in the New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut area and we would love any of you in the area to be a part of it! [Ed.]

Please welcome Janelle Milazzo, our newest contributor here at Everyday Liturgy. Her first post acts as an apt biographical introduction to her vocation and thought.

I interact with a lot of the psycho-analyst types. . . which is probably rational given that I work in a program that is under the Cross-Cultural Counseling Center at IINJ. Currently, most of our counseling grad-student interns are leaving as their semesters are coming to a close, and thus they have to say goodbye to their clients that they have been see for therapy for the past several months.

Last week, I had a conversation with one of those interns who has been counseling the same (survivor of torture) client for almost 2 years. She shared with me how hard it is for both her and her client that she now must make a clean break in ties with him. She also told me about the next phase of her program and how she has a different internship as a clinician at a mental institution, working with patients with severe mental disturbance. I asked her (so far) which has been more challenging for her; working with asylee survivors of torture or working with mentally ill patients.

She paused and acknowledged that both groups of people are severely marginalized, making neither job easy to emotionally shoulder. However, she said that it has been a lot easier for her to find and give meaning to working with asylum seekers, who, if they can heal from their past trauma and get through the asylum process, will have a shot at achieving ''The American Dream'' and building a new and potentially fulfilling life for themselves. Working with patients with incurable mental disorders however, doesn't give the therapist a lot to assign meaning to. She went on to tell me about one of her current patients who spends most of his days locked in a padded room because in the past he has hurt both himself and has harmed his caretakers. He is suffering from advanced schizophrenia. Many of those patients in that institution need to be monitored carefully when they are out of their rooms so they literally do not escape and attempt to jump off the Staten Island Bridge. She said that in situations like that, it is difficult to assign meaning to the relationship or to the purpose of the therapy. ''Assign Meaning'' . . . I have heard that phrase many times this year. Usually, this has been in the context of the grad-student intern meetings that I sat in on with the supervisor of the counseling department. It has come up in conversation over working with clients to get ready for court, working with clients to sift through past trauma, working with clients as they try to literally start their lives over here, working through our own ''issues'' of how we try to assign our own personal meanings to the client's experience, realizing that to mentally cope we have private ways of assigning meaning to what we do and acknowledging that each culture and each religion has it's own way of ''assigning meaning'' to life's events and life's problems and then learning to listen to and accept others' ''assigned meaning'' of life. In other words, humans have this drive, no matter what their background or culture, to ''assign meaning'' to the events of life . . . especially to the hard events. Each time I hear ''assign meaning'', something inside me cringes slightly. Somehow, it seems that this rhetoric of ''assigning meaning'' is one nicely labeled semantic game of what humanity has been playing since the beginning of history. Or, perhaps it's more of a dilemma.