At JRS, every day we are grateful to accompany displaced people on their journeys. The journeys of migrants and refugees are often very difficult and challenging, but their resilience and strength inspires and teaches us so much, including about gratitude.

This prayer of gratitude is from a detainee at a U.S. Federal Detention Center whom JRS/USA serves as part of our Detention Chaplaincy Project, a program that provides pastoral and religious assistance to meet the needs of migrants and refugees detained in five US federal detention centers located in Florida, Texas, Arizona and New York. This detainee expresses her gratitude to God, even in the midst of her detention.

We invite you to pray with her, and share your gratitude:

I come to you to offer my most sincere and humble respect. Thank you for all the blessings you give us, and I apologize because we are ungrateful for everyday things. We constantly run in this (detention) system. Give us the time Father to value the most important thing we have. It is a privilege being able to awaken to one more day of life. To see, to smell, to pray, to feel, to be able to take a shower. In short to be able to say that all is apparently normal. But Father unfortunately there are many brothers and sisters who do not have the privilege of being able to enjoy what many, with or without intention, do not value.

En Español:

Me dirijo hacia ti para ofrecente mis mas sinceras, humildes respetuosas. Gracias por tanta bendiciones que nos das y te pido perdon por que somos ingratos, por las cosas cotidianas. El corre, corre constante de este sistema de cosas. Nos damos el tiempo Padre de valorar lo mas importante que tenemos. Es el privilegio de poder despertar un dia mas de vida . Poder ver, oler, orir, sentir, poder ducharse. En fin poder hablar, que al parecer es normal. Pero padre hay muchos hermanos y hermanas no tienen, desafortunadamente, ese privilegio de poder disfrutar lo que muchos con o sin intencion no valoramos.