The Morning Offering

Catholic Prayers From and For the Heart

Here is a version of the Morning Offering that I have known and prayed for many years:

O Jesus,
through the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
I offer You my joys, works, trials and tribulations
of this day for all the intentions of Your Most Sacred Heart,
in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world,
in reparation for my sins,
for the intentions of all my relatives and friends,
and in particular for the intentions of the Holy Father. Amen.

This is a very beautiful prayer, and one which has slowly etched its meaning into my heart.

Our Saviour wants us to give Him every part of our lives.  As I lay on my bed to pray for a friend the other day, I saw a vision that was strange at first, but made sense to me a little while later.  I saw my friend, but in shadows, and I realised my friend was trying to be very small and hide some area of sinfulness from Our Lord, and was quietly crying.   But, in a moment I saw Jesus come to my hiding friend, since we cannot hide from Him.  He reached down and picked my friend up, surrounding my friend in His loving arms.  My friend wept for some time, while Jesus never let go and provided comfort.

 

Our Jesus knows we are sinners, and He even knows that there are some areas in our lives that we find it hard to trust Him with, that we find it hard to let go of.  Because we love Him so, we see our sin as ugly, and disgusting, which they are, even as we are drawn to it.  I say this from my personal experience.

 

One day, I was having a difficult time with Him.  My sin was overwhelming, as was my inability to succeed at the business I was trying to build to provide for my family.  I was alone in the kitchen we had in our offices, and I looked up to the ceiling.  I did not know what I expected to see, but I needed some answers.  I asked Jesus: "Lord, what do You want from me?"  The answer astounded me in its simplicity and totality.  He said as clear as a bell: "Everything."  For some reason the simplicity of that answer, blew away all my doubts, not because I could give Him everything at that moment, but because it gave me a focus for the rest of my life.

 

Dear gentle reader, Our Lord does not just want us to give Him just the beautiful parts of our lives.  He does not want just from us the love we have for your family and friends.  He does not want just the things that we think please Him in our daily walk.  He wants to be the Lord of Everything.  Our trials and tribulations He wants, our struggles to be who we think He wants us to be, so that He can guide us to who He created us to be.  He came to earth to set sinners free, not just in one miraculous moment, but in all of history. 

If you, dear reader, had been the only person on the face of the earth, Jesus loves you so much that He would have come down to earth, and you would have had to nail Him to the cross with your sins.  But, then Dear Child, you would have had to take Him down and place Him in the grave all by yourself, knowing that your sins had killed Him, and then on Easter Sunday you would have had to go to the tomb and find that He had risen.  Then when He appeared to you and showed you the wounds in His hands, feet and side, you would have had to touch them to know just how much He loved you.

We are Resurrection people, and we live for that.  We must not let the devil speak to us about our unworthiness, for it is a thing of the past.  We have been made worthy by the shed Blood of Our Jesus, and no sin new or repeated of ours can take away that worthiness.  The price was too great.

I urge you to take on the Morning Offering as your own special prayer, or one like it.  Give it all to Him, and see what He can do with it, and with you.