Prayers, Works, Joys, and Sufferings: The Morning Offering Journal
I received my copy of The Morning Offering Journal as a birthday gift from a friend. It took me a few months before I started using it.
Having young children, mornings have not been the easiest time for me to pray. I tried setting an alarm to wake up before my children, but inevitably the baby would wake earlier than expected, or I would be so exhausted from multiple night wakings that I would turn off the alarm and fall back asleep. Then I would spend the morning feeling anxious about missing my appointment with God and not being able to reschedule.
While having a newborn and a preschooler in the house is demanding, most of my excuses for avoiding prayer were rooted in my perfectionism. I felt like if I didn’t do it first thing in the morning in a completely silent house, then it wasn’t worth doing. But God doesn’t want us only at the right time. He wants us all the time.
So much of prayer is about just showing up and doing it. God will take care of the rest. For me, this meant getting over the idea that I had to pray first thing upon waking in order to use The Morning Offering Journal. Yes, the prompts lend themselves to being prayed at the beginning of the day, but when mornings are hectic, you can wait to pray until a little later. Most days of the week, that means praying after dropping off my preschooler and getting my toddler down for a nap. On days when my preschooler is home, he usually gets screen time during his brother’s morning nap, so I can still make this work. It is not a silent house, but I can at least hope for minimal interruptions.
Just this simple scheduling change made a huge difference. It still feels like a sacrifice some mornings to give up my precious quiet time, when the toddler is sleeping, and I could be folding laundry, or emptying the dishwasher, or reading a book for pleasure, but I know that this is the best time I can give to God, and it really does help to start the day with him, even if it’s not right at the beginning. After getting kids up and fed and dressed and out the door and down for a nap, I like to sit at my prayer table with a mug of coffee or tea and transition into the rest of my day with prayer.
Journaling is a method of prayer that I have found fruitful, but it is not something that I tend to do unprompted. I appreciate that The Morning Offering Journal offers prompts to help me get started and provides structure for what I want to say to God.
Each day of The Morning Offering Journal starts with a short verse from Scripture. They are often taken from Psalms or from familiar Bible stories. For me, this is just the right amount of Scripture to begin the day, as my mind fills in the rest of the story, or a hymn or worship song that contains the verse, or a Psalm that I have sung as a cantor.
Mary Beth Keenan, @mb_keenan.15
The first prompt is to tell Jesus what is on your mind as you start the day. What was it that kept me up last night that I am still thinking about this morning? What tasks am I anxious to complete after I finish my prayer? These are the thoughts I would usually allow to distract me from prayer. Here, I am invited to share them with Jesus instead. I can acknowledge them with Jesus and move on.
The second prompt invites you to gaze into the Sacred Heart and offer Jesus your petitions. Recently, I have found it helpful to have a physical image of the Sacred Heart to look at. Usually, the things that I wake up thinking about are the things that I need to pray about, but this prompt also helps me to remember the people who have asked me to pray for their intentions.
The third prompt provides space to offer your to-do list to Jesus. This helps me to think through my day and consider what tasks I can perform as sacrifices to God. Many of the things I do on an average day don’t make my to-do list, things like changing diapers, preparing meals, and unloading the dishwasher. The challenge here is to foster a disposition of dedicating my daily labor to God. Anything can be a prayer with the right intention. This is a habit I am still working to cultivate.
The fourth prompt is for sharing joy and gratitude with Jesus. To be honest, this prompt can be a struggle for me. I find it difficult to start the day with gratitude. Not much has happened yet. When I was in college, I volunteered at a soup kitchen where one of the prayers offered most often by the guests was to thank God for waking them up that morning. To begin the day with gratitude is to acknowledge that everything we have is a gift.
The final prompt invites you to surrender your concerns and crosses to Jesus. I have learned that it is much easier to name my crosses than it is to surrender them. There are days when I have many concerns and crosses, ranging from the seemingly inconsequential to the monumental, whether concerns about my family or about the state of my community, nation, and world. God invites us to place all of these in his hands. When we unite our suffering to Christ’s, even our smallest annoyances can bear fruit for our salvation and the salvation of the world by participating in Christ’s perfect sacrifice. Sometimes it is hard to let go. It is easier to complain about our burdens than to trust that God is in control. Perhaps we can start by choosing just one thing, one small suffering each day to intentionally turn over to God. These are the habits that build virtue. This is how prayer changes us, so that we can change the world.
The morning offering prayer is printed on the back cover of the journal. Saying this prayer each day is a good reminder that we are united in Christ with every Catholic in the world. All of our prayers, works, joys, and sufferings can bear fruit, not only in our own lives but for every member of Christ's Body.
To sum up, prayer only works if you actually do it. At different seasons of life and in different seasons of the liturgical year, our prayer routines may look different, and that’s okay. It is helpful to have some different tools in our prayer toolbox for each season. I am grateful to have The Morning Offering Journal to use during this season of mothering young children.
Written by Bridget Carey
Bridget is a cradle Catholic who loves Catholic social teaching and encountering Jesus in the Eucharist. She and her husband live in North Carolina with their two children. Bridget is a stay-at-home mom, course facilitator, and writer. You can follow her on Instagram @inthisseason_blog, where she writes about liturgical living in her domestic church.
