Just a quick note to all..I had promised to bring back Fr. Wade’s message in my blog today, but as you can probably guess, things didn ‘t always work out as planned, so here I am at almost midnight, but I promised you I would write something about his message and I will, it will just be a bit later this week. Blessings and a good night to all.
Hello again everyone. I have more “Offering” prayers to share:
Offering of Love and Praise
My God, I make the intention of offering to You as many acts of love and praise as the Blessed Virgin, all the Saints and angels, as well as all the faithful on earth have ever made. I desire to love You as much as Jesus Christ loves You. I wish to renew these acts AT EVERY PULSATION OF MY HEART.
This prayer is significant because once you make this prayer, ALL of your heart beats become acts of love for God! I pray this prayer after my Morning Offering. To know that all my heart beats are for the love of God makes me happy! I can just be sitting on the sofa with my children, knowing that I am making acts of Love for God all the while!
PRECIOUS BLOOD PRAYER IN RESPONSE TO REQUESTS FROM OUR LORD
Dear Jesus, moved by an impulse of love, and with purity of intention, I wish to cover my humble labors with Your merits and bathe them iin the supernatural gold of Your Precious Blood. I desire to consecrate my life to the salvation of souls and the extension of Your glory, and I beg the Heavenly Father for as many souls as You shed drops of Blood during Your Passion.
Various Revelations of Divine Love
“Whoever offers Me the satisfaction of his corporal necessities, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, etc..saying in his heart or with his lips, “Lord,
I take this food, this drink and this sleep in union with the love with which You performed likewise while on earth, for the Glory of Your Father and the salvation of men.” Each time he makes his offering in union with My Divine love, he presents Me with a strong shield to protect Me against the insults and outrages of sinners.” -Our Lord to Saint Gertrude
“When you eat or drink, think that you are offering Me that alleviation and do the same whever you take pleasure in anything whatever.”-Our Lord to Sr. Josefa Menendez
All of these prayers and revelations of Our Lord are taken from the book, “Prayers and Heavenly Promises” by Joan Carroll Cruz. As I say, this book has revolutionized my prayer life because to know that it is so simple to stay close to Our Lord with these prayers and offerings is just so wonderful to me. I have more to come.
Today I will be attending a Family Rosary Crusade in Utica, NY, which will have as the keynote speaker, Fr. Wade Menezes, from the Fathers of Mercy and of EWTN. I will bring back to you His message, which I am so looking forward to hearing. There will be a dinner afterwards. It’s important to “Come away for awhile” as Our Lord invites his disciples in the Gospel, because we all need spiritual food and time to relax. I would like to thank my husband and my daughters who help watch our younger ones while I am away from home for a little mommy refreshment. I will write about this tomorrow for everyone!
Blessings to you on this great day of the Lord., Sunday, the Sabbath Day. Let’s make it Holy!
In Our Lord and Our Lady,
Jackie Stutmann
How many folks pray at the very beginning of the day? Do we just fit in prayer where we can, after all the things we must get done? I want to impress upon you that making the Lord your first thought and offering Him your day is THE MOST important act of your day. Why? The Lord God gave you your life to begin with and saying a Prayer of offering to Him first thing, (preferably before you even get out of bed) means that everything that you do, say, think and act BECOMES a PRAYER all throughout your day.
Think of that..you are not performing your labors for yourself and your family in vain. Your labors, prayers, joys and sufferings are all for a purpose after you make your Morning Offering. Everything you do from that point will have spiritual goodness in them and God uses them to accomplish His purposes not only for you, but for others who do not have the benefit of knowing Him! Not only that, but simply saying the Holy Name of “Jesus” before each and every task that lays before us renews that offering, and gives us strength and joy to accomplish it, knowing it has a higher purpose. Even washing the dishes and cleaning the bathroom and changing diapers!
Every mundane task is like gold for us and for God when we offer it with a glad heart. I find that so amazing and so simple! Below, I present to you the Morning Offerings I pray at the beginning of each day..I trained myself to pray them as soon as I open my eyes.
First I’d like to make mention of a Prayer book that has revolutionized my prayer life and most of the prayers I will be sharing will be from this book entitled, “Prayers and Heavenly Promises” Compiled from approved Sources by Joan Carroll Cruz, (one of my new favorite authors). She wrote another book that I love called “Eucharistic Miracles”, available from Saint Benedict Press/Tan Books.
When I open my eyes, I pray, “Almighty Father, I place the Precious Blood of Jesus before my lips before I pray, that my prayers may be purified before they ascend to Your Divine Altar”. This is a prayer of Saint Mary Magdalen de Pazzi.
I then pray this gem:
A Morning Prayer Based on Three Revelations of Our Lord
Dear Lord, I adore Your Sacred Heart, which I desire to enter with acts of love, praise, adoration and thanksgiving. I offer to You my own heart, as I sigh to You from its very depths, asking that you will work through me in all that I do this day; thus may I draw You closer to me than You were before. I offer You all the crosses and sufferings of this world, in union with Your life on earth, in expiation for sins. Please join my every action and heartbeat to the pulsations of Your Heart. I unite all my works of this day to those labors You performed while You were on earth, bathing them in Your Precious Blood, and I offer them to the Heavenly Father so that many souls may be saved. Amen.
The book gives the three revelations from Our Lord, which basically says, that when we first awake, our first act should be to salute the Heart of the Lord, and to offer Him our own hearts asking Him to work all of our works in Him throughout the day, and He will be close to us. It also says that if we offer our works in union with His works when He was on earth and bathe them in His Precious Blood spiritually by our Prayers, they have infinite value and will greatly profit souls!
The other Morning Offering I pray with my husband is this one:
O My Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer You my prayers, works, joys and sufferings of this day, in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world. I offer them for all the intentions of Your Sacred Heart; for the salvation of souls, in reparation for sins and the union of all Christians. I offer them for the intentions of our Bishops and of all Apostles of Prayer, particularly those recommended by Our Holy Father this month.
So you see by reading the prayers, there is great spiritual implications for ourselves and for humanity when we make our Morning Offering. Pray it slowly like you mean it, and with the heart, and you will find that an added dimension will start to make itself apparent to You because Our Lord will be much closer to You throughout the day, helping you to do your work in a better way, because you will have taken the time to pray and remember to offer all that you are to God. I can’t see a downside to this, can you?
Even if something unpleasant comes our way, we know we have offered it for the salvations of souls and in reparation for our own sins. So, take some time in the morning, perhaps even just 5-10 minutes to make an excellent Morning Offering, because it’s the most important act of the day before we do anything else, and we will have treasure in Heaven!
I have much to tell everyone! I will share my candid journey as a Catholic mom who incidentally, has very human faults, but seeks sanctification and redemption of those faults through the devoted practice of my religion, for which I am eternally grateful. I try to live an intensely Eucharistic life, in other words, a life of thanksgiving for all of God’s gifts, but most of all, the Supreme Gift of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, the source and summit of our Catholic Faith.
I will share my insights gained through prayer, my life as a Catholic wife and mom trying to raise our children in the Faith, (which definitely can be a struggle as I am finding out now with my teenagers). I have a passion for sharing favorite prayers and devotions that have extraordinary promises attached to them that I think everyone should know about because they will be very fruitful spiritually and have deepened my own prayer life. I will even throw in some insights and opinions about current events and politics, which I do feel strongly about these days, and include movie and book reviews occasionally. An all-around kind of blog that I hope you enjoy coming back to.
In case you’re wondering why I named my blog “I Prefer Heaven”, it’s after a quote I saw by St. Philip Neri which struck me as a motto I want to adopt, and it signifies the choice for Heaven that we all face in life. We may not be perfect now, but each choice we make for Heaven in each moment, in big ways and in small, will bring us hopefully closer to that end for which we were created; to know, love and serve God in this life and to be with Him forever in Eternity, because that’s the goal.
To include a quote from Mother Teresa: “God does not call us to be successful, only faithful.” This quote comforts me because God considers faithfulness to Him as the ultimate success, and that’s the only success I am concerned about. I am your companion on the journey and I look forward to it with all my heart. May God Bless you and Keep you in His Loving Care Always!
Sincerely,
Jackie Stutmann