This past month, we just completed a challenge within our app where we offered up workouts for nine days for the reparation of sins committed against the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
This devotion is one that has been drawing me deeper and deeper over the past six or seven years. For me, it really started with a season of reading Saint Faustina and Saint Thérèse in their shared desire to have their souls become little heavens, little gardens where Jesus can rest, where he can weep while being comforted. This image inspires me and haunts me, because it forces me to ask a very serious question. Is my heart and soul a place where Jesus finds rest when he enters it in the Holy Eucharist? Is it a place where he can take a deep breath and exhale with gratitude, because for once his heart is not broken by the various sins and atrocities committed against his Most Sacred Heart, both by people who claim to know him and by those who have not yet encountered him?
My honest answer is that I hope most of the time it is. But I also know I need to offer up moments in reparation for the sins I myself have committed against his Sacred Heart. While I don't typically teach others to approach exercise this way (we focus on self-mastery for the sake of self-gift, as you know), I do think this can be a valuable tool at times, especially for someone who struggles with motivation or just doesn't want to eat well or move their body that day.
By simply taking a moment to contemplate the millions upon millions of sins committed each day, and how Jesus knows and experiences every single one of those personally, we can be motivated in some small or big way to offer up our pains and discomforts as reparation. This doesn't mean you'll enjoy the workout or crave the food you're choosing instead. It means this is a true opportunity to love Jesus, in some mysterious way, by comforting him as he weeps in the garden two thousand years ago.
Scripture gives us a window into that very garden. In Gethsemane, Jesus asked Peter, James, and John to keep watch with him, and found them asleep instead. He said to Peter, "Could you not watch one hour?" (Mark 14:37). One hour. That's it. And so often we cannot even give him that. But every set of squats, every walk we take instead of skipping it, every plate of vegetables we eat instead of the dessert we wanted, can become our hour. It can become our way of finally staying awake with him.
Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, to whom Christ revealed the devotion to his Sacred Heart, described seeing his heart surrounded by thorns, a visible image of how our sins wound him still. In one of her recorded visions, Jesus told her he desired souls who would console him for the ingratitude he receives. That single sentence reframes everything about how I view reparation. It's not primarily about punishment or guilt. It's about consolation. It's about being one of the few who actually show up.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks directly to this when it teaches that "sin creates a proclivity to sin" and that conversion requires "reparation for sin" alongside genuine repentance (CCC 1459, 1473). Reparation isn't a side note to the spiritual life. It's woven into how the Church understands healing from sin altogether, both our own and the sins of the world around us.
And maybe for you it isn't a workout or a meal. Maybe it's something far smaller and far more available to you today. It can be offering up countless little annoyances scattered throughout an ordinary afternoon.
As I write this in my home office, my kids are just outside my door. Two of them are playing, and the three year old is quite literally screeching at the top of her lungs for a reason only the good Lord knows. The temptation is to lose my cool and my patience. Instead, I can take this annoyance, this frustration, this distraction, and make it an offering to his Most Sacred Heart.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux understood this kind of small, hidden offering better than almost anyone. Her entire spirituality, what we now call the Little Way, was built on turning ordinary annoyances, ordinary tasks, and ordinary sufferings into love offered to God. She didn't need a desert or a dramatic penance. She needed a sister who annoyed her at dinner and a willingness to offer that moment to Jesus instead of complaining about it.
That's really the invitation here. You don't need an app challenge or a structured nine day devotion to begin, though those things help build the habit. You simply need a moment of suffering, however small, and the willingness to turn toward Christ in it and say, "this one is for you." The screeching toddler. The set of lunges you didn't want to do. The salad instead of the second helping. The traffic. The slow checkout line. All of it can become prayer the instant we offer it.
Saint Paul wrote, "In my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ for the sake of his body" (Colossians 1:24). That should both humble us and embolden us. Nothing in our day, no matter how small or unglamorous, is wasted when it's united to him.
So this week, I'd encourage you to find one discomfort, physical, relational, or otherwise, and offer it up. Don't make it complicated. Just pause for a second, picture his heart, and say it's for him. You might be surprised how much that one small habit starts to change the way you see your whole day, your whole body, and your whole life.