I heard ‘offer it up’ & it was meaningless to me - or else it sounded heartless (I stub my toe, want comfort and I’m told, ‘Offer it up.’)
After Christ became the center of my life, I wanted to know what ‘offer it up’ meant. I couldn’t see how it worked: I got hurt, something bad happened, I ‘offered it up’ - & then what? What good did that do for me? I still hurt.
From experience, I’d say the best way to ‘understand’ ‘offering it up’ is to take a leap of faith & just do it. When I had a headache, I’d be concentrating on how much I didn’t want this headache & finally remember I was supposed to be doing this ‘offer it up’ thing, so I’d say to Christ, ‘I’m offering this up (whatever that means)’.
It became a habit - take a bad fall, offer it up; have a bad day, offer it up. I didn’t ‘feel’ anything or see any difference in my spiritual life, I was just doing this thing on faith, because the Church said it meant something & was a good thing to do.
Once, in the midst of great emotional pain caused by a loved one, I was crying and feeling so hurt, & the habit kicked in, I prayed, ‘I offer this up, I offer this pain for the person who hurt me.’ A peace flowed into my heart. The hurt didn’t hurt.
I should hasten to say that it’s only happened once - ever since then the physical or emotional hurt that I’ve experienced has still hurt when I’ve offered it up. But what has changed is that I ‘know’ - spiritually, not intellectually - that offering up my pains & sorrows is a good thing, it helps.
What you find, eventually, is that offering it up IS what you do with pain. It’s a pure & perfect offering because no normal person wants pain. We can offer up sweets, but that starts with me, saying, ‘I’m going to give up sweets.’ We can decide not to insist on our own way, but still that starts with ‘I,’ my decision. Pain comes without our decision - it just happens to us, & we have no choice in the matter. Why? What good does pain do, what can we do with it? We offer it up - that’s all there is to do with pain, endure it and offer it up.
Now this may sound weird - it certainly sounded weird and scary when I read about it in the lives of the saints - but as you habitually offer up your pains & sorrows, you find a strange kind of joy in them. I don’t mean you ‘enjoy pain.’ Most certainly not - it still hurts. But you come to know, in a spiritual way, just as God allows all things for our sanctification, He’s allowing this pain for your sanctification. You realize that this pain, this suffering, is a gift from God to make you more like Him (in His suffering). You know, spiritually, that offering this pain brings grace to others, somehow, mysteriously, & at the same time makes you more like Christ, sanctifies you.
When that happens, strange as it may seem, you not only gladly offer up your pain, you begin to see your pain as somehow not enough, as tiny, compared to the suffering of Christ & the spiritual needs of those you’d like to help by offering up your pain. You no longer fear & reject pain, you thank God for it, you acknowledge how little it is - & you even offer yourself willingly to suffer more for the good of those souls you hold dear.
You’re a mother; I’ll give you a concrete example. You suffered great pains to give birth to your children. Looking at your children, you’d probably say that you love them so much you’d have willingly suffered ten times the pain to bring them into the world. And you’d suffer 100 times as much to spare them suffering, wouldn’t you?
That’s kind of the ‘love dynamic’ that’s behind offering your pains for the love of souls.
Begin small, offering up any suffering or sacrifice you meet today, when you remember - even a few hours after the headache no longer hurts; that’s still OK. God’s grace will take you deeper into it, & in time you’ll understand with your ‘spiritual intellect’ how your gift of suffering benefits those you love.
Lilder