Offering up your joys?

[MarcoPolo]

I’ve heard of offering up your suffering, but I see in a prayer card given to me by a priest the following language:*"…I offer you my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day…"*This is from the Apostleship of Prayer booklet for “Our Holy Father’s Monthly Intentions 2009”.

Has anyone heard about offering up your joys? What is the theology of that relative to offering up our suffering??

 

[PhilotheaZ]

We should offer our whole lives to God (not just the bad stuff!). Everything we have and do comes from Him; we should return it all to Him.

 

[Eucharisted]

Offer up everything save sin and demons. And give Jesus your sins by throwing them into the Fire of Love, where they will be consumed. For the Fire of Love, His Sacred Heart, is so powerful that if a spark from It fell on a frozen lake, the water would boil in an instant.

 

[LilyM]

As has been pointed out, our joys come from God as much as do our sorrows, so it’s appropriate to acknowledge Him as their source in this way.

It’s also a reminder that we can abuse or rmisuse the things that make us joyful - or at least handle them in a way that isn’t to God’s greater glory. We can be selfish about them. Some are with money - making mega-millions but not using it, or using only a tiny percent, to benefit others. Or excessive in our consumption of them, as so many of us are with food, for example.

Our joys need to be moderate, reasonable and rightly-directed, and offering them to God is a means of helping us to remember this.

 

[MarcoPolo]

Thanks for the replies, but as I said, what is the theology of offering up our joys? Offering up suffering is our participation in the sufferings of Christ, which brings about grace. So what does offering up joy unite us to? Would it relate more specifically to the Resurrection-part of the Passion?

 

[brigid12]

Yes. Our true joys are from Him, anyway, so we’re uniting ourselves with Him through them. I give this as my morning offering everyday, and feel ungrateful if I don’t. I want Him to have all of me and I want to tell Him (and myself) that I recognize the joys He gives us - all stemming from the Resurrection. I can’t totally unite myself with Him if I only offer Him sorrows. I have joys, too (and work).