Redemptive Suffering and Sin

[snowgarden]

Considering what the Pope has gone through brings to mind accepting my suffering and offering it up. However, I have a question…can you offer up suffering that is caused, not by cancer for instance, but by your own sin.

My suffering involves lonliness and isolation. I am shy and social phobic and have struggled for my whole life with this. It is a torture. I want to offer it up instead of feeling sorry for myself, but in the back of my mind I feel like my suffering is due to my own weakness, not something forced upon me. Then again, this situation hasn’t responded to medical treatment…what if it is a genetic or chemical imbalance that causes me to act the way I do? Does that count?
What do you think?

 

[jpjd]

I think any suffering can be offered up, even suffering from sin of your own doing, as long as you are sorry for your sin.

 

[Dr.Colossus]

All suffering may be offered up in union with Christ’s, *especially *suffering caused by your own sin! When we sin we incur “temporal punishment”, basically a debt to justice that will either be repaid on this earth or in Purgatory. When we offer up the suffering incurred by our own mistakes, our own sins, we in effect say to the Lord, “I see what I have done to myself and others by my disobedience! Oh Lord, let this be my punishment!”