I’m sorry to hear about your difficulties. I’ll offer prayers for you.
Suffering may not necessarily be a punishment from God but it is something he does allow. It is after all a result from the original sin of Adam and Eve which we all must bare. From my own experience it really seems that suffering is not so much a punishment as much as it is a sort of “language” that God sometimes uses to speak to us, directing and guiding us toward what is best for us. It is hard to put into words. I think a way of looking at it would be to say that we are often placed in God’s crucible, where like metal we are forged in a fire, being molded into a form more pleasing to him. It is in this crucible that we can gain closeness to God.
God allows us a most profound intimacy with him through the joining of our sufferings with those of the meritorious sufferings of His son our Lord Jesus Christ. Out of His love for us, his human incarnation, passion and death, he has taken the most deplorable of human conditions, those of sufferings, and given to them great merit when we offer them back to him joined with his Son’s sufferings on the cross for the sake of our salvation, reparation for sins and ultimately eternal happiness with him in heaven. Knowing this alone can give us comfort that at least our hardships don’t need to be in vain but rather can in fact be potential treasures stored away in heaven awaiting us. Think about it. Our Lord chose the most intense human suffering and ignominious death as the means meritorious enough to gain our salvation and eternal happiness. It is through his merits that we can join intimately with him through our sufferings, offered and joined with his. It’s such a profound mystery that God can take that which we so often try to avoid at all cost and that is in such great abundance, which is to say human misery, and make it have eternal value. Only God in his mercy can do that.
As difficult as it may seem, when we offer our suffering in union with Christ’s the outcome is often that he consoles us, although often in a time and manner of his choosing. Also it is good to remember that through the acceptance of our sufferings in union with his, that we also console Christ and make our hearts a place of repose for him. We may never be able to avoid suffering but thanks be to God for the merits gained from it through Christ’s sufferings on the cross.
