suffering

I heard a talk on suffering and reparation for our sins yesterday. The speaker talked about how we can offer all our suffering to our Lord in reparation of our sins. We all have pain at some point in our lives. We can use that pain for good...to suffer for others' souls or our own. How do we do that?

The speaker talked about little sufferings we can bring on ourselves. For example, we might fast; we might give up a favorite TV show for a while, we might be kind in return to someone who has done us wrong. Then, there are sufferings that come along in our lives over which we have no control. These we don't consciously wish to suffer but we do have control over how we react to them. Is it possible to view them as joyful experiences? If we see them as opportunities to grow in faith or to lessen the effect of purgatory or lessen it for someone else, shouldn't we embrace all the suffering we can have? In our culture, we are told to alleviate pain. We take drugs for it. We pray it goes away. Sometimes we wonder why, in this day and age, SOMEONE hasn't come up with the solution for what ails us. It seems odd to thank God for pain and, yet, there are great rewards in suffering and we SHOULD be thanking God.

Purgatory is a reality...the question is: do we want to suffer in this life or in the next? From what I understand, purgatory is no picnic in the park and, from what I've read, the pain suffered there is much more intense than the worst suffering here on earth. We can lessen our time in purgatory by doing reparation now. If this is so, why wouldn't we want to embrace ALL the suffering we can while we are here on earth?

Another angle to this is, when someone dies, as I understand it we cannot say definitively that that person is in heaven. (We leave all of our deceased loved ones to the mercy of God.) Of course, there are exceptions to this: declared saints of the Church, children who are baptized and have not committed any personal sin. If we really think that a person is in heaven, we will cease praying for that person just when he or she may need our prayers the most. We must pray for our dead. We must offer our suffering as a way to help others and ourselves get to heaven. Bottom line: we must be willing to suffer for important spiritual reasons.