“Offer it up, Timtom, offer it up,” Grandma Murray would smile and say that to me when I would complain to her because my sisters were teasing me.  Grandma had an interesting habit of repeating her point.  

She was on crutches much of my childhood years.  She endured tremendous pain: years of alcohol abuse and years of fruitful recovery; the death of her husband when a ditch he was digging caved in on him; years of trying to make peace with her family.  Years of physical ailments and Parkinson's Disease.  As a boy, I only knew about the crutches she always seemed to need.  “Offer it up, Timtom, offer it up.”

There was deep theology in what she was saying.  She telling me to endure my childish pain in the same way Jesus endured his cross.  In her own way, she was telling me that there can be something good, something redemptive about the pains we experience in our lives.  They can bear fruit for us; the wisdom of knowing “This too shall pass,” and when it does, I will grow, I will be a better person.  Grief, loneliness, physical pain, emotional pain; these things come and go, and they teach us something about the value of our lives.  When they pass, and we no longer feel the crosses we have carried, gratitude, and joy; Easter, arise from the depths of our souls, where the heaviness is endured.  

“Offer it up, Timtom, offer it up.”  Take up that cross, feel it without complaint, learn from it, let it create the mercy suffering causes within your soul.  And if that doesn’t work, Timtom, you still cannot pinch your sisters.  Just leave them alone.