Is "Sacrifice" a Dirty Word?

"No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." - John 15:13

The secular media tells women on a daily basis that we should have it all - a loving family, a well-decorated organized home, and a rewarding career. If we don't have all that, apparently we have failed to "balance" correctly! This passage from the Gospel of John tells us a different reality. Love has a cost. While most of us will not be asked to lay down our lives for another person, we are asked on a daily basis to sacrifice, to put others' needs before our own.

This is not a popular idea today. We want to know how to get more out of life. We want our husbands to provide us with emotional, intellectual, and moral support, as well as to help take care of the kids and the house. We want our careers to be meaningful and financially rewarding. We want every Church service to have a high-quality sermon as well as build our sense of community. We want "me" time in which to develop ourselves and indulge our interests. We even want to lose weight without giving up any of our favorite foods! While there is certainly a place for self-nourishment and self-development in life, there is also a place for the other side of the coin. We also need to give.

That may seem like it goes without saying. After all, we women do tend to give until it hurts. We need to hear, however, that it is OK to hurt sometimes. The message we tend to get is that if we are giving until it hurts, then we are doing something wrong. The truth is, in Jesus' eyes, we are doing something right. It is OK to sacrifice. It is OK to give up our work or our hobbies in order to care better for those who need us. Conversely, it is OK to give up the dream of having a husband and children if our work is so important that we must dedicate our lives solely to that. It's OK to bite our tongues and compromise with those we love. We may not have to give up our lives, but sometimes we are asked to give up our pride and our ambition to live as Jesus asked.

We have the opportunity to sacrifice without complaint many times a day. St. Therese wrote in her autobiography "Story of a Soul" of how she would make small sacrifices throughout the day and offer them to Jesus. I don't think we could ask for a better role model. Sacrifice is not a dirty word. It is one more way for us to give our lives to God by loving others.