Love is Sacrifice

I already know this, but God taught it to me again, because as often with lessons, He needed to impress it on my heart. Love is sacrifice. Sacrifice, I would claim, is a necessary component of Love. If you love something then you will give up, surrender, go so far as to die, whether physical or a smaller death, for that thing or that one. But I am a philosopher, and I will not give you an idea, without at least trying to back it up with evidence.
Take the story of Jacob-he worked for 7 years in order to marry the woman that he loved. Then, when he was duped, he worked another seven-14 years. This man sacrificed 14 years of his life in for love.
God Himself, to show us His love, sacrificed His only son, obviously that is the best, clearest, most palpable example of this.
Look at the story of any romantic comedy and many other movies-there is almost always an element of sacrifice implicit or explicit within the love story, and if there is not, then it is fake.
This notion has come to my attention for much of this summer specifically when thinking through, processing, praying, and dealing with my apathy. If I do not really care about things, then I notice a much greater reluctance and often even an unwillingness to sacrifice for it. But care, love, friendship, all of these require love. Otherwise, we are all just playing pretend. Think of how much parents give up for their kids. Parents lives change dramatically for their kids, and they do it, hopefully, cheerfully and not tearfully. Whenever I have, at least this summer, been tempted to tell anyone that I love him, I have been forced to stop and think-about sacrifice and my willingness to do it if I do indeed really love these people. It is hard, but nobody ever said love was easy, at least they should not have. Maybe this is me holding myself to a higher standard, as some have accused me of doing, but I think that our cultural representation of Love is piss-poor at best. It does not show sacrifice.
Maybe you have not seen this on a large scale so allow me to illuminate this on a smaller-scale. Are you accommodating? Recently a friend and I got the gift of being able to spend some time together, and we were trying to think through what to do. He suggested a movie that he has been talking about, but I suggested something else because I really did not want to watch the movie. But I needed to sacrifice that in order to show him love, but I was unwilling. We are like little children that are not satisfied unless we get our own way.
We can debate endlessly but at the end of the day nothing that we think of as belonging to 'us'. I can try to convince you religiously or philosophically, but that's not the point. The point is that even if you contend that you worked hard for everything you own and that all of your desires and everything contained therein is completely and fully yours-it is not worth keeping. You are better off giving it up for the sake of the welfare of others or The Other, because that is what Love is.
The Good Samaritan was highly put out tending to his Jewish neighbor, but he did it anyways, cheerfully, gladly, because he loved him. I encourage you to think twice about love; contemplate, meditate, consider, change if need be. God, and I would claim people as well, just are not interested in broken, selfish love, and although I have not done the best job at expressing what is currently on my heart, I hope that you get the gist of it; Love requires sacrifice and if you are not willing to be put out, either via financial, physical, internal, or otherwise, for someone or something, you simply do not love him/her/it.