Good Friday

What have you sacrificed for the ones you love?

No one should know what you have done, what you have given up for them. Otherwise, it becomes a favor unasked for, an unwilling debt to be paid with interest.

Sacrifice means nothing in public. Sacrifice cannot be shared.

Sacrifice should be a private thing — it should not be a public event nor a ritualistic atonement before a community.

For sacrifice to mean anything, it must be yours.

We know this. But still we make our sacrifices . . . and we want everyone to know how we suffer.

It is ours to carry, and ours alone to weep over what has been given up.

It’s different when we’re young. We make choices without realizing how much we’re closing off futures one by one, as though they never existed. We never mourn them.

But as we get older, these choices become more apparent — perhaps because there are fewer of them, day to day . . . Perhaps because we know there will be fewer still in the days to come.

When we’re young, we don’t know what we’re giving up when we choose.

When we’re older, those choices we made so easily have now become sacrifices to weep over in the darkness while our friends sleep nearby, unawares.

When we’re old, we feel every choice, every sacrifice, like it was another Gethsemane, all over again.

What have you chosen?

What have you given up?

What have you sacrificed for the ones you love?

And how much more are you willing to give?