Today’s video was inspired by the comment thread from yesterday’s Sacrifice wallpaper post. I want to hear your voice on this too, so get to typing in the comments!
Video Blog Challenge: About That Word from Rachael Acklin on Vimeo.
Are you joining in the #videochallenge and I don’t know about it yet? Leave that in the comments too! I want to see your videos! :)
Video Blogging It Up In Here {post series}
- [Video] It’s a Challenge!
- [Video] Day Two of the #videochallenge!
- [Video] Day Three of the #videochallenge: The Explainathon
- [Video] Day Four of the #videochallenge, About That Word
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m very touched by how you have taken time to really clarify your meaning of the wallpaper. I’m so happy we can talk about such a triggery word without hurting feelings.
It’s interesting, sacrifice. I see it on so many levels and at so many angles. Like I said yesterday, I make willing sacrifices to get what I want all the time – I homeschool my son, too, so we make a similar money/time/space trade-off to school him in the way that we want. Pace and I make willing sacrifices in our relationship to get what we want – a happy, stable marriage.
And then, as you said, there are the kind that hit us upside the head and we’re like, woah, I didn’t plan or want this, and now what do I do? And it’s hard to handle those without falling into victim mentality, and victim mentality is a hardcore downward spiral wherein we keep wondering why all these bad things happen to us and we forget that we have personal power… Those kind of sacrifices hurt.
And then, the more I think on it, the more I wonder how often the second kind eventually turn out to be hardcore versions of the first kind, after all.
Being raised in a very grounded Christian home, I used to only understand sacrifice as a thing that relates in a fairly epic way to death.
Even though I can see different levels and contexts of sacrifice now, I think that at its deepest level it does relate to death – sacrifice is a willing (or unwilling) death of someONE or someTHING on someone else’s – or something else’s – behalf.
What do you think?
Ya know, I’ve been non-Christian for so long that I hadn’t thought of sacrifice in that way this time around. (;
But now that you mention it, yeah, I agree – a sacrifice is a death of something so that something else can be born.
It’s like the Death card in Tarot: it doesn’t often mean literal death. It means rebirth, renewal, endings, beginnings. To start over, something must end. To be reborn means we die. In a sense, we’re reborn all the time – the me that I am today isn’t exactly the me I was yesterday, and tomorrow, I’ll be different again. Sometimes slight, sometimes not.
When I sacrifice something, if I’m able to do it whole-heartedly and willingly, I give it up. I let it go. I let it die.
And in its place, something else comes into being.
Beautiful.
You put that so much more beautifully than I could. Thank you. :)
Okay, so I just had an epiphany.
If I can turn an unwilling sacrifice into a willing sacrifice – if once the sacrifice is made, if I can look at it and say, “Okay, this happened and, while it totally and completely sucks big major asshats, I can’t make it not happen, so I’m going to let it go and do it as whole-heartedly as possible…” If I can do that, I am making room for newness.
I am making room for something else.
I can make room for faith.
I can make room for Spirit.
I can make room for something else to come into being.
But as long as I hold on to my sacrifice being unwilling, if I am, for whatever reason unable or unwilling to look at it as something I can learn from or gain from, that’s when we get stuck in victim mentality. That’s when we close off. That’s when sacrifice becomes bitter.
I’m not saying that’d be an easy thing to do – gods know, I’ve been weeping, wailing, and gnashing my teeth all year about my current sacrifice.
But it’s potential. It can happen – we can look at things differently, and knowing it’s possible gives me hope.
THAT. That exactly. Kyeli, you’ve hit on exactly what I wanted to say but didn’t, because who am I to say to anyone to just accept the sacrifice they’ve been handed? I sure as hell don’t want anyone to say that to me when I’m in that place of sacrifice and grief.
I feel so honored to be here with you and your epiphany! WOW.
Dear Rachel!
This is Olga in Sweden just popping in to say you did very well in that first video of yours! (Have just seen that one) You did NOT seem nervous or unconfortable. Did not talk alot of “crap”. Simply well done!
I should try it too sometime for the same reasons you mentioned :-) But I won´t now and I blame it on my videocamera not being used for years and the piles are empty and I forgot how to hande it…
Love from a passbyer!