It isn’t a sacrifice.

Sorry for the absence around the blog lately. Life is moving at a speed that is hard to keep up.

But we are on the home-stretch of the school year and I can’t wait for all the end-of-year madness to be over and the lazy days of summer to roll in [if such days really exist].

The other day I had one of those gut-wrenching-this-is-hard-being-a-momma moments with my oldest girly, Taylor.

She’s ten [almost eleven] and we’ve entered the phase where we are starting to notice “things” that other people have.

She has a friend that lives in a 4,000 sq ft house, with a pool, basketball court and anything a tween girl could dream of.

She has other friends who are traveling to Mexico this summer for vacations.

And, most of her friends are involved in very expensive sports leagues.

As we began our business a year ago this July, we told the girls that this journey would not be easy…for a long time. We have explained that there may be years of sacrifice, going without certain things and doing with less in order to build this business to what it has the potential to be.

That seemed fine and everyone was on board…last year.

Now that there are real sacrifices being made, its not so fine.

So, the other day Taylor was thinking about some of the sacrifices she’s having to make and blurted out, “Well, maybe you should get a real job.”

I’ll wait while you gasp…I did too.

Immediately after she said it, she realized that was a ginormous mistake.

She knew it came out as disrespectful and she could tell I wasn’t pleased with her word choice.

Later, after I cooled off and she had time to think about her words, I sat down with Taylor and talked this thing through.

She apologized for her words and had written me a very sweet note telling me how much she appreciated all the stuff I do for “free”.

But as I was talking to Taylor, something occurred to me…

I didn’t like how much we were using the word “sacrifice”. It seemed like we were making this about…us.

And after I saw this definition of sacrifice, I really didn’t like how we were using it.

sac·ri·fice

-the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim.

For us, we’ve been using this word sacrifice to understand the “giving up” of certain things for the hopes of building a solid company that glorifies God.

But we are not really sacrificing.

We are…investing.

It’s a choice in how we are thinking about this. And honestly, we’ve been thinking about it all wrong.

I want to believe that a sacrifice isn’t something we are missing out on…rather an investment.

We go to great extremes in our lives to invest into our cars [locks], houses [alarm systems], and money [banks, IRA’s, savings accounts].

But for some reason, as a society, we have a very skewed perception of what a sacrifice means.

~When I get up early and do devotions with my girls, its not a sacrifice, its an investment into eternity.

~When we say “no” to a certain summer camp because we don’t have the money, its not a sacrifice, its an investment to use what God’s given us wisely.

~When we volunteer all weekend at church, its not a sacrifice of our weekend, its an investment into the people God has entrusted to us.

~When we tithe rather than go out to dinner, its not a sacrifice, its an obedience investment into God’s Kingdom.

Perception. It’s everything.

I choose investment. We’re not missing out on anything.

“Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” -Colossians 3:2