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.

Okay, so I just had an epiphany.

If I can turn an unwilling sacrifice into a willing sacrifice – 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.

I’ve been so full of grief and pain and anger and frustration and swirling whirling emotions that there’s been no room for peace, no room for Spirit, no room for anything. It’s like there’s a vortex inside me, and I’ve been wondering why there’s no Spirit, no connection, and Spirit’s probably out there looking in going, “Well, I’d like to come in, but there’s a huge vortex in there, darlin’.”

I’m so full of me, I didn’t have room for anything else. My pain, my grief, my anger, my rage, my fears.

It’s time to let go of the sacrifice so something else can come in.