Love and Sacrifice- The Question of When Does it Count

 What if a man make a sacrifice for the wrong reasons, or fails to make a sacrifice when he should if he were virtuous- is anyone counting in eternity? That seems to be the question at the heart of love and sacrifice, although one may simply choose to give up their life entirely for secular reasons.

Someone asked about love and what can be learned from it. I shouldn't have replied to the question like it was the essay portion of an exam. I might have written more about love and honor, judgment and social reality. It is needful to express one's love in person. I of course have thought about sacrifice in many forms from that of Christ to war and wondered if everyone besides Christ, who was acting for God, made sacrifices that were generally meaningful. Sacrifices made in the name of love.

Everything is complex socially speaking. It is far worse than  that game where one persons has a message and they pass it down a line of people and at the end it is changed from the original. Sociology researches such issues, as do mathematics and physics, about the number of relations between individuals that are possible- in a world with 8 billion plus people there is so very much fragmented, distorted, misunderstood and lost information that it makes developing optimal political course very rare. Actually Gemini said there are 32 trillion possible relations among 8 billion people... more than I could keep track of.

On a personal level the most meaningful thing I was told counting as advice was from a man who had been a pallbearer of General Patton whom I was painting for. He said; "Don't make anyone's life more difficult; they all have their own battle to face". I once knew a lady with a tattoo on her arm from Auschwitz; that was the best advice I ever saw.