True Sacrifice

God blessed Abraham with many things. He was granted land, riches and cattle. Eventually God blessed Abraham with his only son, Isaac. Abraham truly loved his son, but he also remained strong in his unwavering faith in God. Still, God wanted to test Abraham’s faith. He commanded Abraham to climb a mountain and sacrifice his only son. Abraham gathered some servants and his son and they traveled to the mountain to make the sacrifice. On the way up the mountain, Isaac got a little suspicious. Probably because his dad was acting weird because he was going to have to kill his son. When they got to the top instead of finding a calf to sacrifice, Abraham began to tie up his son over a pile of wood for burning. Just as he was about to take his son’s life an angel showed up and told Abraham that because he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, he would not have to. He then able to sacrifice a ram in place of his son. Isaac lives and Abraham is blessed with fertility and has a bunch of kids.

To me, one true sacrifice is to leave when you don’t want to. But because you have to. I grew up meeting families of immigrants whose came here for a better life. A lot of the parents had left their children in Guatemala or Ecuador or Mexico to be raised by a grandparent while they saved money to buy their child an opportunity at a better life. Then, when they had saved enough money, they would send for their child, who they had barely known, to come to the states for an education. To give up the opportunity to raise your child, to miss seeing them grow up, so that they might have a better life is true sacrifice. I don’t want to get all political, or to express outrage at something I have been lucky enough to never experience, but I do want for people to be able to appreciate the sacrifice that these immigrants make for their families. This sacrifice is such a well known one that it appears across all works of art; in books, articles, poetry and movies.

 

“Like you’re a marching band of single mothers and you’ve smelled your kids dreams so you know you gotta make it, an immigrant worker slaving to feed the belly of your country to oceans away. Strive.”  -- In one of the most fiery lines of the slam poem Strive, the authors honor these parents and immigrants. And here is an article in the NY Times documenting just one such story, The Heartache of an Immigrant Family, written by Sonia Narazio.