A couple of days ago I met an old friend of mine, an old classmate. He is now married and has a child. I could tell from the way he talked that he was very happy with his new born child. He really made my day, since I was happy for him.

While I was walking back home, I kept on thinking about what he said. My friend told me that unfortunately due to a lot of expenses he is doing 3 jobs. In fact when he met me he was on his way to his second job. He was working over 60 hours a week, leaving him with almost no time to enjoy with his wife and his son. Quoting him, he told me, “… I am doing a sacrifice not seeing my son for days …” But is that a real sacrifice? At face value you will agree with him, that’s what happened to me.

But after thinking about this, I concluded that my friend was using the word sacrifice wrongly. In his case, he is denying his son from his parental care in order to work. While I don’t want to go into the nitty gritty of the story, I personally believe that there could be other ways how to reduce expenses like: not taking a holiday, maybe own one car, rent instead of buy a house or buy a small house. In my opinion it is his wife and his son who are doing the sacrifice since they are missing the love of a husband and father respectively.

This is just one example of wrongly using the word sacrifice which struck me. Sometimes the real sacrifice is to stick to our duties and not concentrate on doing more, since more most probably will mean less.