On sacrifice and suffering

Lent was a fairly new concept for me when I was in college, and one year I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice—chocolate. I still remember standing in the ice cream parlor, looking at the luscious rocky road and chocolate swirl and brownie chunk ice cream–and choosing butter pecan. Butter pecan. Such is the suffering I was willing to endure for Jesus.

I think now that the whole endeavor was a bit melodramatic. (I gobbled up a candy bar at 12:01 on Easter Sunday morning—when I should have been asleep.) It’s not that giving up chocolate is a bad discipline in and of itself. I just think that sometimes we act like the point of our Lenten fasts or sacrifices is to make us suffer—and it’s not.

As Christians, we can be far too quick to equate sacrifice with suffering.