I confess I’ve never been a big fan of the concept of sacrifice. It’s always struck me as kind of punitive, like it’s morally superior to suffer than to enjoy life’s abundance.

For many of our CLF members, their support is truly a sacrifice—not only members on fixed incomes who give what they can, but also our incarcerated members, for whom even the price of a stamp to write to a pen pal is a significant sacrifice.

This month we are taking on the gnarly topic of sacrifice. It is a concept that makes many of us uncomfortable, distrustful and a little bit surly, and rightly so.

I have learned about faithfulness and sacrifice as a result of a very strange journey I have been on since I inadvertently found some of the men who were in Vietnam with my older brother, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Christian Jr., “Bobby” to me, who was killed on April 11, 1969.