No Sacrifice

Andy Doel is a top bloke and I'm so chuffed he's part of our church. I dropped into the youth club tonight and took the opportunity to thank him for co-leading the youth camp the previous weekend, he'd done a brilliant job. The guy's got a full-on job, two kids, he does youth work on Friday nights and Sunday mornings as well as stuff in the gaps and he said.....he said, "I enjoy it, it's no sacrifice." And he meant it. He loves serving. I told him he reminded me of the thing David Livingston (the pioneering missionary and explorer) had said whilst addressing Cambridge University students on 4 December 1857.....

People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.