{"id":1316,"date":"2012-02-17T03:00:18","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T08:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/lettinggo\/?p=1316"},"modified":"2012-02-10T22:36:35","modified_gmt":"2012-02-11T03:36:35","slug":"sacrifice-yourself-for-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2012\/02\/sacrifice-yourself-for-love.html","title":{"rendered":"Sacrifice Yourself for Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Real life is perfect balance. And we each get from this life exactly what we give to it&#8230; no more, no less. This is a cardinal rule, although it&#8217;s widely rejected by the masses that refuse to see where they&#8217;re responsible for what life continues to give them.<\/p>\n<p>Wanting love from God, without first giving God your love, is like wanting to be in better shape before you start a long-overdue exercise program. Make no mistake about this&#8230; and anyone who tells you differently lies for the sake of some kind of personal gain. To go &#8220;up,&#8221; you must give something up of yourself; not once, not ten times, but continually.<\/p>\n<p>Spirit serves those who serve it; Love comes to those who walk away from selfish acts. Kindness and patience flower only in the hearts of those who die to the cruelty of demanding that life give them what they want when they want it.<\/p>\n<p>Your life, right now, is as it is because of what you are giving yourself to right now&#8230; and this kind of giving of yourself is the same as what you treasure right now above all else. You can&#8217;t go on feeling angry without giving yourself over to resentment&#8217;s reasons for the fire in you. You can&#8217;t go on feeling sad without standing in the ashes of some past event and rubbing the memory of it all over yourself. You can&#8217;t go on feeling inadequate in the company of others without measuring yourself by a set of social standards that say one&#8217;s worth is only what others agree it is&#8230; on and on and on.<\/p>\n<p>So what then must one do? It&#8217;s right before you: give up what you&#8217;re giving yourself. Sacrifice it for something you love, even though there&#8217;s no &#8220;guarantee&#8221; you&#8217;ll get something back that&#8217;s &#8220;better.&#8221; Act upon the little bit of love in you that longs to grow and know the greater Love that gave it birth, and see what Love does in return. There are no maps in this uncharted country called the celestial life. But you&#8217;re not on your own if you set sail.<\/p>\n<p>One last thought: stop worrying about what you can&#8217;t seem to do, and become aware of what you don&#8217;t want to do &#8212; of what something living within you clings to and won&#8217;t give up &#8212; even though you sense you must make that change. Even the smallest of lights such as this &#8212; brought into the darkness of yourself &#8212; starts a sequence of changes within that will reveal the next step in the direction of the Love you seek.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Real life is perfect balance. And we each get from this life exactly what we give to it&#8230; no more, no less. This is a cardinal rule, although it&#8217;s widely rejected by the masses that refuse to see where they&#8217;re responsible for what life continues to give them. Wanting love from God, without first giving&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":232,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132,255,73],"tags":[656,134,1038,1039],"class_list":["post-1316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-balance","category-faithspirituality","category-love-relationships","tag-relationship-with-god","tag-sacrifice","tag-seeking-love","tag-wanting-love"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sacrifice Yourself for Love - Letting Go with Guy Finley<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2012\/02\/sacrifice-yourself-for-love.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sacrifice Yourself for Love - Letting Go with Guy Finley\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Real life is perfect balance. And we each get from this life exactly what we give to it&#8230; no more, no less. This is a cardinal rule, although it&#8217;s widely rejected by the masses that refuse to see where they&#8217;re responsible for what life continues to give them. Wanting love from God, without first giving&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2012\/02\/sacrifice-yourself-for-love.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Letting Go with Guy Finley\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:author\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Guy-Finley-260924340633\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-02-17T08:00:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2012-02-11T03:36:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Guy Finley\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@guy_finley\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Sacrifice Yourself for Love - Letting Go with Guy Finley","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/2012\/02\/sacrifice-yourself-for-love.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Sacrifice Yourself for Love - Letting Go with Guy Finley","og_description":"Real life is perfect balance. 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His ideas cut straight to the heart of our most important personal and social issues - relationships, success, addiction, stress, peace, happiness, freedom - and lead the way to a higher life. Finley is the Founder and Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit Center for Spiritual Discovery. He is the acclaimed author of \"The Secret of Letting Go\" and more than 45 other books and audio programs that have sold over two million copies in 26 languages worldwide. His work is widely endorsed by doctors, business professionals, celebrities, and religious leaders of all denominations. Through Life of Learning Foundation, Guy has presented over 5,000 unique self-realization seminars to thousands of grateful students throughout North America and Europe over the past 20 years and has been a guest on over 700 television and radio shows, including national appearances on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and NPR. The Foundation's popular Key Lesson e-mails featuring inspirational quotes by Guy are read each week by a hundred thousand subscribers in 142 countries. Guy speaks four times each week on inner-life principles at Life of Learning Foundation's home in Merlin, Oregon. These meetings are ongoing and open to the public. For more information about Life of Learning Foundation, Guy Finley, and their life-changing messages, visit guyfinley.org. \"Guy Finley is...one of the leading experts at the forefront of human potential.\" -Nightingale Conant \"Guy Finley has helped millions live fuller, more peaceable lives.\" -Barnes and Noble","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.guyfinley.org","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Guy-Finley-260924340633\/","https:\/\/x.com\/guy_finley"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/author\/gfinley"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/232"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1316"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1318,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions\/1318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lettinggo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}