When encouraged to list their strengths, I have often heard women say things like “I am selfless to a fault” or “I would do anything for anybody.” I also used to think being willing to make huge sacrifices to help others at any moment with any need they had was a virtue.
Statements like this make me cringe a little now though. What I hear in them is an inability/unwillingness to set healthy boundaries—a problem I definitely used to struggle with in certain relationships. I really thought my unwillingness to set boundaries around what I was willing to sacrifice to help these friends and family members was a positive thing about me that made me an especially good friend. In reality, it was a method I was using to try to control these relationships and ensure that those friends/family members would keep loving me and be willing to help me when I was in need. Subconsciously, I was trying to control their opinions of me and obligate their love and service, rather than allowing them to make their own choices about how much love and service they wanted or were able to offer me.
The problem with over-sacrificing and not setting healthy boundaries is it sets us up to have a victim mentality and actually breeds resentment that hurts our relationships. The person over-sacrificing feels resentful that others don’t seem to be willing to make the same level of sacrifice to help them. Those they are sacrificing to help can feel the underlying expectation that if they are a good person/friend they will also drop everything in their life to meet the other person’s needs, even when that may not be in their best interest. This implied obligation to prove their love in a similar way can also create resentment.
The idea of sacrificing all our own needs to meet others’ needs is often held up as a standard of excellence in our society, perhaps especially in religious circles. After all, didn’t Christ sacrifice everything for us? And aren’t we supposed to follow His example?
Perhaps the distinction here is that we’re supposed to be willing to sacrifice everything to follow God’s will. He’s the one we’re commanded to give all our heart, might, mind and strength to. Why? Because He knows what sacrifices will bless us.
The commandment regarding other people is to love other people as ourselves. Not more than ourselves, and not less than ourselves. As ourselves. Our needs are just as valid as the needs of any other person. We should be very wise about the love and service we offer to ensure we are not undermining our own needs in the process, because in the long run that will neither bless us nor the person we are serving. Other people are not God—they do not know what sacrifices will bless us and what sacrifices will overburden us and make us unable to care for ourselves and our own stewardships. We are responsible for using our agency to make those calls, and we should not give that responsibility away to others.
Those are just some thoughts I was having today that I wanted to share. May we all be wise in how we choose to love and serve that our love and service might truly be a blessing to us and to those we serve.
