Teaching your children to Sacrifice.

Abdul Baha tells us to practice the ideal of self-sacrifice.

Everything we have comes from God. We can show our love and thanks to Him by giving to others. this is being generous. To sacrifice means to give as much of your money, things, time, and service as you think you can and then to give even more. God loves people who sacrifice for Him and others.

This is a story of an old woman who sacrificed for God.

The Old Woman's Gift

Each year Abdul Baha sent one of the trusted Baha'i to Iran to get contributions from the Baha'is. One day this Baha'i visited the home of an old and very poor woman. He explained his job for Abdul Baha. She asked him to wait while she went to the market to sell the only thing she owned a small rug for two months. She was paid one small coin. She gave it as her contributions to the Funds.

When the man returned to Akka, he gave Abdul Baha all of his contributions. To his surprise Abdul Baha said, I can not accept this report. Your total is not correct. The man went to his room to pray. He had never made this mistake before. As he knelt in prayer his knee began to hurt. He fell and found the poor old woman's coin. He took it to Abdul Baha. Abdul Baha smiled and said, This coin is worth more in the eyes of God than all the other contributions because it was given with sacrifice.

The sincere lover is a sacrifice to the loved one and the longing one is a sacrifice to the beloved. The point lies in this: He must wholly forget himself, become a wanderer(in the Abode of the beloved) enamored with His Tresses. He must consign to oblivion the body and soul, the life, comfort, and existence.

The Baha'i Quotation on Sacrifice.

As to the third meaning of sacrifice, it is this: if you plant a seed in the ground, a tree will become manifest from that seed. The seed sacrifices itself to the tree that comes from it. The seed is outwardly lost, destroyed, but the same seed which is sacrificed will be absorbed and embodied in the tree, its blossoms, fruit, and branches.

Abdul Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace.

The Element of Detachment

To be free, we must learn to let go of some of the things we hold dear. This is a lesson from a certain monkey who had never learned.

Escaping from a band of village children who were determined to catch him, Monkey jumped from tree to tree in panic. When he was sure that he had lost them, he calmed down, sat on a branch, and lazily looked around. Oh, how good it felt to be free!

His eyes caught sight of a squirrel busy gathering nuts, entering the hollow of a tree through a hole, dropping its load, coming out, and running to gather more.

The oil of the nuts gave off a delicious scent that aroused the Monkeys' appetite. Here some easy food, he thought to himself and went closer to investigate. Unfortunately, the hole was too small for him to enter, so he puts his hand in. Down and down he reached and, to his delight, his hand finally touch the nuts. He hastily grabbed a few and tried to pull them out. But now his fist closed around the nuts, was too big to come out through the hole.

He could not decide what to do. If he opened his hand, he would lose the nuts, but there was no way that his fist full of nuts would make it through the hole. So there he stood, unwilling to give up the nuts not even when he heard the children's voices again. And as luck would have it, one of them spotted him. He saw the children running towards him, but still, he would not let go of the nuts.

That is how he ended up-sold to a zoo and spent the rest of his life in a cage.