This goes back to our roundabout with that touchy word...'sacrifice'.... a word which sends off alarms in my head everytime it is mentioned-

All vernacular neuroticism aside however, here is a real life example of perspective that i wish to live out in relation to this 'touchy' word (PS-i get that it is perspective loaded with connotation, but i cant put it aside, so i have decided to come to terms with it's application in my life...Ayn Rand has ruined my personal dictionary in this regard; sacrifice and altruism are now derogatory):

David Livingstone, (the your story biography hour does an excellent job) in fact his life is simply inspiring to me all around (medical missionary) and his writings have both clarified and inspired.

What Livingstone said:

"For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. . . . 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."

....my grenade.

Mark 10:29-30. "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life."