After years of trying with his wife Sarah, Abraham simply could not father a child to continue the family dynasty. Because of Abraham's strong and unwavering faith, God gave Abraham a beautiful baby boy named Isaac who Abraham raised with a deep love that any parent can understand. To test Abraham's faith, God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son as an offering (this is where I started getting scared...). Traveling over fifty miles with Isaac and two servants, Abraham arrived at the mountain where he intended to kill his son. Going up the mountain with a confused Isaac, Abraham bound his son and laid him on the altar with a sword to kill him. Right before Abraham stabbed Isaac to death, an angel appeared commanding Abraham to stop because he had shown true loyalty to God (talk about psychological trauma?). Instead of killing Isaac, Abraham sacrificed a ram as an offering to God prompting God to promise Abraham that his descendants would be blessed for generations.
While I noted above that this story was absolutely disturbing for me as a reader, it is a message we all need to hear. To show our faith in God or to simply stay true to ourselves, we must be willing to make sacrifices despite the costs to our personal well-being. Although I wish God would have chosen another medium for his message, it is imperative that we see a broader message of faith to a cause so that we can truly understand the importance of the story. I was reading an article about the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut the other day and stumbled upon an individual who exhibited true sacrifice in defense of her passion, her beloved students. Vicki Soto was a first-grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School who literally threw herself in front of her students so that they wouldn't die from gunshot wounds. She fought for the innocence of those children even as she was about to die leading her to become a posthumous recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal. I know that there are many more stories just like this, but the faith of this brave teacher really stood out to me.
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