I loved this story in The Atlantic about semi-conscious people who have sustained brain injuries. There is much that makes it well worth your time—extraordinary developments in our understanding of the brain, and moving stories of loved ones who were assumed to be unconscious or unaware being heard and understood for the first time in years or decades, to name just two things. But what I found particularly beautiful is the remarkable tenderness and steadfast love of Eve Baer, who has been her son Ian Berg’s caretaker for 39 years now. Eve reoriented her entire life in response to the circumstances she found herself in after Ian’s car accident, which left him immobile and minimally conscious, likely in ways and to degrees she would not have envisioned or desired for herself, even for someone like her whose “ambition in life was always to be a mother.” (Motherhood is different from caregiving, after all.) In a word, Eve embodies sacrifice and shows us what it can mean to sacrifice one’s own life—or at least major elements of it—on behalf of someone else. And in this way, I think she gives us a portrait of what it looks like to follow Jesus, too.

Most of us who are Christians may not have to sacrifice as much of our lives for someone else as Eve has for Ian, but I don’t think we should necessarily expect not to, and I don’t think we should be surprised if we have to. We’ve grown accustomed in American Christian culture to sacrificing our lives to a point, usually the point at which discomfort, inconvenience, or pain increases substantially. Often that discomfort or inconvenience arises from the reality that to change this aspect of our lives on account of this other person means our lives will look remarkably different going forward (and usually, in our imagination, worse) than we were expecting them to look.

This is all familiar to many of us who are Christians, for whom Jesus is that other person on whose account we sacrifice our lives. Where I see a parallel between Eve’s life and my own life specifically is in my experience of sexuality. I think sexuality is an area of our lives in which many of us as Christians implicitly or explicitly expect Jesus to not ask of his followers something too uncomfortable, inconvenient, or even painful. But to follow Jesus is to agree to reorient one’s life around another person, to sacrifice for this person, and to do so again and again as, like Eve, we arrive at new points along life’s way where we have to choose yet again to love this person, to let our life be affected by our love for them, and to do what our commitment to loving them now asks of us.

For me, following and loving Jesus in the area of my sexuality has meant both deciding not to date or marry a man in the belief that it is not God’s best for me, and also, in recent years, responding affirmatively to God’s invitation to me to pursue celibacy. Both of these decisions have been tremendous sacrifices, and have often felt uncomfortable, inconvenient, and even painful. But if I believe in the person and teachings of Jesus and that he is worth reorienting my entire life around—and I do—then I believe these are worthwhile sacrifices, even as believing that doesn’t necessarily make them easier to endure.

There may be many points in our lives where we face a sacrifice that feels too great to make, even for Jesus. I’ve found these are good occasions to pray for faith, strength, hope, and love, and to lean on others to support me in discerning and making these sacrifices. I’ve also found great encouragement in the reality that as followers of Jesus, we do not have to put all our hopes and dreams and longings into this one life we’re now living. We are people who can hope in a life to come—a life!—in which we’ll get to live and work and be in community and love each other and create and recreate and worship together, go on walks and eat good food, paint and draw and write and make music. And if we really believe that that life will go on forever, will never end, then it ought to change how willing we are to make huge, even life-altering sacrifices in this life. It should eliminate for us the sense of scarcity from which we often consider these sacrifices and life decisions, scarcity that would have us believe that spending 39 years as a caretaker for your minimally conscious son represents a profound robbery of your own life and potential and dreams. It may feel this way, particularly at first, and we can and often should grieve drastic changes between the life we expected to live and the life that is actually ours to live. But it does seem to me that these kinds of sacrifices—responses we make to our life’s circumstances in which we reorient our lives toward others in the name of selfless love—are the very sacrifices of which Jesus said “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:29), and “those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

They are, in short, the kinds of sacrifices we will have an eternity to make up for—if in the end we find them something to “make up for” at all.