The Holy Exchange ~ What Sacrifice Makes Possible
What if the thing you're terrified to lose is also the thing you're being asked to lay down?
Not because it was bad or you were wrong for loving it. But because there are places you can’t go while insisting on carrying everything you've accumulated along the way.
I've been reflecting a lot on sacrifice because I'm currently re-listening to John C. Maxwell's The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, and today I reached Law #18: The Law of Sacrifice.
There’s a line in that chapter: “There is no success without sacrifice.”
And wow, did that hit differently this time around. Maybe because I've lived a little more life since the last time I heard it. Probably because God has been teaching me what sacrifice actually means.
Also, as a writer, I'm currently mapping the journeys of characters in two different books—which was not my plan, by the way. I thought I was writing one book. 😅
Apparently God had greater plans—as usual.
So here we are.
And as I've been building these characters—asking what they want, what wounded them, what they're afraid of, what lie they believe, what they must confront and ultimately who they must become—I keep coming back to the same thing:
There is no real transformation without sacrifice.
My characters can’t become who they need to be while remaining who they were.
This is one of my favorite parts of storytelling. Before I write the entire journey, I get to stand above it for a while and see the architecture. Here’s who she is. There’s what happened to her. Over here’s what she believes because of it. Over there’s what she desperately wants.
And right here… here is what she's afraid to lose—the thing she must surrender to arc into her becoming.
Externally, she loses something tangible. But the sacrifice that really matters happens internally.
A belief. An identity. An attachment. A false sense of control. A relationship she thought she couldn't live without. An idea of how her life was supposed to unfold. An old wound she has built an entire personality around protecting.
An ego.
Ooof, let me tell you...
There are a lot of ego deaths on the road to becoming who God called you to be.
I've had many. And many more are coming.
Lucky me.
But as I wrote about in my last Steph's Stories post, When the Story Starts Writing You, something strange and beautiful has been happening while I've been developing these books.
I'm not only writing character journeys. I'm recognizing my own.
We’re all characters when you really think about it.
Maybe this hits me differently because I'm an author and screenwriter, but I increasingly see life through the language of story.
We have wounds. Desires. False beliefs. Antagonists. Thresholds. Reversals. Dark nights. Choices. Deaths.
Rebirths…
And transformations.
I believe God is the ultimate Author of my story.
I have agency. I make choices. I screw things up. I take detours. I occasionally grab the pen and attempt to write scenes He very clearly did not ask me to.
But ultimately, I come back to Him. Because I don't believe I'm the fundamental designer.
I believe I'm a co-author with free will who keeps discovering that the Divine Author sees pages I can't.
And that changes the way I understand sacrifice.
Because when I look back at the things I have gotten to sacrifice—and I'm choosing those words intentionally—I can see something I couldn't always see while I was letting them go.
Space was being created. Not always for another thing.
Sometimes for another version of me.
Sacrifice Isn't Always Losing Something Bad
This is important. I don't believe everything we lose was bad. I don't believe every painful thing that happens was something God deliberately inflicted upon us. And I certainly don't believe faith means pretending loss doesn't hurt.
Sometimes the thing surrendered was beautiful. Sometimes you desperately wanted it. Sometimes you prayed for it. Sometimes you can’t understand why the path forward seems to require loosening your grip on something you thought would be part of your story forever.
Sacrifice hurts precisely because it costs something.
Otherwise, it isn't sacrifice.
But I’ve come to believe, and experience firsthand, that God can use surrender with staggering precision.
Nothing placed into His hands is wasted.
The loss. The disappointment. The dream that changed. The identity that no longer fits. The belief about yourself you've carried since childhood. The resentment you've justified for years. The fear you've mistaken for wisdom. The need to be understood. The need to be right. The need to control the ending.
Even the version of yourself you worked incredibly hard to become.
Sometimes you discover that the thing you thought was holding you together was actually holding you down.
And when it finally leaves your hands—there’s space for what you truly need.
The Holy Exchange
This idea has been showing up powerfully in Rewrite Fear & Rise, the book I'm currently developing around the AFER™ experience God gave me:
Accept.
Face.
Embrace.
Rise.
I won't tell you too much yet. The story is still revealing itself to me. But there’s an image within it that I can't stop thinking about.
A holy exchange.
We carry things into our lives that eventually become like a shroud—old fears, lies, wounds, identities and shadows we have worn for so long that we mistake them for ourselves.
Transformation doesn't mean fighting harder while continuing to wear them. True transformation asks us to finally take them off.
To surrender them.
And discover what was underneath…
Light.
Truth.
Freedom.
Something that was always there but couldn't be fully seen beneath everything we'd accumulated around it.
That's sacrifice too.
Perhaps one of the hardest kinds. Because letting go of a lie is surprisingly difficult when the lie has been keeping you safe.
And Then There’s Jesus
Whenever I think deeply about sacrifice, eventually I arrive here.
Jesus.
My Lord and Savior.
The ultimate Leader.
I believe Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh. I believe God stepped into humanity through Him. I believe He willingly gave His life for us.
And when I look at leadership through that lens, sacrifice becomes something entirely different from deprivation.
Christ didn't model leadership as: Look what I can accumulate.
He modeled: Look what I am willing to give.
He washed feet. He served. He surrendered status. He endured rejection.
And ultimately, He laid down His life.
I'm obviously not comparing the sacrifices of my life—or the sacrifices required of any ordinary human being—to the Cross.
Jesus paid a price I cannot pay.
That's the point.
But I do believe His life reveals something profound about the architecture of transformation.
Death. Then resurrection.
Surrender. Then freedom.
Letting go. Then becoming.
Once you begin seeing it, you start noticing how deeply this pattern has embedded itself into the stories humanity keeps telling.
The hero descends. Something dies. Something is surrendered. The hero emerges changed.
Not every hero's journey is the story of Christ. But I don't think it's an accident that we're so profoundly moved by stories of death and rebirth.
There is something written into us that recognizes resurrection.
Sometimes What Has to Die Is the Lie
I've experienced losses that hurt, had dreams dashed before me, watched versions of my life disappear that I once desperately wanted.
I've had parts of my identity stripped down. I've had to question things I believed about myself, other people and God. I've known depths where I could barely see beyond the pain in front of me.
And some of the hardest sacrifices haven't been physical at all.
They've happened inside me.
The belief. The pattern. The fear. The ego.
The story I'd been telling myself about what something meant. Because sometimes what needs to be sacrificed isn't your dream.
It's the lie attached to it.
Sometimes it isn't the relationship. It's your belief that another human being determines your worth.
Sometimes it isn't ambition. It's your belief that achievement determines your value.
Sometimes it isn't the calling. It's your insistence that the calling must unfold according to your timeline.
Sometimes it isn't who you are. It's who fear convinced you that you had to become to survive.
And yes. Letting those things die can hurt.
Your ego may scream. Your flesh may fight. Every old pattern may try to convince you to pick the thing back up.
But your spirit?
Your spirit finally has room to breathe.
You Can't Rise While Clinging to Every Anchor
That's what sacrifice is beginning to mean to me.
Not punishment. Not a transactional formula where I give God one thing and He gives me something shinier in return. Not spiritual bargaining.
Freedom.
The removal of what can no longer accompany me.
And I won't promise you that if you sacrifice something, God will immediately replace it with exactly what you want. I've lived enough life to know better than to make that promise. But I can tell you what surrender has done in me.
It has revealed me.
It has humbled me.
It has freed me.
It has made more room for God.
It has shown me how many things I once called necessities were actually attachments.
And somehow, again and again, the things I thought would diminish me by leaving have created room for something deeper to grow.
Life is a beautiful, messy, fucked up and extraordinary journey.
There are things we cling to. Things we lose. Things we willingly lay down. Things we swear we cannot survive without. And things we eventually look back on and thank God we were finally willing to release.
I'm still learning this. I'm still living it. I'm literally discovering pieces of it while writing fictional characters who apparently have quite a lot to teach their author.
Divine orchestration has an awesome sense of humor like that.
So thank you, John Maxwell, for giving language to something God was apparently already stirring in me.
Thank You, God, for every experience that somehow converged at precisely the right moment for me to hear those words differently.
And above all:
Thank You, Lord Jesus, for showing me what surrender looks like.
Thank You for the Cross.
Thank You for the sacrifice I could never make.
Thank You for the freedom it made possible.
I'm beginning to understand that the things God asks me to lay down aren't always the ending of the story.
More often than not they're how He frees my hands to turn the page.
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