Did anybody catch the brief segment on NBC last night about those who are losing sleep because of the late (or early) viewing hours for the Olympics? I was fascinated by one of the men NBC interviewed who testified to the effect that his loss of sleep wasn’t a sacrifice because he was getting to watch the Olympics.

Sounds a lot like David Livingstone’s address to students at Cambridge University in 1857:

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. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? 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. (Quoted in John Piper, Desiring God, 243. Italics author’s.)