Jing Li
Professor
HIST 225
11 November 2014

Love is sacrifice
When we talk about love, things will come up in our mind. We think about god, families, friends or spouse that connected with love; and some other attitudes such as patience, kindness, concerns and unselfishness; even the bad aspects including jealous, bitterness, sadness, fighting, bad temper, quarrel or angry. They are all the feeling come out from out mind when we do things that connected with love. When we get along with our family members, spouse or friends, the feeling of love pushes us to face them with different attitude and thoughts in mind, to show our love from deep heart. What is love? In my opinion, love is sacrifice. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his speech of Pilgrimage to Nonviolence to call for and sustain nonviolence in world to make his country live under peace. He mentioned six steps on how to achieve nonviolence which one of them is “nonviolence resistance is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back”; “rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood”. To achieve nonviolent world must shed someone’s blood and lay down someone’s life. There must be lots of people die for nonviolence; there must be sacrifice to get a nonviolent world. As a consequence, nonviolence is a kind of sacrifice. Another consequence was made that nonviolence is love. When he emphasized in the fifth step that nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit; at the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. Connected those two steps, “nonviolence is a sacrifice” and “nonviolence is love”, we can easily to get an equality that love is sacrifice. If one loves his country, such as president, soldier, or ordinary people will be willing to sacrifice in any circumstance. They sacrifice by using their energy, body, time, blood, pain and even their whole life; as well as in families. Ruth in Bible, a kind woman, said to her mother-in-law, “Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die; there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well.” Actually after she said these words to Naomi, she was ready to sacrifice for her whatever happened in the future; and in fact, she did so. She never rejects any requirements from Naomi including marrying to Baoz, for maintain the dead man’s name on his inheritance, in order that the name of the dead may not be cut off from his kindred and from the gate of his native place. Ruth is the one who has not left Naomi without next-of-kin, who loves her and prove it by sacrificing her body which means her whole life to old Baoz. Commonly, people loving family means by loving mother, father or direct relatives. Mother-in-law, sister-in-law this kind of membership sometimes like stranger. What a great love of Ruth in this situation to love someone without next-of-kin. What a great sacrifice by paying whole lifetime to live for someone else; let alone by paying life to die for someone else, just like Alcestis. Alcestis is the one I am trying to analyze for answering the second question, “what is the most worthy of our love”. Since I have made a conclusion that love is sacrifice, we can see this question as “what is the most worthy we sacrifice for