The process of our living involves a lot of trade-off and barter. We are forever giving up some things in order that we might have others; we are perpetually sacrificing this so we may have that. We do this in our marriages; we do this in our occupational choices; we do this in the matter of having children; we do it at almost every juncture of the journey we make. In most of our choices we are actually giving up certain freedoms that we may have for certain others.  Whatever scenic road we take, we take it at the price of denying ourselves the scenery along the other roads we might have taken.

We like to believe that what we are getting is worth the sacrifice we are making. We want to think we are giving up a thing of less value to get something of greater worth, that what we get is worth the price we pay.

Some of us are chronically preoccupied with the negligible - and often with disastrous consequences. They say that on one occasion baseball player Babe Ruth, when running to catch a fly ball, stopped to scoop up his hat when it blew off, and the result was a three-base hit for the opposing team. Lest it spill, a motorist grabbed for a thirty-cent bottle of soft drink on the dash of his car, and wrecked his twenty thousand dollar automobile. Sometimes in the crucial issues of our living we do equally stupid and disastrous things. Let us beware lest we are consumed by the insignificant, lest we use ourselves up doing what isn't worth the cost. Let us be sure that what we go for is worth the going.