What may look like self-aggradation is actually a form of ultimate self-sacrifice. If you allow yourself to be lifted up, you are allowing yourself to be set up. As Robert Knowles observed, what goes up generally comes down.
At this place in my life, I see the peculiar combination of the nonsense and pain that comes with elevating a man’s profile and I find it distasteful. It may be true that some part of it attracts me, but not enough to overcome the distaste. Obedience, or even a sense of mission, the execution on your personal value proposition (which is synonymous with mission), dictates a layered level of sacrifice.
In some ways, the greater sacrifice is the one who disappears in its converse. The most spiritual man may not be the one who lives in the impoverished shack, but the one who lives in an upper-middle-class home looking quite ordinary. In the case of the former, one lives there because he has no choice and, quite possibly, he owns the shack/home. In the case of the latter, one lives there out of choice (he could have more, he could have less), but the home does not own him. This is a brief observation, but an essay needs to be written on this topic: the greatest form of self-sacrifice is the invisible form.
