So, here’s my main problem with the Little Mermaid: She gave up everything to pursue one thing. And she failed. But of course Disney never told it that way because, heaven forbid we fail. We can’t tell a story where the ending is not what the heroine expected. Surely her dreams could not have been wrong.

Personally,  I tend to favor Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic version. Happily-ever-afters are great, but I think we sometimes need a little bit of reality sprinkled into the situation. We’re human. We fail. And things don’t always turn out the way we might have imagined in this fallen, broken world.

While love is sacrifice, I think we sometimes sacrifice too much. Some things were never intended to be sacrificed. Your dreams were not meant for someone else to fulfill. If your “prince” requires you to sacrifice the passions of your heart, I’m not convinced he is truly the man God has for you. Yet we women are all too willing to give everything we have within us if we can only secure the love of an earthly prince. News flash: you already have the love of a heavenly One.

There is something to be said for sacrifice and compromise. They’re necessary at times. My grandma wanted four kids, my grandpa wanted six. They ended up with the grand total of five. Compromise. Sometimes it is necessary, but other times it is extremely harmful. Don’t give up the big dreams in order to chase after the little ones. I’ll leave you with this final thought from Robert Cornuke and Alton Gansky’s book, The Bell Messenger:

Old men die, that’s what they do. They eventually die from withering bodies, but they also die from dreams that never come true.