There is a fallacy, or a belief based on faulty reasoning, called the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy happens when we base our decisions for the future on costs or expenditures that we have already spent and which are impossible to recover. For example, we might decide to continue to drive a car that has broken down many times precisely because we have already sunk so much money into repairing it that we feel that to sell it or scrap it now would be to waste all of that money. The faulty reasoning of course is that choosing to hold onto the vehicle will somehow mean that the money has not been wasted. Whether we drive it for another ten years, sinking another twenty thousand dollars worth of repairs into it all the while, or sell it today, both choices will have the exact same impact on the money that we have already spent on it. None at all. The money was gone the moment that we spent it. Neither the money nor the car care one bit what happens next. But we do! Even though it makes no rational sense, we hold onto our sunk costs. I am convinced that the Sunk Cost Fallacy is so powerful because it is a hollowed out echo of a much more powerful principle that governs our lives and the universe at large. That principle is the Law of Sacrifice. On the surface level, the Law of Sacrifice and the Sunk Cost Fallacy seem somewhat similar. Both deal with costs and the meanings that we place on those costs. The Law of Sacrifice invites us to offer up our time, our energy, and our resources to the Lord, not as the Sunk Cost fallacy to be wasted or sunk or lost beyond all hope of recovery, where thieves can break in and moths and rust can corrupt, but rather to be made sacred and dedicated to our Father's work and glory of bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of His children, and to be safely stored in Heaven, where no thieves can break in, no moths or rust can corrupt, and where none of the sacred and eternal prices we've paid can be sunk or lost. It is foolish to base decisions on the sunk costs of the treasures that we lay up in store on earth. We have spent the money and the energy and the time on things that we will never get back, no matter how much we wish it were otherwise. It is just as foolish to assume that any sacrifice we make to the Lord represents anything but an Unsinkable Cost, a price that our Heavenly Father will honor and remember forever, and which He will repay back to us an hundredfold.
