My three-year-old woke up at 3:48 am.

I know because I heard her singing “B-I-N-G-O, And Bingo was his name-O” in her room this morning. Like all of us, she’s still adjusting to the 8 hour time difference in coming home from vistiting her cousins in England last week.

“Mama, can we go back on the plane to visit Madelyn, Josiah again? Next week?”

Apparently she quickly forgot the 24-plus hours of no sleep, the 3 hour bus ride, the 12 or so times we had to produce our passports at Heathrow, the 90 minutes we sat in the plane before we took off from London, the nearly 12 hour plane ride home and to top it all off, the LA traffic as we left the airport.

But she also doesn’t understand the sacrifices that were made to get us there and back cannot simply be reproduced so quickly or easily. Time spent off from work, from Hope’s school, the mail, the cat, the postponed bills, the canceled appointments, the LAUNDRY! All of these are sacrifices. The mental, emotional and physical energy from all of us to take four of us across the ocean is enormous.

And her sweet, focused three-year-old mind cannot comprehend that.

And that’s alright. That is what her parents are for.

To make the sacrifices so that her and her sister can spend 11 days playing with their cousins during pajama mornings and pizza dinners. We make the sacrifices so that she doesn’t have to worry. But she still doesn’t understand.

In some small similar way, we don’t understand the sacrifices of Christ for us.

Our minds are too small and too bound by earth to begin to understand what it took for God to move heaven to create redemption for us. It cannot be reproduced or even fully understood; just accepted. And we can be thankful.