Inspiration

“I am Moana” part 2.

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Okay, I’ve already outlined the story and the positive and negative elements of the film itself, now I want to get to my favorite part: The message.

It’s funny that directors often don’t know their own message very well. Everyone thinks Moana is about being true to yourself.

“You always, always say ‘be true to yourself,’ but you never say which part of yourself to be true to!”–Buddy, The Incredibles.

Well, as Buddy points out, being true to yourself is not as simple as just being told to be.

And what does it really mean anyway?

I won’t argue that a large part of Moana is devoted to that message, but I don’t think we should just apply it to Moana. What about the Ocean? The Ocean wrecks Moana’s canoe, twice; almost drowns her; almost drowns her father and does drown his best friend; it also doesn’t respond to Moana’s cries for help every time she want sit to. What is the deal with the Ocean?

Moana, as we all would, gets frustrated with her new “friend.” Maybe you have a friend like that, one who acts in ways you can’t understand. I do.

But I actually love that the ocean acts this way, because the Ocean reminds me of God.

I know Christians say this about virtually every movie, but don’t roll your eyes yet, I have an unusual reason.

If you’ve read the Chronicles of Narnia, you’ll recall that Aslan, the king, is not safe; but he’s good. Even in the movie they admit “He is not a tame lion.”

The wildness of Aslan frightens many people, in and out of the books, I might add. Aslan himself may not frighten those of us in the real world, but when we meet anything like him, we are frightened.

When it comes to things that aren’t alive, I’d say the Ocean takes the prize for being the most wild and unpredictable. You know why sailors are famous for cursing? You try being on a boat in the middle of rough water and see if you don’t at least think about it. I have been, it was one of the worst days of my life–and then there was the return trip.

No one can tame the Ocean. And that is something Moana needs to realize, no matter whether it chose her or not, the Ocean is still the Ocean, and it has to act according to its nature. Aslan admits to swallowing whole villages of people, to Jill, (in Book 6,) and not at all as if he is sorry or glad. He just is.

It is largely forgotten among the Church that God is like this. He is not predictable, we can not carry Him in our pocket. God Himself does destroy things, he does mete out justice, He does cause death. Many people hate Him for those reasons.

Yet God is not responsible for murder, for evil, or for every sorrow. But eh never tells us how we may know the difference between what he ahs caused and what other things have caused, He just ells us to trust Him.

This is why many people think Christians who are not fake are simply nuts. Well, maybe we are, maybe we are crazy for the sake of others, as Paul says.

But is it not somewhat crazy for Moana to set off alone, with her dumb chicken, to find Maui, who doesn’t seem the hero type even to her, and fight a lava monster single handedly after Maui abandons her like a jerk. (Really, if he’d just left it would have been one thing, but the mean things he says made me want to punch him.) Moana’s Grandma is crazy, and Moana definitely takes after her, but I loved it and I was not in the minority for once.

The Ocean teaches us a very important lesson: Good things are dangerous.

Things cannot be truly good until they are dangerous. Otherwise they are not tested. Evil things are also dangerous, but not in the same way. The difference, if we go by Jesus words, is one can destroy your body, the other can destroy body and soul, but the first is men, the second is God. Which is more good?

Of all the monsters in the realm, none of them defeats Moana or comes as close to it, as her disappointment and discouragement with the Ocean does. Good is far more dangerous than evil.

But that’s not bad. Because it’s good. That’s the paradox the movie is trying to show us. The Ocean helps Moana, just not in the way she expects, nor in the way she understands. For example, because the Ocean wrecked Moana a few times, she is not fazed when the Lava monster is making waves and nearly drowning her. She’s figured out how to swim.

And because Mona has had to do things without the Ocean’s help, she is brave enough to tell it to part when she needs Te Ka to come to her.

Because Moana has to carry so much of the weight, she is able to go on with or without Maui.

Maybe the Ocean knows what its doing.

The Ocean chose Moana for a reason, and I believe God chooses people for a reason too. But it’s not really about what’s special about us, it’s about if we will learn to trust.

That’s what’s great about Moana. It spends more time focusing on the journey than on why she was chosen, that becomes more apparent as we go.

Moana means Ocean, so the movie is really named after both of them, and Moana and the Ocean are in a sense, both the hero, neither is independent of the other.

Christians believe that God does not need people, but I personally believe that He has chosen to set this world up so that he does, in a sense. Not like we need things, it’s a different kind of need.

Moana realizes that our desires are awakened by something outside ourselves. That she longs for the Ocean because it calls her.

“And the call isn’t out there at all, it’s inside me. It’s like the tide, always falling and rising. I will carry you here in my heart to remind me, that come what may, I know the way. I am Moana!”

I am the ocean. Not that I literally am it, or that I have the power of it, but that the ocean is a part of me.

As weird as that may sound, the movie completely backs me up on it. Who we are is, literally, who we are called to be. Think about that sentence.

That song is what made me like the movie, and in my opinion, it’s why everyone likes it.

Is it better than “Let it go”? Of course not; they are two different songs that describe two different feelings, which are connected but are certainly not the same.

But Moana is like Frozen continued. Not good in the same way, but still good, and that is my verdict.

Until next time–Natasha.

“I am Moana.”

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I’m having fun doing reviews, though I don’t do them exactly like how people generally do, but that’s fine, because I figure if someone wants to know about the cast, the score, and the rating, there’s a bunch of other sites that tell them better than I can.

So, as my title says, I want to talk about Moana.

Everybody, including me, went into Moana with high expectations, except those who hate Disney Princess movies, and they went in with that expectation.

I will say from the beginning that the advertisers never should have marketed this movie as something made by the creators of Frozen. Frozen is hard to replicate for its own screen writers (have you seen that horrible short that came with the 2015 Cinderella?) let alone for other people.

I tried hard not to watch the movie with a Frozen bias, but I realized that I couldn’t help myself, the result was, upon first watch, I really disliked it.

But now I’ve had plenty of time to reconsider, and I’ve had my sister give me a lot of reasons why the movie was not as bad as I thought, and I liked some of the songs; and the long and short of it is, I have changed my mind.

Now, the people who say (and there are many) that this movie is better than Frozen, are completely wrong. From the first moments of the film there is a different tone and style to it than Frozen, Moana herself is nothing like either Elsa or Anna, and she has no special power, there is not threat form the elements. Plus, Moana is based off of a myth, not a fairytale, and the writers and animators did a good job of making the whole thing feel like a legend.

So, since this is the case, Moana is not actually the same kind of story as Frozen, and comparing the two in that light, is not fair to either.

Just in case you haven’t seen it and don’t plan to (Spoiler alert!) I’ll outline the story. Moana is the daughter of the village chief of an island in Hawaii, not yet called that, of course. she had a love for the sea, that her father discourages for reasons of his own, but Moana can’t help herself. Then we find out the Ocean chose her to be the one to save her people. As we are told in the opening minutes of the film the heart of Tafiti, the Polynesian goddess of creation, was stolen by the demigod Maui, and that brought a curse of decay and death over the world, which now finds its way to Moana’s island. Realizing this, and with some pushing and revelation from her crazy Grandma, Moana finally sets out to restore the heart, despite various setbacks. She finds Maui, they team up, and after a lot of monsters and storms, and Te Ka, the lava monster, Moana figures out how to restore the heart, and succeeds. (You knew she would.)

Okay, so what is negative in all this?

Well, though the story works a lot of the time, it unfortunately breaks down whenever Maui is acting less than demigodly.  Also, some parts of it are a little rushed, not very well explained, and why did we need that dumb chicken? But that’s a personal preference, not an actual plot problem.

I have to admit, the movie has no real plot holes, but it has plot rubbish. Maui may be the most unnecessary additional character that I’ve ever seen as part of the whole. But what I really had a hard time forgiving the movie for was that Maui and some other parts, constantly took away the mythic feel of the whole thing. They made it seem cheesy and too aimed at a young audience, and a young audience with low standards at that. The humor was just stupid at many times, and often it was modern, which threw off the movie because the whole point is to feel like you’re way back in time, watching the whole legend unfold before your eyes.

Moana is not the first modern Disney Princess movie to use modern humor, Tangled did in some ways, I’ve seen other movies do it and it worked fine, like Shrek. But those other movies were set up with a much simpler plot that would not suffer from that kind of humor, while Moana, form its conception, is supposed to feel more timeless.

I may be overstating my case, but the importance of this factor really cannot be stressed too much, I winced every time the movie got too modern, because, if I wanted to hear modern jokes, I’d watch a Dreamworks movie or a TV show, for crying out loud, I watch Disney to get away from that.

It doesn’t bother everyone the way it bothers me, but whether it bothers you or not, it does change the tone of the movie and that’s going to affect the quality.

Enough with the negative. What changed my mind about this movie was two things: The first was of course, Moana herself.

I’ve got to hand it to Auli, she kept this character grounded. Moana never is ruined by the stupid jokes, or unnecessary humor around her, she stays down to earth and passionate the entire time, and manages to sell innocent and shrewd at the same time. I have no problem with her character at all, and I would have liked her even better without the plot problems that were not her fault.

The other thing will not surprise anyone who has seen it: The Ocean.

I think the climax of this movie is one of the best parts, but the only thing that made Maui and Hei Hei bearable for me was Moana and the Ocean working together. The Ocean actually behaved just as I would expect it to if it were a conscious creature, and that was what really sold me on the plot. If the Ocean had been too nice, or too magical, it would have felt fake and contrived, but the Ocean being unpredictable and very real at times made it work. I was most into Moana’s head when the Ocean proved more dangerous than she expected, and when she almost gave up, because it was a natural feeling.

I can’t get into the meaning of the movie in this part, so I’ll do it in part two, until then–Natasha.

What is the meaning of Life?

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I feel like I need to address this question.

(I actually already have in one of my Quest posts “Why am I here?” So you can check that out if you’re interested in further thoughts from me on the subject.)

I think when we ask “what is the meaning of life?” We are really asking “What is my place in this life?” Or possibly “Was all this an accident?”

Until the Evolution theory became popular sometime after the Civil War, there was little debate over the purposefulness of creation. Of course it was no accident.

But it might surprise you to know that even in ancient times, the theory of evolution existed. even the Greeks, famously polytheistic, had some traces of evolution in their mythology, I think I’ve heard the Egyptians did too.

It is probably not news to you that in recent decades evolution has taken some hard hits from Intelligent Design theorists, there’s a lot of evidence out there against evolution. Though many people still do not believe that, but there is.

This post is not about evolution, but it is part of my point. Only if we evolved does the question “Is life an accident?” even seem legitimate. And I don’t think we did.

So, I would say life is not accidental, but just because it’s not an accident that doesn’t mean it’s meaningful.

And what if life originally was not an accident, but now, because people have children often without meaning to, one could say they were an accident. Who gets to decide?

The government?

The parent?

It’s not the church anymore, though it has contributed.

It’s really quite simple, either we are born for a reason, and that means someone wanted us to be born; or, we aren’t. And then, there is nothing.

But there’s more to it. There are plenty of people who believe we are put here for a reason, yet still feel lost and often discouraged about their lives. I’m not immune to such feelings myself.

I’ve seen many people write that we can’ t know. There is no way of knowing. Or that maybe answers will come to us, but we can’t be sure they will. I remember one person said they accepted that life was a lie, and art was one of their only solaces.

I think that person missed something key there.

For one thing: Why are we even able to understand the concept of meaning, and purpose, if it does not exist?

Why do we make things to use them, if things don’t have use?

And if something like a toothpick or an eyebrow pencil still has its’ use, heck, if we can turn puked-up octopus into perfume, then why on earth would we amazing, complex, intelligent, human beings be without purpose?

I’m sorry, that is more mind-boggling than rocket science.

Really, we are such lost, damaged people; that we even have to wonder this stuff. We were never meant to.

Yes, meant to.

I say this with compassion, and empathy, because I’ve had my dark moments too.

You all know my answer: God. But let me take a slightly different tone. I often talk about my feelings about God, but I don’t want all you intellectuals out there to think I’ve never considered the scientific side to all this.

Actually, science fascinates me. I don’t claim to understand mcu of it, but what I do understand is jammed with wonder.

I understand that our brains are ever-changing, growing tools, that we can sharpen or dull by choice.

I understand that what activates our conscience is actually a mini sort-of brain in our chest, and that’s why our strongest feelings are there.

I understand that we cannot make our own heart beat.

I understand that our eyes pick up images upside down and our brain switches them around so that we don’ feel disoriented.

And all this is just the tip of the iceberg. And all of this has meaning. Just like the words I’m using have meaning to you because you speak English.

So, if life seems to have no meaning, if I may further use my own analogy, it is because we cannot speak the language of Life.

You think I am being metaphorical, but this is true.

We see meaning when we speak it, when we hear it. What we say about ourselves and about our surroundings affects our perceptions; and also what we’ve heard said about us.

I guarantee you, the idea that life has no meaning got started with words. And those words got repeated to people until there was a whole culture that believed it. And that affects each individual in that culture.

Of course, it would be stupid to say words alone are responsible.

But it’s science. Look it up, things, even inanimate objects, are affected by human speech.

But we, as beings who have choice, do have the option of not believing everything we hear. You may not believe what I am saying, and I can’t make you. I wouldn’t anyway. Or, you may believe it.

I had to choose.

But I was convinced by both what I could see of life, what I knew of it through science, and what I felt in my heart had to be true.

In a nutshell, I was convinced life is full of meaning. That it is there for

everyone who looks for it, that we naturally look for it as kids, but often turn ourselves off to it as adults and teens.

People say the answers might come, but if you ask me, they are there already. It’s we who shut our eyes and our minds to it, to what’s right in front of us. And I have too. I think everyone does at some point, but some of us wake up.

One more thing, art is full of meaning. An art lover is seeing meaning some where.

My NLT Bible says “He made the world to be lived in, not to be a place of empty chaos.” Isaih 45:18. That’s good enough for me. Because, the world in only chaotic where we have removed natural order, originally, it was designed for life. We know that.

I hope you enjoyed this post, until next time–Natasha.

Courage.

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Courage. What makes a king out of a slave? Courage.

What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage.

What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist or the dusky dust.

What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage.

What makes the sphinx the 7th Wonder? Courage.

What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage. 

What makes the hottentot so hot? what puts the “ape” in apricot?

Whatta they got that I haven’t got?

Others: Courage.

You can say that again.

Recognize it? This is the memorable speech give by the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz movie.

Courage. The most foundational of all the virtues, as C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Screwtape Letters.

Courage comes from the French word for heart, cor. I think that is because courage is a thing of the heart not the mind. Nor even of the soul.

The Bible talks about your soul being downcast, but it says your heart is what is afraid or unafraid.  Your mind may tell you fear is rational, or irrational, your soul may feel afraid and troubled, but if you choose in your heart to be brave, then your mind and your soul will not have their way.

Of course there is false bravery; a. k. a. stupidity. That is when there is a risk taken for no real reason except to take it, for thrills. Where do you think we got the phrase “It’s your funeral,” from? (Ironically, that phrase if often used in movies when the person is taking a worthwhile risk.)

No one can be themselves without courage. As the Lion is pointing out for us. I would also argue that no one can let other people be themselves without courage. I read an article about courage on this phycology website I found. It was pretty good, but the comment section under it made me sad. One man said he was considering the idea that the earth is hell. That it matches Dante’s description of it. It was because the article had pointed out how dangerous the world we live in has become.

And that is true. The world is dangerous. Most of that is our fault. But the world, though broken and sometimes twisted, is still in many ways beautiful. If it seems like hell to a person, that person is not doing enough to make it like heaven.

What we contribute affects our outlook. When you act like a jerk or a weasel or just mediocre, you will see the world through those lenses. When you live to bless other people, you will reap good results. I don’t think this man who commented that remark had courage. Because if he did, he would not see the world that way.

Take from someone who was an expert on every kind of fear. Fear spoils life. It has torment, as the Word says.

I get disappointed too, just like all of you reading this do, I see things almost every day that make me shake my head at the world. (All you have to do is watch the news for ten minutes.) I do not have less reason to fear and despair than the average American. Though I will not pretend I have it anywhere near as bad as many people in other places do.

I don’t think I have it bad at all. I feel bad sometimes (truth be told, I’m feeling blue today as I write this,) but I don’t live in constant negativity.

I remember, there was a shooting near where I lived a year ago, and there was one in a place I’d been to, not long before. The day the first incident happened I got to my youth group and they had the door locked, my sister and I had to announce ourselves. We got in a found everyone freaked out. Though not enough to stay home apparently. But I felt calm. I thought, hey even if a gun wielding maniac charges in here, (unlikely as it is) I’ll rely on Jesus to protect me. I don’t think I ‘m going to die that way.

I will not call this bravery because it was not tested, but it was at least an assurance I never used to have. A couple years before, I would have been dying to go home and called my mom.

This may sound weird, but I often consider that someday my faith may put me in mortal danger. I expect it to, all I have to do is go to a country where they are killing Christians, or I could be in this country and meet a radical terrorist. Who knows? (I am not saying terrorists only target Christians by the way, but they especially hate them.) Am I going to let that stop me?

No.

I still struggle with fear sometimes, but it is very weak now. And I will not let it dictate my life. I am a firm believer that you cannot die tell God says so.

And in this more than anything else I rely on God. If you could understand what it was like to live in fear every day and not have God, it would make sense  to you why I can’t leave Him out of this.

But I did have Him actually, I realized afterward that God was there the whole time, I was just ignoring Him. I half knew I was.

But not to pontificate.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but it is when love for something more important than fear overcomes it. That’s my paraphrase of the saying.

I think that’s enough for this post. Until next time–Natasha.

Do Your Worst. (Part 3.)

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Continued from part 2…

So, I’ve covered a problem with our attitude towards the real and the imagined, and the problem with not showing mercy. There is one last piece of this I want to put into place, and this is where the title comes in.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Shirira Hall struggled with feeling guilty long after the whole thing was over. It’s not like anyone let her forget it either, even if she had tried.

It’s because of this that I really started to feel sorry for her. Real or not, it breaks my heart when people cannot forgive themselves. I have seen it enough in real life to know how destructive it is, and to feel it myself.

I actually have a difficult time forgiving myself if I feel I’ve really done something that was intentionally wrong.

The things is, I have been tempted to wallow in guilt. To let it make me miserable, because then I won’t want to do the bad thing again, and I know people who embrace that way of thinking.

And then there are those who shrug off guilt way too easily and ought to dwell on it a little longer.

But guilt has never set me or anyone else free of their fault. It actually weakens me, I have less resistance to sin when I feel guilty, because if you feel like crud, you act like crud. But if you feel like a million bucks, you act like a million bucks.

The worst of it is, when you live in constant guilt, you lose you ability to tell when someone is guilt tripping you unfairly, and you don’t know whether you’ve truly done wrong, or whether they have misconstrued it so that they think you have.

The way I see it, that is what happened to Shirira, she did do a lot of bad things, but she made unbelievably hard choices in order to do t e right things, and she was criticized for doing it, until she didn’t know herself. She, quite sadly, started to wonder  if she was destined to betray her friends.

As far fetched as her example might seem, is it really any different form us? How may of us have started to feel like we are doomed to fail, to bring unhappiness, to let people down? I know I have felt that way in the past.

But I am no longer laboring under that kind of guilt. I broke free. So it is possible.

I have often wished that there was a way to change the show so Hawk Girl found peace with herself, because it might have helped people.

But this is the best I can do at using her story for good. And it still works, because we know what should have been.

She should have been forgiven. She should have been shown kindness by more people. She should not have been constantly reminded of her mistakes.

And if you find yourself in a similar situation, rest assured, it is not right. You do not “deserve it.”

The truth is, we all deserve such treatment from God. But not from each other. None of us are sinless, or anywhere near good enough to have the right to judge each other to that extent. If God can show mercy, (He delights in it, according to the Bible,) then we sure as heck have no right to complain that it’s not fair. Like Jonah did,

I always feel sorry for Jonah when I read his last words, how could he have missed what God was doing so much as to wish to die? Yet it is possible to be so full of hate that you’d rather die than see your hated people live. You’d rather drag them down than be lifted up. It’s very sad.

I trust no one reading this has that problem, but if they do, God can fix it. I recommend reading what He tells Jonah, it is little quoted, but it tells something of how God views mercy.

Mercy triumphs over judgment, every time. Mercy has a miraculous effect on people, it has made hardened killers sob, it has made people on the brink of suicide find a new reason to live, it has broken the pride of the proud who judge people unfairly.

Mercy has made the fearful find the courage to be brave.

Mercy can take the red out of your ledger. (Avengers reference.)

Mercy is the first attribute of Love that we recognize as such.

And, it’s not actually that hard to get, if you just ask. But ask the right Person.

One more thing, those who know they need mercy have a lot easier time receiving it. They won’t make such a complicated mess out of believing. They respond the quickest.

And while there are other ways of finding the truth, the path of mercy may be the simplest.

But, like Shirira, if you get too deep in the mire, it can be difficult to believe there is any way out. And that’s the whole point of this post. There is a way out.

You can do your worst, and still be forgiven. And I want everyone to keep in mind that we all have done our worst, and most of us have been forgiven even by people, so we have no call not to extend that forgiveness. Though it is not easy; it has often been a long fight for me to be able to do it. But it’s really about making it a priority. The rest follows.

Okay, I think that wraps up this series. Thanks for reading, and until next time–Natasha.

 

…turn to color all around…
all is new….this is lving now!

Click on pictures for captioning.

Do Your Worst (Part 2.)

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Okay, continuing from part 1…

So, as I have already covered, there is an attitude toward both real and imaginary people that is very harsh, and it is very prevalent.

But I recognize that I may be the only one who thinks it is a problem. So I am now going to dive into this question: Is it deserved?

Specifically, do these both real and unreal people deserve to be spoken of, cursed, and held a grudge against, in this manner?

What makes this question important even for the made up characters is that many of them do things that real people have done, so we have something to compare them to.

I’m going to go back to Hawk Girl, a. k. a. Shirira, what exactly did she do?

Well, she lied. But that is hardly enough, we all have lied. What makes hers worse, so we think, is that she lied to her friends, multiple times. About who she was, why she was there, and what her own people planned to do.

To be fair, the last one she didn’t know herself and lied more than she thought.

We might jump on that and say, she should have found out what her own people were really planning. Ignorance is no excuse.

It may be no excuse, but all of us have been ignorant and I daresay we acted upon what we thought, instead of what we knew.

So far, I see nothing that overwhelmingly wrong in what she did.

But it turned more serious, she helped her own people defeat her friends, telling them what their weaknesses were, so they could be exploited. She did nothing to stop them from hunting them down. She sucker punched the guy who she’d claimed to be in love with. After asking him to trust her. Not to mention that she’d never told him she was already engaged.  Not that she could be absolutely certain that was going to be a problem since it had been five years with no word from her own people.

All this is pretty bad. On top of it all, she was betraying the whole planet of Earth, almost leading to its destruction. This was heavy stuff.

But as bad as it was, Hawk Girl was never the callous kind of betrayer. She felt guilty for everything.

And I never blamed her for wanting to believe in her own people, who wouldn’t?

It was a tough call, because if they didn’t destroy earth, their enemies would destroy them.

At one memorable moment in the film, Hawk Girl is angrily arguing with her old fiancé, Ro, and cries “So we just trade their lives for our own? That’s not right.” Or something like that.

In a word, Shirira is talking about Honor. Earth is full of life, and its people have no quarrel with the Gordanians, they are not in the war. They were duped. There is no excuse at all for, as she says, for committing this kind of holocaust. Even thought Thanagarians do face extinction by letting Earth survive, it was their fight, their risk, and their choice. We never find out how the war started or who was at fault, but it is certain that the technologically advanced Thanagarians could have had other options, had they not been such a barbaric society. They waited too long, but that was their own fault.

There is no country on earth that could substitute another into its war to be killed in its stead, thank goodness, and I think because of that it is difficult to realize how horrible the idea is. But Shirira did, the reason she was conflicted was because these were her people, how could she turn on them?

She does the same thing to them that she did to the Justice League, but she tells Green Lantern “I did what I thought was right then, which is what I’m doing now.”

I wish I could say that Shirira at least never regretted her choice, but she did. Not enough to unmake it, but she felt horribly guilty and to make matters worse, many people, even in the Justice League, kept ribbing her on it. Eventually she got to the point where she didn’t even want to hear about forgiveness because it was too painful. She got flack for not being able to be loyal to anyone.

I just shake my head, these people entirely missed the point.

Honestly, I think the people writing the series missed the point.

Shirira messed up, but she was listening to her conscience the entire time, and ultimately she did the right thing. She lost her people, you’d think a smidgen of sympathy would be possible. Just a little bit, but it never occurred to anyone to put themselves in her place. Except Superman, I liked him better for that.

And outside the DC universe, what about in real life? Does it ever occur to anyone that these are real people we’re talking about? Who have real feelings, who go through the same things we do, and maybe they made the wrong choice, or maybe they didn’t, but could we just put ourselves in their shoes for one second?

I don’t mean to rant.

Look, I have my beliefs about Mercy, and I know many people do not, but two things Jesus said about it sum up the reason it is important to me. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy,” and “Judge not lest you be judged.”

I want to be shown mercy for my many faults, and I do not want to be judged, so I need to be merciful and not judge other people. Christians are famously accused of being judgmental, but from what I’ve seen, non Christians are every bit as judgmental, if not more.

Who is leaving those hate comments or hate mail; who is blasting those political people; or the opposing side? Yes, Christians do that, but it would be delusional to say all or even most of the culprits are Christian.

And it is not my intent to point fingers, I just mean we all do this. Few people are born merciful. But we all need it, and we all need to learn it.

There is one more thing I want to talk about concerning this, so watch out for part three,

Until next time–Natasha