junpei hyūga

“So what should I do?”“First, you should drink your tea.”Sophia looked at the cup set before her. She hadn’t even touched it yet. She picked it up and took that first sip. “It’s good.”

“All I ever wanted was to change the world, to make it a better place where the weak wouldn’t be stepped on and enslaved, where freedom was a right instead of a privilege. I pushed myself, I struggled, I suffered, all for that goal, and survival is the best I could accomplish? If I have to focus only on survival, to be grateful just for staying alive, then how am I supposed to change anything? How am I any different from those who do nothing to fix this broken, corrupt reality?”

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.