ohthesunnyside

“We have to talk,” she said sharply.“I didn’t tell anyone!” I protested. “Promise.“Oh, I know,” she replied. “I would be fired or in jail or both if you had. We both know that shouldn’t have happened and can never happen again. I’m sorry, I don’t know what got into me.”“I’m sorry too. But I like you so much!” I said with typical juvenile lameness.

That said, Viktor was bringing the power as well. He extended his arms, and his hands caught fire, with his flesh blackening and hardening, soon resembling cracked volcanic rock. “With these hands, I slaughtered our foolish master and the rest of those whelps. Now, when I close them around your throat, I wonder which will kill you first, the heat or the strangulation?”“I’ll sever those hands and lay them upon their graves, so they know they’ve been avenged!”

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.