Okay, so the butterfly hair piece is official merch. Everything else was thrown together from my closet, true Closet Play style. More young Shinobu behind the cut!
My limbs are too long, I thought, until I realize, “no, I’m accomplishing Shinobu’s dream.”
But can I pull off dream Breath action shots? Noooooope.
I think a difficult thing for people to accept is that forgiveness and redemption are wholly independent of each other.
You don’t need to forgive anyone for what they’ve done, and, likewise, no one needs your forgiveness in order to redeem themselves. Redemption comes from their own actions and convictions.
Other people can forgive them. New people can decide to love and befriend them. Your personal desire for their eternal punishment has no bearing on how their life unfolds.
Your feelings are understandable, they’re valid. So are their efforts and desires to better themselves and have a normal, happy life. And they don’t need your forgiveness for that.
This is what I’m doing tonight: #Redemption is the story of a cop who comes to Ireland to discover two unexpected teen grandchildren and her daughter’s ever more mysterious death… starring Paula Malcolmson of #Deadwood and #thehungergames - my clever friend @siobhanniconghaile wrote episodes and I am wicked proud of her! Tonight at 9pm on Virgin Media. https://www.instagram.com/p/CdEXBGyLuxn/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
A few days ago, I was talking to a girl who used to be in the business of prostitution. She told me something that was really touching. She mentioned how she constantly felt alone, used and helpless while being a prostitute, and how she felt loved in a surreal way when myself and some of our team of girls came across her and spoke to her, helping change her life for the better.
“I didn’t want to trust you guys because it felt too good to be true. But when I saw you and some of the other ladies come over and talk to me day after day, sharing all about Jesus and love with me I felt wanted and loved for the first time. It was the first time someone genuinely had pursued me.”
She is following her dream now - studying to be a chef and we constantly keep in touch.
When she told me this, it just reminded me so strongly that I wouldn’t be here helping others if God hadn’t pursued me first and continues to do so. There was a time in my life where I was just shattered and broken. I felt useless and nothingness constantly, and I felt like I had no place in society. When I was feeling the most down, God pursued me in ways I could never have imagined. In His pursuit of me, He captured my heart and I captured His and I fell madly in love. I finally woke up to the amazing purpose and plans that He had for, me and all I wanted to do was go after them and live it through.
His pursuit of me inspired me to stay in the Church and help others. This same pursuit just fuelled me and strengthened me to never give up no matter how hard it gets. His pursuit of me is passionate and true. This alone shapes me to be the Christian and follower of Christ I am today.
Christ pursues all of us, and it is the kind of love story that you truly want to find yourself in.
The Holy Spirit renews us in baptism through His godhead, which He shares with the Father and the Son. Finding us in a state of deformity, the Spirit restores our original beauty and fills us with His grace, leaving no room for anything unworthy of our love. The Spirit frees us from sin and death, and changes us from the earthly men we were, men of dust and ashes, into spiritual men, sharers in the Divine Glory, sons and heirs of God the Father– who bear a likeness to the Son and are His co-heirs and brothers, destined to reign with Him and to share His glory. In place of earth, the Spirit reopens heaven to us and gladly admits us into paradise, giving us even now greater honour than the angels, and by the holy waters of baptism extinguishing the unquenchable fires of hell.
We men are conceived twice: to the human body we owe our first conception, to the divine Spirit, our second. John says: “To all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave power to become children of God. These were born not by human generation, not by the desire of the flesh, not by the will of man, but of God.” All who believed in Christ, he says, received power to become children of God– that is, of the Holy Spirit, and to gain kinship with God. To show that their parent was God the Holy Spirit, he adds these words of Christ: “I give you this solemn warning, that without being born of water and the Spirit, no one can enter the kingdom of God.” [But through that same Spirit, He has given us both the power and means to accomplish this.]
Visibly, through the ministry of priests, the [water of the baptismal] font gives symbolic birth to our visible bodies. Invisibly, through the ministry of angels, the Spirit of God, whom even the mind’s eye cannot see, baptizes into Himself both our souls and bodies, giving them a new birth. Speaking quite literally, and also in harmony with the words of water and the Spirit, John the Baptist says of Christ: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Since we are only vessels of clay, we must first be cleansed in water and then hardened by spiritual fire – for God is a consuming fire. We need the Holy Spirit to perfect and renew us, for spiritual fire can cleanse us, and spiritual water can recast us as in a furnace, and make us into new men.
A Christmas Eve Prayer Lord, please heal my loved one Walking now with Thee On a narrow, thorny path Dark and shadowy…
A Christmas Eve Prayer
Lord, please heal my loved oneWalking now with TheeOn a narrow, thorny pathDark and shadowy…
Lord, please heal my loved oneHold, I pray her hand,Fill her mind with peaceGive her strength to standIn faith upon Thy promisesRenew her hope in Thee,May she feel Thy Presence,Around her like a seal.
Sing to her, Lord, in her heartLike angels long agoSang to the shepherds in the…
On the cross Christ bore the sins Of all humanity Not all the pain and sin and shame For all eternity Not even all the hosts of hell Nor death claimed victory…
Over Christ, God’s only Son Who shed His spotless blood To redeem our sinful souls And make us each His child…
Born anew in righteousness, Not ours but Christ’s alone, A righteousness we could not earn But His…
hi, sweetie! thanks for getting back to me, and thanks for taking a look at my blog :) i really appreciate it! i’m just going to address your first point, because, y’know, i can tell that trying to talk to you about the rest of the points isn’t going to go anywhere! thanks for the block, by the way :))
so. hmm. i really want to talk about the part where you said “Shipping Zuko or Azula with anyone is a bad idea. They were children who were extremely abused, which is one good reason for them not to be shipped with people.”. i am only going to be talking about this statement, purely bc i can’t rest until i address this. my response is: what??? hi. i’m an abuse survivor. i was abused by my stepfather from the ages of seven until fifteen. it left me extremely mentally scarred. i have depression, anxiety and ptsd as a direct result of this abuse, and it fucked me up. i want to be really explicit that this has been a major part of my life that i’m recovering from to really enunciate the fact that i take. so much offence to this statement.
normally on this blog, we don’t like to take offence to a whole lot of stuff. we simply don’t have the energy. but this. “abused characters cannot be shipped with other characters”. this legitimately offends me. and i would say, justifiably so. i’m not sure if you meant for it to be taken this way, but to me it sounded like this infers that abused people cannot find love. that abused people are too “damaged” to have access to fulfilling relationships that teach them that love can be healthy and that love is possible. and that’s not an okay stance to take. for a very long time, i didn’t believe in love. i thought that every relationship i would ever be in would be like my mother and stepfather’s. it took me a long time to believe in love again. being abused does not mean that i am undeserving of love, it’s not unhealthy for me to fall in love, and being in a healthy, post-abuse relationship with someone who actually respects me should not be stigmatised.
there’s a reason that gaang fics centered around zuko’s abuse and the gaang finding out about zuko’s scar are so popular. there’s a reason that zutara and zukka fics where zuko is exploring healthy love after being traumatised are so popular. it’s because these fics symbolise hope. hope that love is real, and that healthy relationships are possible, and they’re just fucking nice and cathartic to read. zuko is allowed to be shipped with other characters, because his abuse does not and should not prevent that. azula is a character worthy of redemption, and she deserves love too. she’s fourteen. she still has time to learn and grow and unlearn behaviours that ozai manipulated into her.
because, yes, i’m turning this into an azula-deserves-redemption post, being the “favourite” child in an abusive situation feels like life or death. you don’t want to be mistreated, and you don’t want to be hurt. this becomes a very real competition between siblings. my little sister and i ended up hating each other by the end of our abuse, because we were in such fierce competition of being the “favourite” child. this is why azula is the way she is. and this can be unlearned. she can be deserving of love, eventually. i don’t want this response to get super long, so i’m going to leave it here. i don’t know if you intended that one-off statement to be read that way, but jesus christ, please, please never say that again. it’s such a hurtful belief to hold. abuse survivors should not be prevented from loving relationships purely because of their trauma.
At every Mass, day after day, we stand at the foot of the Cross, for we gather around the Altar which is Calvary and the Mass is nothing less than the Sacrifice of the Cross made present once more for us, here and now, Sacramentally, in an un-bloody manner. With the devotion of Our Lady, the piety of St Mary Magdalene, or the friendship of St John, in every Mass, we gather at the foot of the Cross. But at Calvary there were also those who were merely curious, those who were bored and disinterested, the confused and uncertain, as well as the rich, the poor, the powerful and the dispossessed. In other words, all of humanity, in our complexity, was gathered at the foot of the Cross. And it is the same today also at every Mass.
And all who are gathered here are loved from all eternity by God, and all who come – and even those who don’t – have been foreseen by the Lord Jesus when he freely offered himself up on the Cross for them, for us. Christ on the Cross is a living Sacrifice of love, offered up for us sinners, in order to reconcile to the Father all of humanity who has been estranged from God because of sin.
Christ our God assumed the condition of a slave, sharing in our human weaknesses even to the point of death. And then he even freely chose to die, not just any death, but in humiliation and agony, mocked and tortured upon the Cross; the innocent Victim of the world’s violence and inhumanity. In these past weeks, in Ukraine, the media has reminded us once more of the tragic horror of Man’s inhumanity to man.
But such anguish and trauma, in big and small ways, continue to happen in other places of the world, and even in our own borough, and perhaps even in our own homes. These prosaic inhumanities, though, are often unnoticed or forgotten by the media, and so they can also be overlooked by us. However God sees, and God remembers, and indeed, in Christ Jesus, God suffers alongside the voiceless. And then, as to the good thief, he promises them who call out to him a share in his glory, a place in his paradise.
Each of us, again, who come to the Mass today, and time and again, stand on Calvary with Christ. Some of us are crucified with Christ, sharing in his sufferings, perhaps through the anguish and grief that confronts us daily, or in the sorrows that we endure, even to the point of illness and death. To each of them, Christ promises a place in paradise. As St Paul says: “If we have died with him, we shall also live with him; if we endure, we shall also reign with him” (2 Tim 2:11f)
So, when we hear again the drama of Christ’s Passion and Death; when we enact again in a small way, the triumphant entry into Jerusalem with the waving of palms, and then we recall the fickleness of the crowd who days later turn against him and cruelly call for his bloody execution, let us remember this: Christ suffered and died for us, alongside us. But this is no mere act of compassion. Rather, as St Paul says, from this depth God raised Christ up and exalted him in the heavens. Thus God overcomes death and destroys its final hold over Mankind. This is the reason Christ endured the Cross and the Burial so that we, even though we shall also die and be buried one day, shall also have the promise and hope of rising with Christ. All this – Calvary, the Mass, the gift of the Sacraments – Christ has done and is still doing for you and for me because he loves us; he does all this so that we can reign with him eternally, so that we can enjoy friendship with him in paradise. So, day after day, Christ offers himself to the Father for us, and he pours out his grace upon us, to draw us closer to himself in love.
So, let us cry out with hope, “Hosanna!” which means, Lord, save me! And so let us now turn towards God and go up to the holy Altar of God, to Calvary, with thanksgiving and gratitude. So, let us sing with joy, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
In the middle of the world, in the centre Of the polluted heart of man, a midden; A stake stemmed in the rubbish
From lipless jaws, Adam’s skull Gasped up through the garbage: ‘I lie in the discarded dross of history, Ground down again to the red dust, The obliterated image. Create me.’
From lips cracked with thirst, the voice That sounded once over the billows of chaos When the royal banners advanced, replied through the smother of dark: ‘All is accomplished, all is made new, and look- All things, once more, are good.’ Then, with a loud cry, exhaled His spirit.
