Saturday, December 14, 2019

"For the Holy Ghost shall teach you" - Better for You to Enter Life Maimed



Mt. Fuji (3,776 m) from around Tokyo

Better for You to Enter Life Maimed

Christ Jesus said that it was better to lose one's hand or leg, if his hand or leg committed a sin, and to be allowed to enter Heaven.

A Japanese cartoonist or manga artist named Shigeru Mizuki, when he had been young and before he had been called up for service of Imperial Japanese Army in WWII, watched his palms to see lines of the palms too short.  According to palmistry, he found that his life was short.  He knew that he could not live longer and probably he should die around the age of 20.

Later he was inducted into the Imperial Army and sent to an island around Papua New Guinea.  There he lost his left arm due to an air raid.  However, soldier Mizuki could survive the war and go back to Japan.

After years of hardship in Japan in the post-WWII era, he succeed as a manga artist or cartoonist.  Mizuki was good at painting a picture at his childhood.  But it took a decade or more for Mizuki to have a hit in the world of comics.  He was not young, compared with other successful manga artists who became famous in Japan after WWII.  Besides, he had just one arm.  However, despite various handicaps, his efforts finally paid off.  He also received a decoration from the Japanese Government for his contribution to Japanese culture in 1991.  He was also awarded with some foreign prizes.

Finally he died in Tokyo in 2015 at the age of 93.  According to palmistry, he could not have lived so long, but as he lost one arm in a battle against Americans and Australians in New Britain Island in 1944, the ominous line of the palm must become void.

So, whenever reading Mizuki's comics depicting soldiers' life in New Britain Island and activities of Japanese specters, I recall the said word of Christ Jesus: "If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.  It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out (Mark 9:42). (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+9&version=NIV)

If the lines of our palms predict that we cannot live long, we may have still a chance to live longer and succeed like Shigeru Mizuki who succeeded in the world of Japanese manga/comics and animation like famous Osamu Tezuka who died at his age of 60 in 1989.
 

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Luk 12:11 And when they bring you unto the synagogues, and unto magistrates, and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say:
Luk 12:12 For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.
Luk 12:13 And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me.