命の森
Forest of Life Aokigahara is a forest at the base of Mt. Fuji, also called Jukai (Sea of Trees) and unfortunately, Suicide Forest. Basically a lot of people commit suicide there. The reason why this has particularly caught my attention is a personal one. God just fairly recently released me from depression, suicidal thoughts, and self-harming actions, which is something I have been struggling with for a long, long time. Imagine how many souls must be in Japan with no hope and no chance for change. They don't know the freedom of Jesus and have little if any access to it. They don't know there's one God that created everything and controls all nature, and yet His only concern is with each and every person. So in my prayers for this forest I felt as though God wanted to reach out His hand to these people and pick them back up. So that's what I drew. I'm not very good at drawing people, but I hope it serves its purpose nonetheless. The text on the bottom that's scribbled out reads: "遺書 今までの人生嫌な事しか無かったので来ました。 誰も捜さないでくれ・・・・" which means "Suicide Note: Nothing good has happened in my life up to now. Please no one look for me..." This was an actual sign on a board nailed to a tree that I saw in a short video where a geologist in his free time goes into the forest to try to talk people out of suicide. I re-appropriated it not only for grammatical correctness, but because there was a person out there somewhere that thought and wrote these words, and I wanted to counteract that spirit and thinking for all the people who go there to take their own lives. "キリスト様が僕のために死んでくださりましたので、罪に対して死に、今、キリスト様のために生きています。" means "Since Jesus died for my sake, so I will die to sin, and now I will live for His sake." I borrowed the concept from 1 Peter 2:24 and a couple other places, but the Japanese Bible didn't word it the way I wanted to express it. I asked for corrections of my own sentence on lang-8. I guess I'm just hoping that this will somehow shift something spiritually, bring attention to this problem, and will make my own prayers stronger.
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