So what's something that you wish you could do,
but you just can't?
Is it starting that business?
Is it traveling the world?
Or maybe it's just allowing yourself to say yes, or no.
Now, oftentimes we come to a crossroads
where we have to make a decision,
but for some reason,
we want to allow ourselves the chance to change.
Well, today's character that best represents this
is the sniper who can't shoot people,
is Chica Amatore.
Hey, what's going on guys?
My name is Nate.
You're listening to the Otaku Liberation,
a show where we help you break free from the chains
that are holding you back in your life
by connecting some biblical principles
with things from your favorite anime.
And without further ado, let's get into it.
And so for today's verse that I'm going over
with this episode is actually
Philippians chapter four, verse six.
And that says, don't worry about anything,
but in everything through prayer and petition
with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
And the key points I want to pull out from that
is the beginning says don't worry about anything.
And then towards the end it says,
present your request to God.
And so let me start with the don't worry about anything.
So I know, especially for me personally,
I used to have a bad habit of worrying
about things that are beyond my control,
which is literally everything else in the world
besides myself.
And the biggest thing was what other people thought about me
and what they may say, what they might think.
If I did this and that and third, growing up in school,
it was, if I wasn't always at the top of the class,
well, people say, they all been, you've lost your edge.
You're not as smart as you think you are type thing.
If I were to fail at something, especially sports,
because I tend to overthink things
that hinder my physical performance in sports.
And it's like, man, people just think I suck.
I'm letting the team down, things like that.
And even starting this podcast,
what are the people going to think about it?
Are they going to like it?
Are they going to hate it?
Are they going to hate me personally
because I don't, you know,
essentially preaching the gospel through anime,
it's like, oh, that's a taboo.
You can't do that.
Who knows?
I don't know.
I honestly don't know.
And again, so this verse kind of came to me.
It's like, just don't worry.
Just don't worry about it.
Just give it all to God, let him work it out.
And that's it.
I mean, that's literally it.
There's nothing more, nothing more than that.
And it's easier said than done.
Definitely that's something that we have to actively choose
to do each and every day in each and every moment.
And even now I still have things that I worry about
sometimes where I have to just take a step back,
take a deep breath and just say,
okay, God, I'm going to let you handle it.
I'm just going to let you handle it.
I'm not going to worry about it.
But I know it took a lot for me to get to that point
where I can just readily drop it and give it to God.
And for today's character, Chica,
is something that she's still struggling with,
but she's getting better with herself.
And what she's worried about is essentially
people blaming her, blaming her for her actions.
And it doesn't give you a little context to that.
So again, like I said before,
in World Trigger, the power system is called Trion, right?
Trion is something that all living creatures have,
and you have a pretty set amount
from the moment you're born, right?
And in the previous episode,
I covered Osamu who has below average amounts of Trion,
like abysmal levels.
Chica is the exact opposite of them.
I think they've stated she has the most out of everyone
in the series that we've seen thus far.
And I mean, her volume and density of it is massive.
And because of that, she grants unwanted attention
from the neighbors, which again,
for those who don't remember or who don't know,
the neighbors are essentially the neighboring planets
that are close to Earth's orbit in an alternate dimension.
And then they cross over
since they're closer neighbors at this point.
And the neighbors are essentially just the term to use
for the aliens themselves.
And because of Chica's high Trion levels,
the aliens are trying to come take her
and use her essentially as a,
at first we thought it was just a fuel source,
but we learned later on in the series
for something even bigger than that.
But the biggest thing is that Chica's always been targeted
by neighbors since she was like a small child.
And it was because of this that ultimately
one of her friends ends up getting taken instead of her.
Because of Chica's high Trion levels,
she has an ability that she can sense
when the neighbors are near.
So she always knew when one of them was around her.
So that made it hard for them to be able to capture her.
But for her friend, that wasn't the case.
And one time when she again,
I think she was in like in grade school,
something like that,
her friend ends up getting taken by the neighbors
because she was essentially, because she was close to Chica
and she can do anything about it.
And the crazy thing is before the kidnapping happened,
Chica would tell the teachers, the other kids,
to her parents about these creatures
that are trying to get her.
Because at this point, border was still secret.
The neighbors weren't common knowledge.
So no one knew about this alien threat.
No one knew about it.
So at the time they just thought,
what most adults think when they hear a small child
frantic about something that they think
is just make believe, right?
And because of that, no one paid her any mind
until her friend ended up disappearing.
And then at that moment, they all went back to what
Chica had been saying prior to this,
was that, you know, maybe they're all creatures out there.
Maybe she is right.
And then somehow, because they got this twisted idea
in their mind that she was to blame
for her friend's disappearance.
Because of what she did or didn't do,
that she is the reason that her friend disappeared.
Now, us as viewers, we kind of know it's kind of right,
but kind of not right.
Because the neighbors were just taking
a lot of people at that point.
And like her friend wasn't the only one to be taken.
But the neighbors were targeting Chica
because of her huge amount of try-ons.
So you could argue it kind of,
it wasn't her fault intentionally,
but it's just one of those things of circumstance.
But regardless of the fact, that stuck with her
up until where we are in the story now.
And that just fed into her inability to shoot people.
Right?
So in Border, the agents have different classes
they can be, more or less.
I think class is the best thing I can use to describe it.
And Chica decided to be a sniper.
And the crazy thing is because her sniper,
her shots aren't like normal shots.
They call her the cannon because due to her huge amount
of try-on when she pulls the trigger,
it's literally like a cannon being shot off.
And she just decimates the area.
And it's kind of a running thing throughout the series.
And because of that, people initially thought,
oh man, she's gonna be just a huge threat.
No matter what squad she joins,
she's just gonna be just a menace on the battlefield.
But they soon realized that she freezes up
and she has to take aim at people.
Now she can shoot buildings all day long.
She can shoot buildings and level the map.
But the minute she has to do essentially
what a sniper is there to do and to take out
the opposition, the enemy agents,
she can't pull the trigger.
She freezes up.
And more than once has that cost her team
some serious damage, whether it's her not scoring points
where she could have or by her not taking a shot
is inadvertently cause either Osama or Yuma
to lose in their respective battles
and causing their team to essentially lose out
on either the match entirely or just on points
they could have had.
And for me as a watcher or a seer,
that was so frustrating to see is like,
you're so good, but you're not living up to your potential.
You're not doing what essentially what you need to do.
And looking back on it now, it was selfish of me to say,
right, to this anime character.
But think about how oftentimes we just think about people
or we see somebody who we just, sorry.
How many think about how we see people
who we think they could do better with their lives,
but for some reason they just don't,
they don't, they're always stuck in this hamster
with this self sabotaging cycle.
And we don't know what it is because again,
we're not them, right?
We can't read minds, we can't,
we can sympathize with what they're going through,
but we can't understand it because we're not going through
what they're going through, right?
And because at the end of the day, we're all unique.
We're all unique people.
We can go through similar situations,
similar circumstances, so we have that level of empathy
for it, but we don't truly understand it
because we're not them.
Two people going through the same scenario
can handle it completely different ways,
just based on their own personality,
their own mental toughness, so to speak.
And I know, so for Chico on the outside looking in,
people just thought she was afraid,
she was afraid of shooting people
because she didn't want to take another person's life,
that she didn't want to be someone
who just kills people, right?
Even though in the anime, no one really dies,
since these are all mock battles,
but it's just that mindset, right?
And so when she joined Border,
it's kind of funny, she joined Border
in order to search for her brother, right?
I mean, it's kind of the main premise of the story.
So Chica joined to find her brother
because he went off into the neighborhood
and into the alternate dimension of his own free will,
but she's trying to find out why he left.
And that's the reason why Osamu wants to go too,
because Chica's brother actually taught Osamu
about Border and triggers and all that stuff.
So that's their connection.
They want to essentially find him
and find out why he left.
But even after joining Border and becoming a sniper
and joining the squad with Osamu and Yuma,
Chica's still unable to shoot people,
even when the need is there for her
to make a decision to take action.
And part of this is twofold,
but it's the same problem,
is that we tend to make excuses, right?
We tend to make excuses for ourselves
as to why we can't do this, that, and the third.
We tend to blame other people.
We tend to blame our circumstances.
We tend to blame our luck or a lot on life about,
oh man, I can't start this business
because my wife won't support me on it
or my husband won't support me on it.
I was like, okay, well,
have you really had a conversation with him?
Have you sat down and tried to have
like a full-on conversation,
or did you just say, hey, I'm thinking about doing this
with no explanation whatsoever, right?
It's like one of those different type of deals
where are you really giving it your all
or are you just saying you are
to make yourself look good or to convince yourself
that you're really doing everything that you can.
And I mean, that's a serious question.
Like I'm seriously asking,
because I mean, this is a question
I had to ask myself multiple times,
multiple, multiple times.
Am I really giving it my all
or am I really just saying that to convince myself
that the mediocre work I'm putting in is enough?
And sometimes the answer is yes,
I'm literally giving it my all,
there's nothing more I can do.
And honestly, sometimes it's no,
I'm just being lazy.
I don't feel like making myself uncomfortable
by trying new things.
I don't feel like trying to grow
and be better at this thing that I'm trying to do.
And let me say, the truth hurts,
no matter where you hear it from.
But it's so often since we as people
wanna be as comfortable as possible,
we don't wanna try to do different things,
try to go outside of a comfort zone.
We'll make excuses that sound good and grand
to justify us not taking action.
And honestly, I think the worst part of it is
others will make excuses for us as well.
And nine times out of 10 is those who are closest to you
because they care about your emotions
more than they care about you.
And it's not intentional, it's not intentional.
Most of us have been raised and taught to
be considerate of other people's feelings and their emotion
and be understanding and sympathetic and things like that.
But to a certain extent, that can be detrimental,
especially when you see someone self-sabotaging themselves
and their potential and what they could possibly do.
When you make excuses with them to justify
their self-sabotage behavior,
you're just enabling the badness.
You're just enabling them to essentially
throw the pity party to not really give it their all
and to, and honestly just to go through life
instead of just living it.
And in Sheikah's case, it was Osamu and Yuma,
they're always coming for her on the battlefield
and off it.
And again, it's coming from a place of good intentions.
They're her friends, they don't want her to do anything
that she doesn't wanna do,
that she doesn't feel comfortable with.
And again, it's from good intentions
and I definitely get that.
We don't want, you don't wanna push someone
before they're ready,
but sometimes you need to push them so they can be ready.
And because we, since we're alone with our own thoughts,
alone with our own thoughts all the time,
it's easy to convince ourselves that we can't do this,
we can't do that, we're not good enough,
we're not ready, we're not this, that and the third
where it takes an outside force,
someone else looking in to say, no, that's not the case.
You have the potential, you can do it.
Is it gonna be hard?
Yes, but that doesn't mean you can't do it.
That's the difference.
And like I say, like again,
since we're taught to be considerate of people's feelings,
sometimes we don't say what needs to be said
because I don't want them to be upset,
I don't want to make them more upset if they already are,
I don't want them to be mad at me,
I don't want them to feel any worse about themselves.
Whereas sometimes they just need to hit in the mouth
and it's like, hey, suck it up, this is what it is,
this is, you gotta make a decision, right?
Now, I'll admit that doesn't work for everybody at every time,
but you need to have someone in your circle
who is honest with you, completely, utterly honest
with your strengths, your flaws,
the good, the bad and the ugly,
who can give it to you straight no matter what.
You being a knucklehead,
they're gonna tell you you're being a knucklehead.
If you're being too soft on yourself,
they're gonna tell you being too soft on yourself,
being too hard on yourself,
you're not giving yourself the chance to change.
And basically I'm here to tell you you're being stupid
and to get it together.
And for Chica, for the longest time,
she didn't have that,
she didn't have someone there
to essentially knock that sense into her.
But there was two times where someone alluded to the fact
that Chica is just making excuses,
it's not some grand fear of shooting people
or that she can't bring herself to do it.
And the reason why is so,
to compensate for the fact that she can shoot people
with actual try-on bullets,
she came up with a method to shoot them
with lead bullets instead, which they're non-lethal,
they just slow the targets down long enough
for Yuma to get them.
And the person who made the observation
was one of the veteran snipers on in border.
He was like, if she was truly afraid to shoot people,
she would never shoot anyone with any type of bullet.
But the fact that she can shoot people down
with the lead ones remorselessly, without remorse,
is that shows that she can pull the trigger
and she's just choosing not to,
for whatever the reason is, she's just choosing not to.
And so that was the first time.
And the second time was when their squad
got their second ace, Hughes,
Hughes brought it to the fact that he was like,
no, no, no, I think she can do it.
And she's just refusing to shoot people.
It's not from the fact that she can't do it,
it's the fact that she won't.
And that kind of shocked everyone.
They were like, hey man, you just joined the team.
What do you know?
And Hughes is a war veteran.
I mean, he's a prisoner of war
and he's been on the battlefield.
He's seen enough action to know the difference
between someone who can't do something
and someone who won't.
And ironically enough, he was really the deciding factor
to help her find a resolve
in order to start actually taking real shots.
Because he brought up this point to her,
is like, right now these are just mock battles,
but when you go on the away mission,
when you go out into the neighborhood,
these are gonna be real enemies out there.
And your inability to shoot
is gonna end up costing your friends their lives.
And it's when that reality hit her and it shook her,
and she realized, I need to make a change,
not for myself, but for my team,
for my friends who've had my back since the beginning.
And that is the type of change that we all,
I know for me personally that I'm doing better at,
is that our inability to change,
our, well, I'm saying inability,
our reluctance to change,
our reluctance to give up the excuses
and to really just risk it all
and go for broke on something,
is gonna end up costing somebody
their lives somewhere out there, right?
And it may not be as someone as close to you
as your friend, as your family,
but it can be just a complete stranger, right?
I'm just trying to put it into perspective that,
all the different motivational coaches
and speakers out there,
all the ones who, I've seen some in the post
and I've seen some in the comments on their posts,
where it's like, you saved my life in my darkest hour
because I heard your one video, your one speech.
Sometimes it's even just a single quote,
just a single word resonates with somebody on a level
that you're not even aware of.
But if you're too afraid to just take that chance
to really put yourself out there,
to really go for broke,
and you're too worried about what other people
are gonna say and think,
then you may be forfeiting the life
of so many other people
that you would never know,
that you would never know.
And I mean, that's pretty much all it took for Chica.
She decided to, she can start shooting real bullets now
because she figured that helping her friends
outweigh the possible backlash from others.
She figured that, despite what everyone else might say,
because again, none of this is confirmed.
She's living in the what if scenario.
And boy, have I lived in the what if scenario
for too, too, too long now about,
what if they say this?
What if they say that?
What if they don't like this?
What if they don't like that?
It's like, and in the day, you just gotta go.
That's it, you just gotta go, you gotta move.
You have to decide that the reward
is greater than the regret.
And I was like, I don't think anyone wants to live
in regret, and I don't think anyone wants to just stay there
all the time with the what could have shit us.
And I know I feel better to have tried something
and I failed at it than to know what could have been
if I never tried it at all.
And I mean, honestly, that's it.
That's pretty much it, is that we can't,
don't hold yourself back, right?
Don't count yourself out before you've even started.
Allow yourself the chance to change.
Allow yourself to fail at something
so you can have the opportunity to be great
at something else.
Because if you never try, if you never take the chance,
if you keep making excuses for yourself,
if you keep allowing other people to make excuses for you,
then you're never gonna reach the potential
that you've always been meant to reach.
Because I do realize we all have different columns in life,
we all have different values, different things
that we bring to the world.
And it's up to us to discover it,
and it's up to us to hone it and to really master it
and just put it out there, right?
Because I truly believe that we all have gifts
that aren't just meant for us,
they're meant for other people out there,
they're meant for your family, your community,
your country, the world, whatever it is.
And it doesn't have to be, some of it might not even be now,
it might not even be while you're alive.
Your gift and potential may not be truly recognized
until long after you're dead and gone.
But if you never start now,
then that's never gonna happen.
There's just never gonna happen.
A lot of people are never gonna see the light of day.
And I just wanna encourage you guys to,
just take the leap of faith, just take the faith.
Don't worry about it anymore.
Just let it go, pray about it, give it to God,
let him do what he does best, which is everything.
And just really take that load off,
and then just move with the peace and assurance
knowing that he got you no matter what,
no matter what all the other flawed people on this earth
are gonna say about you.
The perfect one is, he's already say,
this is done, you're forgiven
for whatever you've done in the past.
And I know what I've given you
and what I've called you to do.
So I just need you to walk in that path.
And that's it, that's it.
Honestly, it's easier said than done,
but I promise you, if you overthink it,
you're gonna just make it worse,
like we always tend to do.
We're just gonna muck it up.
So don't overthink it.
Take a step back, take a deep breath,
and just go, that's it.
So all right, I wanna thank you guys
for tuning into today's episode.
I pray that you got what you needed out of it,
and hopefully you learned something new about yourself.
Feel free to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review.
I love reading guys' comments,
and it helps me improve each and every episode.
And always remember, you are the main character of your story,
and that story doesn't end until he says so.
All right, be blessed.
And I'll see you next time.