“How is your heart posture, mom?” Is a question I didn’t want my son to ask me - as a matter of fact, it made me angry that he would even ask me that question and a bottle of mosquito spray may have been tossed across the screened in porch at that moment. You see, I had every right to be angry, the facts were all lining up in my mind. I had been wronged, a relationship had been strained, due to a leader that had spoken and reacted in a way that lined up with the opposite of what I thought was appropriate. The audacity that my son had to ask “how my heart posture” was when I was the one that had been offended and hurt. If I am being honest, I didn’t do the spiritual thing and make everything right with the people on the porch, my family, that I lashed out at because they weren’t seeing the hurt that I was walking through and wanted me to let go of my anger and have a heart that was teachable.

In the middle of the night, I woke up after a dream that rocked my world a little bit. I dreamt that our Adipsy office was in a less than desired neighborhood, in an old home on a corner lot that had been restored. This neighborhood seemed to have the worst of the worst living in it. The problem was the supply store where we purchased everything from was one block away. There was a block of homes that if you were a female, you literally could not walk past, you would have to be in full athletic wear to run past in hopes that the men would not come out and chase you. I left the house and crossed the street to walk on the opposite side of the road from these homes, very preoccupied with a phone conversation, I was walking instead of running. I looked up from my phone conversation, and a line of women about 100 feet behind each other were running - it was then that I saw my daughter as the last person in that line. She had made it and as I yelled across the street to her, “I guess the men are not home today.” I began to hear a rough voice and a porch door slam, they were home and the chase was now on. I thought that he would begin chasing me because I was closer but he took off after the last person that had ran past the house, which happened to be my daughter. Chelsie entered the office and he stormed in behind her - I was screaming and crying as my not so fast self tried to run to her rescue. As I entered the office my husband arrived, I was so delirious that he held on to me instead of letting me run up the stairs to find our daughter. He was trying to calm me down enough to figure out what was going on and I was trying to run in full blown attack mode. After getting him caught up with what was going, on I demanded that he go get a weapon so that we could be prepared to attack the predator. When we opened the door to where we knew our daughter would be our posture was ready for attack, to find her sitting on the floor with her head resting against a wall, very peaceful. Across from her was not a male but a female lying in fetal position weeping. We grabbed our daughter to make sure that she was okay and find out what had happened. She had said that as the “male” started to attack her she screamed, “No, don’t you know what no means!” At that point the male backed up and began to morph into this teenage girl. Chelsie looked at this creature as this was happening and said, “Darling, what is going on?” At that point the girl began to weep and tell her of situations that had happened to her that had caused her to take on something that she was not because of the wrong that had been done to her. The teenager laid her head in my lap and said, “It was the firmness and the kindness that your daughter showed me today that caused me to realize what I had become.”

When I woke up there was an unexplainable peace in my room. I could finally see it now, my son was not asking me not to be upset over wrong doing, but to have a heart that was postured out of love instead of attack mode.

My friend, there are always going to be situations that cause us to be angry and upset. For some of us it may be an unexpected sickness, a loss of a family member, that crazy person on your job or maybe even someone in your own household. If we continue to bottle up the anger and resentment we are only hurting ourselves and missing out on this beautiful life that God has given us. Bad things are going to happen, people are going to be people but the real question is - how are we going to handle it. I am asking God for more love, to be able to see people through his eyes and not my own. My prayer for you today is that we have a heart posture that is full of love, radiating kindness wherever we go.