Dear son,
I have written this letter several times in my mind to you, and each time I have struggled with what I really want to say.
I do not want to tell you not to love a strong woman, because I know that ultimately, you will fall for one. Your mother comes from a line of women whose strength was written in tears and blood, but with time, I have come to understand that our strength was wrong and because of that, it is not the kind of strength I ever want you to love.
Our strength came because we were looking for God in our father’s eyes and failed to find him there. Everyone looks for God in their daddy’s eyes. Our strength was born when, instead of the image of God, we saw the devil for the first time and his image became seared into our tender minds.
We were looking for meaning, and because our fathers did not know God, they could not show us how he looked or spoke, or how he loved. And so, we searched for love in places other than our fathers. Our strength came on the heels of searching for God in the eyes of men who looked nothing like our fathers but acted like them in every way.
We did not know then that we were looking for God. And because all we had was the image of the devil, it was the only image we kept before our eyes. We constantly sought devils while our hearts yearned for angels with flaming wings. We knew that love did not look like our fathers, but we did not know what to look for. And because of this, we found broken men who were looking for God as well, and we all became a mass of brokenness, unable to become one with anyone, when we could not become one with ourselves.
Dear son, we were not strong because we wanted to be. We were strong because we had to be. Our kind of strength was the one that cloaked itself with towering walls and coals of hellfire because our fragile hearts needed to be protected from the kind of pain that comes when the first men in our lives fail to protect us.
Don’t look to the world for the definition of a strong woman. Our kind of strength has been labelled by the world with names meant to keep us down in dark places and hurtful spaces. I am writing this letter to you, ultimately, because I want you to know what kind of strength to look out for.
First, I want you to know that a strong woman is a soft woman. She will dream big dreams, tall dreams, wild dreams and will fearlessly pursue those dreams in the face of the most breathtaking odds. But she is also a woman who will cast down her crown of gold at the feet of a man who understands her true worth and who will dream her dreams alongside his.
Love a woman who knows that she is strong because she had to be, but who has also come to a place where she has found the God she was looking for in her father’s eyes and in the eyes of the men after him.
A woman who has found God and knows him as her father will love you fiercely and hard. She will understand that she is under the shadow of a being that made both you and her, and she will not name herself the names that the world will try to give her. You will want this kind of strength because when hell comes charging, she will fight with you from a place secure in the knowledge of who she is in God.
Do not listen to the world when they tell you that a strong woman needs to be broken by you to be loved by you. You want to love a whole woman and not bits and pieces of her that you have chipped away because of the insecurities the world will try to cloak you with. Remember that broken pieces not broken by the maker will never make a beautiful picture.
Dear son, to love this kind of strong woman, you must be a certain type of man. Never expect a strong woman to yield to your lordship when you have not shown her the face of the Lord. You will be like a man expecting milk from the Milky Way. This kind of strong woman seeks the image of God, his sound, his heart and his mind. She will not kneel for anything less.
There are days that I am worried about what the future holds, but I also know that I am raising a kingdom man. It is my sincere desire to show you the kind of strength that yields to the person of God. It is the only kind of strength that really wins in the end.
Love,
Mum.
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