You can make your point without offending.

You can cut a cake cleanly, or you can tear it apart. You can respond with dispassion even when your heart is hurt in some fashion. Was it necessary for your heart to be hurt in the first place? And if your soft heart had to be wounded, did there have to be a need for you to wound back as well? You are not meant to be heartless. You are meant to be heartful, not hurtful. Because something stabbed your heart, must you engage in a duel and stab back? Is this why I brought you to Earth? Is this how I raised you? When it comes to words and hearts, decide to heal rather than hurt. Be a balm. You can do this and still be true to yourself.

Beloveds, you can be clear, concise, and not wound a heart. Because you felt offended, your heart doesn’t have to be hamstrung. You don’t have to offend in return. You don’t have to get back at someone. You don’t have to have the last word.

It was not required that you take offense in the first place, beloved. That someone else was less than ideal does not require you to be less than ideal. It requires you to lean another way. Remember that you are a spiritual light on the horizon. You are to guide other hearts. It simply is not necessary to hurt even one heart on Earth. When you throw a dart back, now a second heart is hurt. And all who witnessed it – their hearts are hurt. There is too much flak. There need be no flak at all. Do not shoot hearts.

What is possibly worth making a beautiful soul like you take offense? What error committed truly has the power to shake your good sense so? If someone was rude and uncaring and neglectful of your heart, take that as a signal for you to be a lady or a gentleman. Remember courtliness.

If you want to lift the world, you have to rise above the world. You must not be like everyone else who is hot under the collar, quick to be incensed, perhaps slow to engender good will. If you must be quick on the trigger, be quick on the trigger of love.

It is one thing not to know better. It is another thing to know better. When you know better, then you must consult with yourself and not the riff-raff of the past or cheap novels. You are not a retaliator to be.

Yes, I understand that you were not even thinking an eye for an eye. You were not even thinking at all. Odds are, beloved, that your ego took offense. Odds are that, for some buried reason, you wanted to take offense. You pounced on offense. Further, odds are that you misunderstood. That would not be the first time, would it?

When Christ said to turn the other cheek, he was talking to you, beloved. He did not mean to turn you into some kind of Mr. Milquetoast. He meant you to take a look from another angle, to turn the cheek of your thoughts, as it were, to give the benefit of the doubt. And if there is no benefit of the doubt to give, then to give forgiveness. Is it not time for you to erase debts?

Because your offensiveness came second does not make you innocent. It makes you guilty of having forgotten yourself for a moment, having forgotten why you are on Earth, having forgotten the meaning of hearts, and having forgotten Me. And now you remember.