Still Stubborn as the Day Is Long

Her mother said it when she was six and it has never left the family vocabulary.

It was said at a table, about a shoe, and there is no version of the story in which she was in the right. She refused for about forty minutes over something that did not matter, and her mother said stubborn as the day is long, and her aunt laughed, and that was that.

She is thirty eight.

The word has followed her through school reports and a marriage and two jobs, and it is not always affectionate and it is not always wrong. She knows what it costs her. She could give you a list.

Here is what nobody knows.

For about six years she has been treating the removal of it as the sign.

Not consciously at first. But somewhere in her twenties she began to think that when God really got hold of her, the stubbornness would go, and that its going would be how she and everybody else would know something had happened.

She has been filled. She has no doubts about that and would defend it. And she is exactly as stubborn as she was at six, and she was in a disagreement about a schedule in March that she is still, privately, certain she was right about.

The sentence, unsaid: the one thing I told God I would accept as proof is the one thing that has not moved.

You may know that word. The one they have used about you since childhood, and what you have decided its survival means.

What the room actually noticed

There is a scene in Acts where a room of powerful people watches two ordinary men and comes to a conclusion, and what they conclude is not what anybody would predict.

Peter and John are in front of the council. They are not lawyers and they are not scholars and the text says so plainly, in a phrase that means roughly unschooled and ordinary.

And here is what the room notices.

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.Acts 4:13

Read what does not happen. Nobody notices that they have become educated. Nobody notices that anything has been removed. The unlearned and ignorant part is stated in the same sentence as the marvelling, unchanged and unhidden.

What the room takes knowledge of is that they had been with Jesus.

That is a strange thing for a hostile council to conclude and it is worth asking how they got there. These are people whose whole training is in telling one kind of man from another, and what they land on is not a credential and not an argument. It is a resemblance. Something about the two of them in that room reminded a group of professionals of a man they had recently had killed.

You are recognized by company rather than by subtraction, and Acts 4:13 has a room perceive the unlearnedness and the having been with Jesus in the same breath, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a hearing in a council chamber and lands it on a woman who has been called stubborn since she was six.

The traits are still in the sentence

Consider how remarkable that verse is on its own terms.

Luke could have written that they were transformed. He could have said the council found them unexpectedly learned, which would have been a better story by most standards and would have made a cleaner point.

Instead he keeps both facts in one line. They were ordinary and unschooled, and they were unmistakably marked by somebody, and the second thing was visible through the first rather than instead of it.

You have been waiting for a subtraction Scripture never uses as the mark, because the written word puts the unchanged traits and the recognition in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a detail in Acts into six years reread.

And notice the word boldness at the front of the verse. That is what got the room's attention first. Two ordinary men saying something in front of people who could ruin them, which is not far from a description of a woman who says the thing at a table when everybody else has decided to go round it.

You have something the room notices before it notices anything else, and Acts 4 leads with the boldness rather than with any change in the men, and the same Spirit who filled them is the one who fills.

Stubborn is not one thing

Now the honest part, because she has a list of what it costs her and the list is real.

Stubbornness is a word people use for at least two different things. One of them is a refusal to be moved off something true, which is the whole reason those two men were in front of that council. The other is a refusal to be moved at all, which is a different thing and it is the one that costs her.

The verse does not settle which she has and neither does this article. What it does settle is that the removal of a temperament is not the mark, and that a woman waiting for one has been waiting for the wrong thing for six years while carrying the actual mark in front of a great many rooms.

You have been carrying the mark while waiting for the wrong one, because Acts 4:13 makes the having been with Jesus the thing perceived and leaves everything else in place, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that a relief rather than a settlement of who was right in March.