Faithfulness Or Just Stubborn

It was a document and he would not put his name on it.

Not a large fraud. Nothing anybody would go to prison for. A set of figures presented in a way that was not false line by line and was not true taken together, and everybody in that meeting knew it, and four other people signed it that week.

He said he would rather not.

That is the phrase he used. He has gone over it a great many times since and he thinks now that I would rather not was probably worse than a flat refusal, because it left room to be read as squeamishness rather than as principle, and squeamishness is easier to route around.

Nobody punished him. That is the thing he would want understood. There was no reprisal and nobody said anything and the man who runs it was perfectly civil to him at the Christmas thing.

The role went to somebody else in the spring.

He would have got it. Everybody who knows that place knows he would have got it, and nobody has ever said so out loud, and it is four years now.

And the question he has not been able to put down in four years is not about the money, which he did not need, and it is not about the role, which would have been a great deal of extra work.

It is this. Was that faithfulness, or am I simply a stubborn man who has told himself a story about it?

Because he is stubborn. He knows he is. He was stubborn before he believed anything, and there is a version of that meeting in which nothing spiritual happened at all and a difficult man dug in about a spreadsheet.

They went out from that room glad, and it settled nothing

Let me name the four years properly before anything else, because they have not been about the role.

You have been trying to grade yourself, and the grade is impossible, and you have gone back for it about a thousand times because a thing that cannot be settled does not stop asking. Nothing written hands anybody that grade, and the Holy Spirit has never issued one.

You will not find out. That is the first true thing here. Motives do not come apart like that and never have, and a man who insists on separating his principle from his temperament is asking a question that has no clean answer in anybody.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as consolation: the account you were raised on records people paying for a stand and does not use the paying as a proof of anything. That is not my kind reading of four years, it is what stands written in the fifth chapter of Acts, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it was in that meeting with you.

Read it, and notice how little the text does with it.

The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.Acts 5:41

They had just been flogged. And they went out glad.

Now look at what the account does next, which is nothing. It does not say and this proves it. It does not pause to point out that men do not rejoice over a lie. It reports what happened and moves straight on to what they did the following day, which was carry on.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a verdict on your own motives: what you did in that meeting is not required to be pure in order to be counted, because the written word records the cost and declines to build an argument on it, and the Spirit of God is the one who was in a man who said I would rather not and meant more than the phrase carried.

And here is the piece that will take four years off you, because it is the same distinction this whole site turns on.

Cost never proved anything about a claim. It cannot. People pay for false things constantly, and stubborn men dig in about spreadsheets, and both of those are true.

What cost does is show what somebody was actually willing to lose. Not why. What.

You lost a role you would have had. That is a fact and it does not need a motive attached to be a fact, and it is the only part of this that was ever going to be knowable.