“Everybody, get in the car! We’re leaving for Mass in three minutes!”
The house buzzed with last-minute scurrying as my family donned coats and boots, one child hunted for black socks, and another child, ready to go, decided to spend the remaining three minutes lounging on the couch.
I looked at the lounging child and said, “I forgot to ask you: Please serve at Mass today.”
His mouth that opened in silent protest immediately turned my polite request into a firm command reminding him of the need for obedience and sacrifice.
He did indeed obey, and I thanked him for it later.
When I told my husband that my son’s initial reluctance caused me to come down on him harder, I sought my husband’s approval.
“Because he didn’t want to do what he should, I made him do it,” I said. “You agree with me, right?”
“Um, yes, dear,” my husband said with a laugh. Like my son, my husband knew better than to disagree with my stubborn bulldozer parenting.
A stubborn streak can be sometimes a virtue, sometimes a vice. Stubbornness to further a noble cause can be a virtue, but stubbornness for its own sake, rooted in pride and not tempered with gentleness, can be a vice.
Stubborn streaks
Think of how God Our Father must patiently endure our own stubborn streaks in our spiritual lives.
Have you ever been aware of God’s will but remained reluctant to do it? Have you ever stubbornly held onto something you know you should let go?
Lent is a good time to examine where stubborn streaks may exist in your interior life. If a stubborn streak is impeding you from growing closer to God, then it is a vice that must be rooted out.
Because He is Our Father, God reminds us — repeatedly if necessary because all children sometimes need gentle prodding — to ask for the grace to uproot vice and grow in virtue.
Just ask for grace
Our Father knows exactly what we need, even when we are too stubborn to see it or too stubborn to do what is necessary to be open to His overflowing grace. All we have to do is ask.
Jesus said: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).
“Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake?” He said.
“If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him! In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:9-12).
God never gives up
In these weeks of Lent and beyond, our Father undoubtedly never gives up reminding us to ask for the grace to identify and root out our vices so He can help us attain virtue instead.
With His children, our Father has an unfailing stubborn streak of His own.
It’s called faithfulness.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four children, is a teacher’s aide at St. John the Baptist Catholic School in Waunakee.