Then Everyone Deserted Him

It was a Thursday in February and the call came at twenty past eleven at night.

His brother-in-law. Not a man who rings. Not a man who has ever rung him at that hour in twenty-six years, and the voice was wrong in the first three words, and he knew before he had the rest of it what kind of call it was.

He said he would come.

He said it, out loud, into a phone, standing in his own kitchen in his socks with the light off.

And he did not go.

He is not going to explain it here because there is no explanation that survives being said. It was not the weather. It was not the hour, though it was late, and it was not the drive, though it is ninety minutes. Something in him did not get in the truck, and he stood in that kitchen for about forty minutes, and then he went to bed and lay there with his eyes open.

It got sorted. Somebody else went. It was handled.

That was eleven years ago.

Nobody has ever mentioned it. Not his sister, not his brother-in-law, not his wife who watched the whole of it happen from the doorway. The family has, without any conversation about it, agreed together to hold a silence over one Thursday in February, and the silence has held for eleven years and it is holding right now.

He has been at every hospital since. He has driven further and later and in worse weather more times than anybody has counted, and he does it fast and without being asked, and he knows exactly why he does it, and so, he suspects, does his wife.

Four words, and they left them in

Let me put the eleven years where they belong before anything else, because one Thursday has been paid for with a decade of driving.

The driving is real. Every one of those hospitals counted and the people you got to were not receiving a payment, they were receiving a man who came. Nothing in this article is going to reduce eleven years of that to a symptom.

But a man cannot drive far enough to un-stand in a kitchen, and you have been trying for a decade.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: the account you were raised on says the same thing about every man who was there, in four words, and it did not soften it. That is not my kind reading of a long February, it is what stands written in the fourteenth chapter of Mark, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it has been in the truck with you on every one of those drives.

Read it. It is one of the shortest sentences in the whole book.

Then everyone deserted Him and fled.Mark 14:50

Everyone. Not most. Not some. Every one of them, at the moment it mattered, ran.

Now think about who wrote that and who it was about.

Those men were the leadership of that movement afterwards. They were the ones people looked to, and the account of the worst night of their lives is written down with no qualifier and no context and no explanation that survives being said.

They did not write that they had been overwhelmed. They did not write that it had been dark, or that there were soldiers, or that anybody had counseled them to withdraw and regroup.

Then everyone deserted Him and fled. Four words in most translations, and they left them in.

So this is yours right now rather than pending anybody's forgiveness: what you carry has a record that does not manage its own reputation, because the written word says every single one of them ran and offers nothing to soften it, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the unqualified version is the one we have.

And the honest boundary, because this house does not overclaim. That kind of detail is an argument about invention and it is one consideration among a number. It does not establish everything and it is not a proof, and anybody who hands it to you as one is handing you more than they have got.

What it does, on a Thursday in February eleven years later, is put a man in company.