Dear Church Family,

Thank you all for the well wishes and prayers for Carey and Dena Dyer. We are so grateful for their ministry with us. Since they will still live in Granbury, we hope to see them on a regular basis! We celebrated 2 baptisms as well, so aren’t you thankful God is still at work. We also hosted the annual Paluxy Baptist Association Sunday evening and welcomed 3 church plants into our family of churches.

I read this devotion and thought it would bless you—

There are two verses in Mark’s Gospel that seem to make no sense. And they might be the most personal confession in the New Testament.

It’s night in Gethsemane. Judas has arrived with a crowd carrying swords and clubs. Jesus is seized.

Then Mark writes: “And they all left him and fled.” (Mark 14:50)

Every disciple. Gone.

And then, out of nowhere:

“And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.” (Mark 14:51–52)

That’s it. No name. No explanation. He’s never mentioned again. Matthew, Luke, and John all describe the arrest, and none of them include him.

Why would Mark put this in? At the most important moment in history, why stop to tell us about an unnamed young man losing his clothes in the dark?

There’s an old answer, and it’s a beautiful one: the young man was Mark himself.

Here’s why many have thought so:

Mark’s family lived in Jerusalem. His mother Mary owned a house where the early church gathered to pray (Acts 12:12). Some have even suggested it was the house of the Last Supper. A teenage boy, woken in the night, throwing on a linen cloth and following the crowd out to the garden, fits that picture.

And only someone who was there would bother to remember it. It adds nothing to the story of Jesus. It only makes sense as a memory. Ancient writers sometimes left a quiet signature in their work, and this may be Mark’s: I was there. And I ran too.

We can’t prove it. Some read the scene symbolically instead. The prophet Amos had said that in the day of judgment, “he who is stout of heart among the mighty shall flee away naked” (Amos 2:16). Either way, the point is the same: when Jesus was taken, nobody stood with Him. Not the twelve. Not even a boy in a linen sheet.

But here’s what makes it extraordinary.

If this was Mark, it wasn’t the last time he ran. Years later he abandoned Paul and Barnabas mid-mission and went home (Acts 13:13). Paul was so frustrated that he refused to take Mark on the next journey, and the two great missionaries split over it (Acts 15:37–39).

Mark was the runner. The one who quit.

And yet near the end of Paul’s life, in his final letter, he writes: “Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11). Peter calls him “Mark, my son” (1 Peter 5:13).

The boy who fled naked into the night became the man who wrote the first Gospel ever written.

And in the middle of it, he left his own failure in plain sight.

Not hidden. Not edited out. Written down for every reader for two thousand years.

Because the Gospel isn’t the story of people who stayed.

It’s the story of the One who stayed for the people who ran.

Press On!

Mark