Before Dawn: Mark 1:35-39

The house was silent, bodies sprawled in exhausted sleep, when Jesus rose. Outside, the darkness was absolute—that thick, heavy darkness before the first hint of gray touches the eastern sky. He moved through the sleeping village like a ghost, past the doorways where the healed now rested, past the empty street where the crowd had pressed so desperately hours before.

He found a solitary place. Mark does not say where—some rocky outcrop, perhaps, or a grove of olive trees beyond the village edge. Somewhere the silence was complete. And there, in the cold dark before dawn, he prayed.

The disciples woke to find him gone. Simon led the search party, stumbling through the gray morning light, and when they finally found him, the words came out almost like accusation: "Everyone is looking for you!"

The whole city wanted more. More healings. More miracles. More of whatever this was.

Jesus stood, brushing dust from his knees. "Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come."

Not to set up camp in one town. Not to become Capernaum's miracle-worker-in-residence. He had come to move, to preach, to carry the message to every forgotten village in Galilee. The crowds would have to follow or be left behind.

And so they traveled—village to village, synagogue to synagogue—preaching and driving out demons across the whole region. The kingdom of God was not staying in one place. It was on the move.