Mark chapter 1. Jesus just had the best night of ministry anyone in that town has ever seen. The whole city shows up at his door. People get healed. Demons leave. It’s working.
Then before sunrise, he’s gone. Simon and the others go looking for him and find him alone in a desolate place, praying. When they catch up to him, they say six words that sound a lot like FOMO (the fear of missing out):
“Everyone is looking for you.”
Translation: this is working, Jesus. People are lined up outside asking for you by name. Why are you out praying in the middle of nowhere?
If you’re building a Messianic movement, you stay. The crowd is real. The need is real. People are getting healed in front of your eyes. His own guys can see the momentum building, and every normal instinct says stay.
Jesus leaves anyway.
If he judged that town by what looked fruitful, he never leaves. He’s asking whether it’s what the Father gave him.
We think FOMO means wanting an invite. It goes deeper. It’s the anxious feeling you get scrolling Instagram at 11pm and seeing two people you know doing something without you.
If I am honest, I do the same thing with opportunity that the disciples did. Something is working, so I assume I am supposed to be part of it.
Someone asks, a door opens, people respond, and I start treating the opportunity itself like guidance from God.
Our grandparents missed almost everything that happened in their lifetime. The difference is they didn’t know it. You do: every time you pick up your phone off the table, which happens about forty times a day.
While Jesus walked the dirt roads between Capernaum and Nazareth, Rome kept happening. Egypt kept happening. Most of the known world kept happening without him. Even inside Israel he couldn't reach everyone. He got tired. He got hungry. He sat down for hour-long meals with people who weren't strategic. He spent years on twelve ordinary men instead of touring the country chasing bigger crowds.
Jesus could still only be in one place at a time. And he seemed completely at peace with that.
It would be reasonable to think that if we had a mission as important as his, we'd feel the pressure to scale it. He had the most important mission that ever existed, and he still let most of the world go on without him.
Jesus says it in John 5:19.
The Son can do nothing of his own accord, only what he sees the Father doing.
He wasn’t waking up asking what he could accomplish. He was waking up focused on and listening for what he’d been entrusted with.
It’s tempting to read his life and walk away with a system or pattern only. Invest in twelve. Say no more often. Leave right when ministry gets successful so the momentum doesn’t distract you.
Those aren’t bad lessons. They’re just not what drove him. You can copy the pattern down to the letter and still miss it because he wasn’t applying principles. He was following his Father.
You can’t reduce that kind of living to a principle. Always leave the crowd. Always choose depth. But he didn’t work off principles only. Sometimes obedience meant staying and preaching to thousands, and sometimes it meant walking out on a room everyone around him thought he’d be crazy to leave. You can’t turn that into a formula. You actually have to know the Father.
Jesus never tried to make more happen. He trusted the Father with what happened next, which sounds nice until you try it. It means walking away from a packed house and not spending the drive home wondering what you just cost yourself.
You see the same thing in John 17:4. He prays,
I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.
Sick people are still in Judea. Towns still never heard him teach. Whole nations will live and die without ever hearing his name from his own mouth. By any normal measure, the work isn’t close to finished.
He says he finished it anyway. Not because he did everything that could be done. Because he did what the Father gave him.
We (or at least I) tend to think more options mean more freedom. More group chats, more platforms, more training invitations, more side projects, more podcasts to catch up on during the drive. But every new opportunity takes time from something else. Eventually all those open doors start pulling you away from what God already gave you. Every yes you type just exposes a hundred more things you could’ve said yes to instead.
A packed room might be exactly where he wants you. It might also be exactly what he wants you to walk out of. You can’t tell just by looking at the opportunity. Jesus didn’t trust opportunity to tell him where the fruit was. He trusted his Father.
Your phone can show you more than you could ever possibly respond to.
Jesus wasn’t afraid of big crowds. He ministered to a whole city gathered at the door and preached to thousands at other times. He just wouldn’t let the size of the crowd make the decision for him.
Strategy and focus matter and help us get lenses to see God’s ways. But neither can tell you what God is actually showing you to do.
Jesus accepted the limits of being human. He couldn’t be in two towns at once. He couldn’t personally meet every need. And sometimes he chose even tighter limits, like leaving Capernaum while people were still looking for him.
We have limits too.
God never asked you to do everything you could possibly do.
FOMO asks what you’re missing while you sit at your kid’s soccer game instead of the new connection opportunity. Ambition asks what you could pull off with six more hours in the day. Comparison asks what the guy from that org is doing that you’re not.
Jesus lived by a different question: Father, what have you actually given me to do?
Obeying that answer means actually giving something up. You say no to a good opportunity, even the kind that would look great on paper. A friendship stays at the level of a Christmas card. Someone else takes the open door, because you’ve already got the one the Father gave you.
You genuinely lose things this way. A door closes and stays closed. You watch an opportunity go to someone else and never find out what would’ve come of it, because you believed the Father was asking you to do something else.
The line from Mark 1 never went away. Now your phone says it every morning. Notifications stack up overnight. Slack messages wait since 7am. People do things without you, and you find out about every single one before you’ve brushed your teeth.
You can spend your whole life answering that voice. Or you can do what Jesus did: get up before everyone else and find the desolate place, because that’s the only place you’re going to hear the one voice that can actually tell you what’s yours today.
You are going to miss out. On the trip your friends took without you, the promotion someone else got, the conversation happening in a group chat you’re not in. Jesus missed out on almost everything too, and he still stood at the end of his life and said he finished the work. Not all of it. His.
The goal was never to stop missing out. It’s to trust the Father enough to miss the right things.
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