'The Verdict Isn’t In'

Thomas Watson Sr. built IBM into one of the most dominant companies in the world. He was not known for softness. In the early years of the company, a salesman cost Watson a government bid approaching a million dollars — a deal IBM desperately needed. The rep walked into Watson’s office that day and set an envelope on the desk. Watson knew what it was before he touched it. He asked the man to sit down and walk him through what happened. The salesman did — every step, every mistake, every place where he had gone wrong. When he finished he said, “Thank you for letting me explain. I know what this deal meant to us.” He stood to leave. Watson met him at the door, looked him in the eye, handed the envelope back, and said: “Why would I accept this when I have just invested one million dollars in your education?” The salesman kept his job. Watson kept his investment. Most leaders in that situation would have accepted the resignation and moved on. The apostle Paul would have too. He understood the logic. He couldn’t see what God saw.

Two years before the events of Acts 15, a young man named John Mark had been given the kind of opportunity most people only get once. He was on the first missionary journey — traveling with Paul and Barnabas into territory the gospel had never reached. He had grown up inside the movement, in his mother Mary’s house in Jerusalem where the early church gathered, where Peter had fled after an angel walked him out of prison (Acts 12:12). He had seen things most people only heard about secondhand. And then, at a port town called Perga, the moment the journey moved from familiar ground into genuinely hostile Gentile territory, he left. Acts 13:13 records it in half a sentence: no explanation, no emergency, no dispute. He went home. When Barnabas proposed bringing Mark on the second journey, Paul said no. “Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia” (Acts 15:38). His reasoning was sound. The mission was real. You don’t risk the work on someone who has already shown you what they do when the pressure arrives.

That is a rational verdict. It is also, in this case, not the last word. God rarely lets our most reasonable assessments of people be the final one. Paul would later write from a Roman prison asking Timothy to bring Mark because he was “useful” for ministry (2 Timothy 4:11). The Greek word is euchrēstos — genuinely fit for the work. Not generous. Precise. Something had changed in the years between Perga and that prison cell. The man whose dismissal verdict Watson refused to write became the man IBM needed. The verdict Paul wrote at Perga was not the last thing God wrote about Mark.

The verdict isn’t in until God says it is.

Blessings,

Jonathan