But as he drove home that night, he realized he had been pretending. He was not fleeing an assignment. He was drowning in the silence of his own life. His mother had died six months earlier. She had been the one who studied with him, who took him to the assemblies, who cried when he got baptized at sixteen in a hotel swimming pool converted into a makeshift baptistery.
But the answers felt different now, because the questions had changed. It was no longer “Why is there suffering?” It was “What do I do with my own?” And no brochure—no matter how well-designed—had a page for that.
“That’s good,” Elias had said. “That’s really good.” jw-org
He tucked the bookmark into his pocket. He wasn’t sure if he would ever walk through those gray doors again. But he knew he wasn’t done searching. And perhaps, he thought, that was the most honest prayer he had offered in fourteen months.
After the meeting, Elias had stood in the foyer, drinking lukewarm punch from a tiny paper cup. He watched the families drift toward their cars. A toddler cried. Two teenagers whispered about a video game. A sister named Helen told him her husband’s chemotherapy was showing results. But as he drove home that night, he
Elias held the cardboard rectangle for a long time. He remembered his mother’s hands—dry, cracked knuckles from decades of cleaning other people’s houses. She had never been a public speaker or a pioneer with hundreds of hours. She was just a woman who believed that a resurrection would come, and that she would see her own mother again.
He typed slowly: “Dear Brothers, thank you for your concern. I am doing okay. I am just taking some time to think.” His mother had died six months earlier
Then he closed the laptop. He walked to the window. Down on the street, a woman was locking her bicycle. A man was arguing on his phone. A child pointed at a squirrel.