Elias thought about the jw.org bookmark in his hand. The website’s articles were always so clean, so certain. Why Does God Allow Suffering? How to Be Truly Happy. He had memorized those answers once.
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.
He looked back at the computer screen. The cursor blinked patiently.
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.
Tonight, he decided to answer.
He did not send it. He deleted it.
He remembered the last time clearly. It was a Tuesday night for the midweek meeting. He had sat in the second row from the back, his leather-bound Bible open to the book of Jonah. Brother Vance, an elder with a kind, tired face, had read the paragraph aloud. Something about “fleeing from one’s assignment.”
He typed slowly: “Dear Brothers, thank you for your concern. I am doing okay. I am just taking some time to think.”