Tonight, he decided to answer.
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.
Elias’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. On the screen, a single sentence glowed: “We have missed you at the Kingdom Hall.”
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. jw-org
He looked back at the computer screen. The cursor blinked patiently.
“Hey Mark. I’m not coming back yet. But I wanted to say I don’t think God hates me. I just don’t know what I believe anymore. If you want to get coffee sometime—not to ‘encourage’ me, just to talk—let me know.”
Outside, the city lights flickered on, one by one, like reluctant candles. Tonight, he decided to answer
It was the third email this month. The first one had been warm, almost cheerful. The second had been concerned. This one, sent by the Congregation Service Committee, was gentle but firm. It spoke of “spiritual drowsiness” and “encouraging one another.”
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.
At first, the texts from his friends were frequent. “Missed you at the book study.” “Are you sick?” Then they became less frequent. Then they stopped altogether—until the emails from the elders began. He was drowning in the silence of his own life
He wrote a new email. Not to the elders, but to the only person he still spoke to from the congregation: a quiet, gray-haired brother named Mark who sat in the back row and never commented, just like Elias used to do.
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.
Without her, the meetings felt like a play where everyone knew their lines except him.