He typed slowly: “Dear Brothers, thank you for your concern. I am doing okay. I am just taking some time to think.”
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 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.” jw-org
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.
He pressed send.
Tonight, he decided to answer.
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. He typed slowly: “Dear Brothers, thank you for
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.
“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.” He watched the families drift toward their cars
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.
“That’s good,” Elias had said. “That’s really good.”