He looked back at the computer screen. The cursor blinked patiently.
Elias pushed his chair back from the desk. Outside his apartment window, the city hummed its indifferent evening song. He looked at the calendar. It had been fourteen months since he last put on his tie and walked through those wide, gray doors. jw-org
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. He looked back at the computer screen
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. Outside his apartment window, the city hummed its
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.
Without her, the meetings felt like a play where everyone knew their lines except him.
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.”