“You’re thinking about leaving? You mean, quitting? But, Chad, why? What’s wrong?”
“Oh,
there are a lot of reasons,” he sighed. “Any one by itself probably wouldn’t be
enough, but...”
He was silent for a long time, while
she watched his face. Finally he glanced at her and realized that she was still
waiting for an answer.
“I guess it all started a year ago,
when I was home on furlough,” he began. “You know about the girl I was going to
marry—Laura. We had a rather whirlwind courtship, and before I came back we got
engaged. The plan was for her to apply to Harvest and then I would go home this
summer and we would get married. She seemed really happy about it at the time.”
His voice trailed off. “Then in February I got an e-mail from her. She wasn’t
sure she wanted to leave home and move halfway around the world to a strange
country. She wasn’t sure she wanted to live in poverty when she had a proper
job making good money in England. She wasn’t sure she loved me enough. And that
was that.”
“I’m sorry, Chad,” Kerry said
softly. She knew there was no easy answer that would take away that pain. She
could only listen.
He shrugged. “I told myself all the
things that people do in a situation like that. I would get over it. It wasn’t
meant to be. It was God’s will. All those things. But right after that I fell
ill with malaria. I couldn’t work; I couldn’t do anything but lie around
burning up with fever and shivering with chills and wanting to die. I felt so
dreadful. And—well, I know this sounds idiotic, but I kept wishing my mum was
there to take care of me, but she was so far away and I felt so alone, like the
whole world had forgotten about me.”
O malaria. Yuck. Sounds like he's been through a lot
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