Malinda, mentioned earlier, had a grandfatherly neighbor who regularly brought the Watchtower and Awake! magazines to her house. Remembering him with fondness, she says: “What impressed me the most about my neighbor was that he did not celebrate holidays. This was important to me because Halloween and some of the other holidays were occasions for ritualistic practices in my parents’ cult.” A decade later, when a friend invited Malinda to attend a Christian meeting at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, she remembered this neighbor and readily accepted the invitation. That helped her to search for the truth.

Malinda too seeks the advice of the elders when making important decisions in her life. In dealing with the sense of hopelessness and the feeling of worthlessness that trace back to her early years, what she finds especially invaluable are various articles in The Watchtower and Awake! She says: “Sometimes in an article there is just a paragraph or a sentence​—just a morsel—​that touches me. About nine years ago, I started saving such articles in a loose-leaf notebook so that I can readily turn to them.” Today, her three notebooks contain some 400 articles!