Here's the deal, life has the meaning you give it.~ Lisa Rose
Very profound.
A JW family member of mine told her "apostate" son not to come to her bashing everything that gives meaning to her life (her JW hope for everlasting life, Panda Petting Paradise, etc) until he could offer her something better than she has now.
That's the same problem we are all dealing with now. We all believed that we had the greatest future possible, too! As a JW, we believed that God selected us (1 of 1000 people on average) as "special" -- deserving (if we earned it) of Everlasting Life in Paradise. Someone here won the $500million (US) lottery this week. That's pretty damn good! But even that cannot top what we really believed we had "won" as JWs.
What if you had that lottery ticket and finally weeks or months later, after your extensive tax planning, when you went to turn in the ticket and claim your prize they said "Oops! Typo.......it's not real!" You'd feel like shit!
Same with learning TTATT. Someone just yanked the carpet from underneath you! Your world just collapsed! You are going to feel like "shit" until you "get over it" or get past it, etc. Personally, I had 50 years (not weeks or months) invested in that "ticket" only to find out that the $500million was Play Money!
Let's face it, it going to take some time to find something "better" to replace what we've lost. It first takes accepting the fact that your ticket was fake. Only then, can you find that "something better".
At our age (wife & I) after losing 50+ years to The (false) Troof, it's our children & grandchildren that we are working on making that "something better". We've accepted the fact that our place in life is pretty much set in stone. The only thing missing on the stone (tombstone) is the Date of Death, which can't be all that far off. No time for us to "start over".
BUT......we can make a difference in the lives of our kids and especially our grandkids. We saw to it (thankfully) that our kids went to college and they have a great head start on getting more out of life than we did, or that we can at this point. They have careers vs. dead-end jobs. We've helped them pay off college loans. We've helped (some of) them buy homes. We've encouraged them to start investment accounts NOW! (If only I'd bought stock in WalMart 35 years ago!) We plan to see to it that our still very young grandkids have a head start in life. They won't be limited by the fables and false hopes of JW World. We will try to set them on the course to be doctors or scientists or anything they dream to be (vs. being satisfied with menial dead end jobs and pioneering) that will bring meaning in their lives and perhaps help many other lives.
"Life has the meaning you give it."
Go out and do it!
