part 1 is here:
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/9/120566/1.ashx
...the line clicks over.
At this point I'm in my car driving with the back windows down. I need the air. I'm looking for Little Caesar's Pizza. They have $5 cheese pizza and something tells me that emotional eating will be my only savior tonight.
"Have you gone back to meetings yet?" No Gran. "Well are you going to start coming back to Jehovah?" Gran, I don't feel like I ever left him. I'm just trying to figu-- "Well, if you aren't attending meetings you have left Jehovah. Don't you believe that Jehovah has a spirit anointed organization on earth?" I don't know what I believe Gran. Like I said I'm just trying to figure it out. "Don't you believe that God's people are Jehovah's Witnesses?!" Gran, really, I didn't call to talk to you about this. I called because you are my grandmother, I love you, I miss you, you raised me and I haven't talked to you in over a year. "You have to stop saying that to me. At some point that has its end. Yeah I raised you. You are as much my child as your mother and uncle but that doesn't matter. We don't have anything to talk about. You don't love my God, so I don't want anything to do with you"
Now here is where the lump starts. I swallow hard and I keep going. I'm reaching here for any semblance of humanity in her. Sadly, there is none. The grandmother that cooked my every meal, washed me, put peroxide on my skinned knees, blew bubble pipes with me, made me grilled cheese 'sammiches' doesn't exist anymore for me. Somewhere, at some point inside one of my decisions, she vanished for me. I know this is tough love. I know this is 'the only way to get me to see reason.' But all I can feel is coldness like wet steel... But that isn't steel, its rejection...its the warm quickening of blood and pulse while my heart rends itself
Gran, I have never stopped loving Jehovah. ~~ I don't need to tell her that at this point partly because of her behavior and that of those in her professed "true" religion I am nearly an atheist. That would help my case none. Really, I am willing to believe in a God but only in the face of more proof and less conjecture~~ "If you don't attend meetings and recognize Jehovah's organization as the only way to get life, you have stopped loving him." Gran, you don't read hearts. You have no idea of what I have been through these past 15 years. I've tried to tell you but you don't hear me. I didn't leave over a girlfriend or wanting to have some stupid worldly freedoms. I left because I was searching for something. I had questions and no one had answers. "Well then you should have written the society." I did. I did do that. I did that and more. I asked every CO, DO and all parts in between. Remember when I worked at the assembly hall? I had access to so much there and access to so many. I asked them my questions. Do you know what they had to say? They, all of them, told me the exact same thing, that I lacked faith, that I wasn't praying enough, that I didn't study enough, not enough field service. So I would study harder, do more, pioneer. Nothing removed that feeling in the pit of my stomach. NOTHING. "Well, that is your fault for not waiting on Jehovah." 15 years is a long time to wait for the answer to simple questions Gran. If I couldn't find my answers inside, then they must be outside. I had bled dry and exhausted all of my resources within the organization. It was time to go outside for them. "That was the wrong choice." So you say...
Let me get this straight gran, my homosexual cousin can come into your house, eat a meal with you and hug you followed up by my fornicating, cursing, politically involved brother and he can do the same, but I am not welcome. "They've never dedicated their lives to Jehovah. You did. You promised." WHEN I WAS 9 Gran. NINE! "It doesn't matter. You made a vow. You knew what you were doing." ~~ I snicker at her... Snickering keeps the lump down~~~ So you never want to see me again? Never want me to call you again? "Not unless you plan on coming back to Jehovah." Okay then Gran. Let me part with this then. You and I both will be dead and buried before either of us ever see a paradise. I promise you this. I love you very much...
..dead goes this line...dead goes a bit of my hope...dead goes my past...dead goes my binding tie... My concept of God was built upon the strengths I observed in my grandmother. Fate, it seems has a sense of irony. I am dead to her... for now, only for now she is dead for me... and God's voice if he has one has never been more faint.