Part V – 9 Years, 2 Shepherding Calls And 2 Kids
Sam and I quickly settled into happily married life. Neither of us are particularly volatile and we had five or six years advantage on a lot of JW kids who get married at a very young age. So we never had the elders round to ‘help’ us in our marriage. The London property market was just catching fire after a quiet spell in the mid 90’s and we were keen to get on the ladder. We ended up buying a place about 3 miles out of the territory but we decided to keep going to that Kingdom Hall anyway. Nobody said anything to dissuade us, although a friendly elder whose territory we had moved into did make a pitch for our business.
By now I was working for a division of the giant American corporation 3M. I was responsible for taking care of one of their biggest customers in the UK. The job involved some European travel and also I made my first trip to the US – Minneapolis in February made a Scottish winter seem sub-tropical. Sam was also working fulltime so expectations were I guess quite low for us from the congregation. I always felt we didn’t quite fit there. Strike one – I didn’t want to fit there. Strike 2 – we were both working fulltime. Strike 3 – we were white, middle class and lived out of the territory, which was mainly working class and more than 1/3 Afro-Caribbean. (Racially the congregation was split 50/50 white black and whilst nominally everyone got along fine, it was clear that socializing and friendships tended to be along racial lines.) But I am reasonably articulate and a Scottish accent in London does not go unnoticed, so it was no surprise to have a few different elders approach me and ask if I thought about Doing More™. My response was terse. No. I had basically settled into a rut where I could miss 25% of meetings, never go out in Field Service, answer up occasionally and give moral support to Sam in her attempt to do the best she could. I had also taken to never wearing a jacket to meetings. A silent protest and an effective mechanism for enabling Doing Less™. Plus the fact it’s never cold enough in London to actually merit anything more substantial than a shirt.
Out of the blue the PO asked if he and another elder could come round for a shepherding call. We hadn’t been expecting this and of course we wondered if there was another agenda. There was. My Dad had taken it upon himself to write to my congregation elders asking if they could Do More™ to help me Do More™. So although we hadn’t had a shepherding call for 3 or 4 years now there was something in writing that had to be replied to, so we got the call. It was a cringe worthy 45 minutes. They didn’t want to be there, we didn’t want them there and to top it off I was over 30 years old and my Dad had written from 400 miles away without telling me what he was doing or why. It was not the last time I would be on the sharp end of a surprise attack from Scotland. But in the meantime I agreed that I had plenty room for improvement and I would try and find a jacket for the meetings. God knows what they wrote back to my Dad - Paul is looking for a suit jacket?
Before getting married, we had discussed the subject of having children. Good advice to do so, although inevitably things change. For a quiet life flexibility is more important than a list of previous decisions. And we had decided that it wasn’t for us. Neither of us really wanted to bring children up as Jehovah’s Witnesses. We both had happy childhoods, but the tormenting and embarrassment you suffer as a Witness child leaves a gouge in your psyche. Out of our 4 parents only 1 had been brought up a JW and in a ‘divided household’ at that. And we were busy – work, nights out, assemblies, holidays – the years ticked by and were soon in our early and mid 30’s. Sam raised the question again. It had been the best part of 6 years since we had discussed it. The hints were getting stronger and by now many of our previously child-free friends had kids in tow. It was like looking down the barrel of a gun. Don’t misunderstand – I loved kids but because we had ‘decided’, I had never given the idea of having my own children any mental bandwidth. I hadn’t considered the reality of having kids or the consequences of not having them. I was severely disabled in my thought process. Sam’s biological clock was on time to save the day however. Time for one last rearguard action. We lived in a 2 nd floor apartment and I said – yes – let’s try for kids once we sell the apartment and move into a house. Six months later we were in the new house. Sam was motivated.
Earlier I had switched jobs to ‘the Internet’ in the year 2000 when fortunes were still being made. I took a sales job with an Internet Service Provider and lost a lot of corporate perks compared to 3M but quickly doubled my salary again. Fortunately the company I was with focused on infrastructure and services, not the infamous dot.bombers - we were selling shovels in a gold rush. I was now earning six or seven times as much as I had been when I moved to London. We lived in one of the nicest houses in the territory and were driving a flash new German car – you get the picture – life was good and we weren’t hurting for the nice things. The house was too big for just the two of us though. It needed the patter of tiny feet and they soon arrived in April 2005 when we had a lovely son born to us. Sam was a high risk mother – slightly older for 1st time, the baby was breech; there was the normal blood issue and also a complicating Rhesus issue. For all those reasons Sam had a planned C-Section carried out by the most experienced surgeon in the area and in our brief conversation with the anesthetist beforehand we confirmed our ‘no blood’ stand. It would have been an interesting test of resolve for me if it had all started to go wrong. In any event it didn’t and we had our first son to play with.
Going back a few months prior, just when Sam found out she was pregnant, apparently it was also time for our 2 nd shepherding call. The average was steady at one call every 3 years. I’m not sure what the target is for elders but as far as I was concerned the lads were being over-zealous on our account. Like the first call we had, this one was also prompted by an external trigger. Sam had cooked up the idea of us hosting the Book Study Group. The sister who had been hosting ours for many years needed a break and Sam stepped into the breach. I don’t recall my opinion being sought but it was above my pay grade in any case. And neither Sam nor the sister sought the approval of the elders so we were getting a call, ostensibly about the Group coming to our house, but in actuality a thinly disguised effort to recruit me to the Do More™ campaign. The PO and a different sidekick turned up again. Before long there were several of the larger publications on our dining room table – Reference Bibles, Insight books etc – it was like a visit from the Big Book Inquisition to find out why I was still using Small Books. Anyway having been proactively inactive for several years at this point I felt emboldened to reveal to them my true reasons for being a fully paid up member of the Do Less™ brigade. And they didn’t like it. My basic reason was the futility I had observed in my Dad’s quest for organizational progression. I didn’t feel like it was God’s purpose for people to try and move up a religious hierarchy. So no thanks. I will continue Doing Less™. Their reaction was shocking – to Sam at least – I didn’t give a rat’s ass. They said my attitude could well mean that the Holy Spirity wasn’t operative on our house and so may prevent us hosting the Group. Sam – newly pregnant and still a true believer – could not believe what she was hearing, burst into tears and fled the room. They were clearly embarrassed – they assured me they were going to check if what they had said was in fact the case and they would come back and let me know. Whatever lads. I showed them out and went to check on Sam. To this day I don’t how you verify whether Holy Spirity is active on a particular house – maybe Google Maps knows.
Now here was the rub – they never came back to us. Soon after we got a sympathy card from the other sister commiserating ‘at this difficult time for us’. Unbelievable – as well as not coming back to me as promised they had clearly given the other sister a version of events that was nowhere near reality. Sam was devastated and embarrassed in equal measure. I had moved from Do Less™ to Do I Even Want To Be Here. But karma had one last card to play. Within 6 months the PO had been removed as an elder AND, more ignominiously, the Book Study Group was taken out of his house at the same time. Evidently, the capricious Holy Spirity had moved house.
From about this time onwards, through the birth of Archie and a few years following, I was having increasingly radical conversations with safe people. Sam was not yet privy to the full extent of my growing disbelief. Just before the birth of Archie, I secretly joined JWD. I remember reading other websites at this time - watchtowerobserver, freeminds and jwfacts. It quickly became obvious to me that doctrinally the Watchtower Society had major flaws. I had never considered this before. But more importantly to me I realized there were other people out there who felt the same as I did. From born again Christians to atheists and scientists – there was a whole spectrum of color exploding into my consciousness brushing out the black and white in huge bold strokes of riotous color and anarchistic confusion. Perfect. I couldn’t get enough. But we had a 2 nd baby on the way and my mission was to deliver both Sam and the two babies from the clutches of what I now understood to be a high control group.
Part VI – The Great Apostasy Sets In (will post when I write it)