WOW! I'm on page 160 - Yes, I'm a fast reader and all I can say is
FINALLY I'm getting answers to questions I always had. I ALWAYS wanted to know about the history of the WBTS - about Russell, Rutherford, Knorr and Franz - I always wanted to know when and how they were anointed - what gave them the "God-given" right to the position and power they had. I wanted to know (for myself) how they KNEW what they KNEW and how they KNEW it was RIGHT.
Without those answers, I could NEVER put away my doubts fully!
There are now a few more things I KNOW - I KNOW I'll be ordering the second book & I KNOW if I ever doubted my decision to leave, I KNOW I'LL NEVER BE GOING BACK!
I bought that book a couple of months ago...I figured, well it'll be one of those pick em up put em down kind of books...
what a surprise. I just couldn't believe all that I had read...and it was almost as if I slipped right back into reading the witness literature...and I don't mean that negatively. The writing was just so smooth, so calm...and then when I got to the part where Franz said that he did a lot of writing for the organization...that was it! :)
For me it was comforting...here was a man who according to the "How to bring up JW chiddrens" was a poster person to strive to be. This was a man whom countless numbers of us read his works through the organization...and this man harbored the same doubts and had some of the same problems all of us had been faced with and he held true to his conscience, to his inner faith, and still in writing this book projected no bitterness or animosity towards the organization...simply stated the facts ma'am. I was impressed!
I dunno, maybe what I'm saying is weird, but it took me three years to scrape up the courage to read that book...and in doing so it really released a lot of the deep down guilt that I still carried with me about leaving the organization. It cemented that I did the right thing...it truly helped to set me free.
Forsharry - I couldn't have said it better. I guess my gut knew that this book would be the icing on the cake as far as cementing my decision - I think I took so long to read it, because I wanted to make sure that the decision I made was based on MY heart, on MY experience and not on (once again) what somebody told me. Once I had reached the conclusion that there really was something very wrong with our teachings and that I couldn't in my heart continue, then I was ready to hear what he had to say.
