Since I Left...
So there I was, a disabled single dad bereft of all he had known or believed for 30 years.
I had moved a good 45 minutes away from the area where the events in my introductory post went down, but was now living in an area where I had resided some ten years earlier and still had a few stale connections with the organization.
I was lonely, depressed, pissed off, and really disgusted with the God I had been shown in my years of unfruitful association.
In my mind, he had made me the way I am, which apparently entailed being unable to meet His 'righteous requirements', and was going to kill me for it. He had endowed all of us with a natural human nature (apart from our fallen sinful nature,) and now expected us to conquer our every natural impulse or desire, even the healthy ones, to survive the Big A.
Hold off on marriage or kids, no college, no success, no normalcy... The Big A'll get ya if ya don't watch out!
So I railed against Him, defied him to just take me, do anything to show he even existed or had any power at all.
I went around saying 'God is an a$$h*le' and the like, but then I realized something that shook my world....
I was just as much a witness outside the organization as I had been inside!
By accepting their paradigm, and their concept of God, I was still playing out their belief system!
I gradually came to realize that I did not know God, and never had; but I realized I wanted to very badly.
I had been overdosed with structure, study, scriptures, requirements and religion in general, so I sought a more 'easy' way. I figured, God is supposed to be there for us if we only seek him, he's supposed to make life easier, not harder, so I will simply seek him and see what happens.
I lived in a handicapped building that took up one city block and was attached to another city block that was a public park. In the dead of night with the stars all spread out across the sky I would get on my power chair and make my way to the top of a little hill in the middle of this park, away from what I perceived as the 'interference' of all those other human minds stuffed with turmoil, and poured out my heart to the heavens.
I confessed my worthlessness, my inherent sinfulness, and the utter waste my life had been up to this point. I begged for guidance, wisdom, for faith. I pleaded for him to help me to be the kind of person I wanted to be, competent, just, reasonable, and strong. I marveled at the immensity of his creation and my insignificance within it, and the almost impossible realization I was coming to that he actually was there and cared about me!
I still had more questions than answers, but at least I had found God and that was a good start. I began by throwing out everything I had ever believed and starting new. If a belief had solid scriptural basis, I kept it. If it seemed to exist merely to enforce social isolation or buttress the society's usurped authority, out it went.
Birthdays, thanksgiving, 4th of July, and voting were in; Christmas, Easter, Halloween and organized religion were out.
And do you know what? The perpetual f**k-up I had been began to be replaced by someone who made better choices, someone who was a force to be reckoned with.
I seem to have put on a new personality, but not the WT drone one I used to aspire to.
My family and old associates seem to have noticed this and made efforts to regain me, thinking they could simultaneously make use of my newfound strength and competence and squash my irritating new independence if they could bring me back into their spiritual charnel house.
I'm not a dog, and have no particular appetite for vomit, so I declined.
About this time, I began feeling comfortable making small expressions of faith without a sick feeling I was simply echoing all of the lies I had ever heard. This was fairly threatening to my family, as it was separate from the control tower and thus suspect.
'Don't you still believe in the bible/Jehovah/the truth?' they would ask me.
I would respond, 'Of course I do, I just don't believe you have to be in the watchtower society's organization to do so'
At that point they would typically demonstrate the full depth of their condescension and trivialize the idea that an honest expression of faith is even possible without their mommy-dearest organization to provide a bad-housekeeping stamp of approval.
My little sister, a real zealot who never called me for years unless she needed something calls me up out of the blue making chitchat. It didn't take long for her to get down to brass tacks and a full-court press to determine my true views on all things spiritual.
I tried to be cagey, but lacked the sense to simply end the interrogation and was thus goaded for 45 minutes until I finally snapped at her that it wasn't the truth, and I owed NOTHING to the "sons o' bitches in Brooklyn or any of their toadies!"
Having finally gotten what she wanted, she got off the phone; she now had other calls to make.
It was years before any witness relative would have anything to do with me, but no real loss.
I did learn to simply refuse to discuss it and now have dealings with my mother and older sister by mutual agreement to avoid the subject.
They would LOVE to label me 'apostate' but I just dust off their own definition of the term and point out that as an unbaptized person, I supposedly have never had a relationship with Jehovah to 'turn away' from. It seems to shut them up.
All of this took place between 1997 and 2001 and it has settled down to a tolerable level with only occasional outbreaks of conversion attempts on the part of my mother, which I fend off with ease.
Recently I have actually felt the desire to read the bible again aside from researching a particular point of doctrine so I guess time really does heal all things
Once again, thank you for taking the time to read my tale, it really does help me to quantify it and see it in print, and the feedback is wonderful.
Roller
I was just waiting to die at armegeddon. Then I found JWD and recently have begun reading the bible for the first time. I can't say what if anything I believe but, I will eventually reach a conclusion as to whether or not I even believe there is a god. I want to believe in him, but he's not making it easy. Thanks again for sharing here.