I just remembered this today, though I would share.
There was one sister in my childhood cong. that was mentally challenged. She was always very eager to participate, gave answers at every meeting (she would ramble on, sometimes for 5 minutes, until the conductor had to stop her). She was in field service almost every day and would go door to door, make return visits, try her best to spread the "good news".
I didn’t think anything of her other than she was that strange sister that talked funny and smelled like moth balls, no insult intended, I was a child and that’s what I thought. However, my sympathy for her grew when my father (who had faded and was a quiet apostate) told me that she at one time had been disfellowshipped. I didn’t know for what until high school when I helped take care of her mentally challenged son who was my age…. She had never been married.
My father had always had a problem with disfellowshipping and so at first I just brushed this bit of information off as his attempt to poison my spiritual mind. But that bit of information stuck with me…… it bothered me. Before I had doubts, before I lost faith in the WT, my conscience bothered me that the organization and the BOE would disfellowship a mentally challenged person. They had found her "un-repentant"….. did she even understand what that meant?!?
It still makes me sick to think what she went through, having a mentally challenged son, then having that son taken from her by the state because she was incapable of caring for him. All the while her only real support group, the congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, kicked her out, shunned her. That sister still attends meetings today, she still goes door to door spreading the "good news" of this organization that treated her so poorly. Sad.
-LL06