Jeremy, I enjoyed reading this part of your story. Pioneering was really an eye opener for me too. It was kind of like putting to the test all the fanciful advice of the society. What I thought would be a wonderful spiritual adventure turned into a very real life discouragement.
The preoccupation with counting time and the obvious practice of wasting time was infuriating. The longed for goal of pioneer school was a long, slow endurance of monotonous repetition. No deep pearls of wisdom there.
The nail in the coffin was a study that just kept saying aloud what I felt inside about many of the watchtower doctrines. She could so easily refute them and I wanted to agree with her, but had to keep up the watchtower front. I eventually turned the study over and disappeared because I could not teach anyone what I no longer believed myself.
Looking forward to the next part of your story. You write vey well.
cl