Hello Sailor,
My name is Vince. I’ve been off line for a little bit due to getting laid off and no Internet access. It’s good to be back on again. I don’t think I’ve ever told my life story. So, here ya go.
My parents moved out of Utah shortly after I was born and into another state where the Witnesses approached them. They studied and were baptized in 1975 –just under the wire for what could very well be the advent of Armageddon. I grew up in a house with a psychotic momma and a wonderful dad who always tries to do what is right and always does the best he knows how regarding God and people. I was baptized at the ripe old age of 14yrs 1mth. A big factor was receiving a lot of pressure from my mom to be baptized as soon as I was 14. I also sincerely believed that this was the Truth.
Pioneering during summer vacations was par for the course. I didn’t apply myself in school since it was highly dubious that the generation of 1914 would live long enough for me to graduate and go to college – not that college was something that you could do and still remain in good standing. So, after graduating high school I utilized my time to regular pioneer. I had a lot of fun then. I enjoyed going from door to door with friends from the congregation. It was very pleasant to go out in service and share my faith with those who had no true hope. I’ve always liked people. Talking to complete strangers, listening to what they had to say, and trying to educate them in the Witness’ beliefs was very rewarding to me –even if they didn’t listen. This, as well as successfully dealing with psychomomma at home instilled in me a very tolerating temperament when dealing with people’s rage or displeasure. It was so enjoyable because I was doing what God wanted me to do. The satisfaction of being one of the few people on earth who could be saved at Armageddon brought me peace of mind.
So, after regular pioneering for eight months or so, I was accepted to Bethel, the “House of God”. Nothing that I had heard about the place really prepared me for what I would experience. The work was intense and our department was understaffed. We had such an awesome crew that could turn out the production with such a limited amount of resources. We had supervisors that would continually harass the new members to break them in. By some stroke of ill or good fortune, my table head, my supervisors and the only Bethel Elder in my congregation all had the justified reputation for trying to “break in the new boys”. Being pulled into three different directions to be molded into three different models of the “ideal Bethelite” just didn’t sit well with me. I was also working with a bunch of “rebels” who influenced me and helped trigger a more independent attitude (horrors). Sadly, a little after a year at Bethel, I had a weakness in one of my joints that the exacting toll aggravated to an unbearable degree. I tried to get a transfer of an assignment so I could stay at Bethel, even talking with the assistant Home Overseer Bob Rains. Nobody really seemed to care except the Brothers and Sisters I worked with every day, and they couldn’t do much to help. So, disillusioned and depressed, I went home.
I decided to take a month to relax, get my head on straight, and figure out what I wanted to do. After leaving Bethel, I was still considered a full-time minister for three months until I made up my mind. After the first month, the pioneer school was going to start up. I asked the CO if I could attend since I had made it my goal to start regular pioneering again. He told me that he didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t go but he wasn’t going to let me. I was very disappointed. (I was even more disappointed when the following year a different Bethelite left and the same CO let him attend.) I decided against regular pioneering at this point and received no encouragement to do otherwise. Since I speak Spanish, I went with the backup plan then and moved to where the need was greater, in the Spanish circuit. I also started taking classes at a vocational school so I could cultivate a skill to support myself. That was not received well by a number of witnesses in the area. College was still a big no-no and a true Christian would not want to store up treasures on earth. After all, wasn’t Armageddon still just around the corner? The generation of 1914 was almost fizzled out.
The Spanish Circuit was fun at first. I even helped start up a study group that eventually became a congregation. The sad thing was that a pharisaical Elder and his family moved into the small group. They didn’t speak any Spanish but were going to run things their way no matter what. The group was only about 15 people when they moved in. They punished about 5 people who didn’t do things their way. For example, they encouraged me to Auxiliary Pioneer one month. I was told that they would help me achieve my 60-hour quota on weekends and some evenings. I eventually was able to achieve about 54 hours, 20-something hours was done working alone. They were making sure I was feeling the love. During the week they took over the return visits that I was cultivating. On the weekends I was told a couple of times that car groups were already arranged and there just wasn’t any room for one more. (Sound familiar, Brother Bowen?) They went to other people’s bible studies and said that someone else was going to study with them. They would then turn the study over to one of their personal followers in the English congregation. Gradually, their cronies came over and the Spanish group was now made up almost entirely of brothers and sisters from the English congregation who would get together and study the publications in Spanish and have meetings in poorly spoken Spanish. The ones who were bilingual with Spanish as their native tongue moved over to the English congregations and the two couples who didn’t speak much English stayed there.
I moved back over to the English congregation and got engaged to a pretty pioneer who had visited the Spanish congregation to support her friend’s decision to learn Spanish to go to Belize. I asked her if she was interested in learning Spanish too and offered to give her “Spanish Lessons”. A year later we were engaged.
Life was going great. I was serving as a Ministerial Servant in the congregation and the Elders had asked me what I thought about serving as an Elder. That was put on hold when I switched congregations – the new Elder body had to get to know me for a few months before I was appointed.
One of my interests is computers. I was spending one evening surfing the net after the missus had gone to bed – about 10:00pm. Curiosity got the better of me and I plugged in “Jehovah Witness” into a search engine. Some were obviously Apostate sites. I thought I would take a look. After all, I was rock solid in the truth. What did I have to fear? I popped on over to freeminds.com and looked at Randy’s site. What a bunch of claptrap! How could anyone possibly believe these lies? I looked at some writings by ex-witnesses and almost felt physically sick. How could these people possibly leave the Truth? How could they possibly such abominations like the Trinity? Satan assuredly had a grip on them. I looked at David Reed’s site and was horrified that someone who used to be a witness could believe the things that he obviously believed now. What’s more, the cartoon characters of the ex-witnesses actually had smiles on their faces! I was appalled and disgusted, but I couldn’t help but to look with the kind of morbid sorrow and fascination one feels as when watching the Titanic sink beneath the ocean in the movies.
Another site caught my eye. This one had to do with Elders and New Light on Blood. (Now ajwrb.org) It was about 11:00pm so I was going to look at one more then hit the sack. I started reading the opening pages. The question that burned itself in my mind was, “Do Jehovah’s Witnesses really abstain from blood?” I would answer unhesitatingly, “Yes!” but as the copies of the Watchtower and Awake articles pointed out, Jehovah’s Witnesses could accept most of the components of blood if their conscience permitted it. If some components were a conscience matter, how was that still considered “abstaining from blood”? I was up until 3:00am researching the matter using resources from the website and my personal Watchtower library. The whole time my heart was racing, I felt that I was teetering on the edge of an abyss. I couldn’t believe what I was discovering, but I couldn’t ignore it either. I was surprised that I was able to sleep at all that night. The next day I could hardly function at work. I took an extended lunch hour and visited the local library to do more research on blood. Everything that I found at the library backed up what I had read on that damn site. Everything that I had researched in the Watchtower library had backed it up as well.
That evening I thought to myself, “Well, are they the Faithful and Discreet Slave or are they not?” I decided to go straight to the source and look at the scriptures in Matthew 24 concerning this doctrine. Just reading the chapter straight through floored me. I remembered in 1995 there was a Watchtower article concerning the Sheep and Goats Parable in Matthew 25. It went into great detail on the difference between coming, (erkomai –sp- ) presence, (paurosia) and how Jesus coming with his angels to separate the sheep from the goats was in the future at the Great Tribulation. The same criteria should apply to Matthew 24. The realization that Jesus’ coming, the separating of sheep and goats, wise and foolish virgins, and faithful and wicked slaves were all talking about the same thing made for another late night this time until 2:00am.
Within a couple months after this realization, my parents started having nasty marital trouble, one of my best friends died (they still don’t know if it was suicide or a freak accident), my grandfather died, and my brother was diagnosed (incorrectly as we learned later) with a bone marrow disease and given a 20% chance of living beyond another year.
The abyss that I was teetering on opened wide and I plunged in.
I was in a depression. I was having minor panic attacks every day. The worst part was that I couldn’t tell anybody what was going on. The couple of trusted friends that I confided in couldn’t really help me out much, but the did give what support they could. (Yes, I did and still do have some true friends that are in “the Truth”) I was obsessed with finding out all the information that I could about the Witnesses’ beliefs. At one time we really did believe that the Great Pyramid of Ghiza (sp?) had a divine backing because some measurements supposedly supported the 1875-1914 presence of Christ. The date of 1914 was originally arrived at by a totally different method than now. Everything that we predicted about that year was wrong. The worst part was realizing all of the deceptions that came from the society: Hypocritically condemning other churches for things that they themselves were also guilty of; changes that the Society made and tried to pass off as not a change; forcing people to accept “minor” changes that became major issues if they weren’t accepted.
Things are much better now. I have been off of anti-depressants for a year. I’ve helped a few people to be able to look at things from a different perspective instead of the black & white perspective that they used to have. The only reason I hit the meetings anymore is for the sake of my wife. She has grown so much in her own understanding and making her own decisions, but the fear that she has of losing her family keeps her going even though she sees a lot of the hypocrisy now.
I have not firmly attached myself to any set of beliefs for the moment. I am still examining them and seeing where I am led. I now enjoy things that I wasn’t permitted to enjoy before. I can associate with people who don’t believe exactly the same as I do. I can have deep meaningful conversations with “worldly relatives” without trying to convert them. I can take martial arts from a Born Again Christian if I choose. I can write an editorial in the newspaper without feeling guilty (although the fallout from that hasn’t completed yet.) I don’t have to spend my vacation time and money to go to a three-day seminar that I don’t really listen to anyway. I no longer try to change the world.
This is a wonderful earth that we have been given. There are many beautiful people out there too. I can now enjoy it all. Two things from the bible have been guiding my life for the last year and a half and it seems to work pretty good so far: 1) Love your God and love your neighbor. 2) You can’t love your God unless you learn to love your neighbor first. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all fluff beyond that.
-The Belligerent Paladin