Wobble,
The happiness comes doesn't it, its a nice surprise, you find yourself smiling more, admiring the natural beauty around you more. Little by little the new life takes shape.
All the best.
How did you find the strength to leave?
by SAHARA 49 Replies latest watchtower bible
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streets76
I can't help but think while reading some of these personal stories, wouldn't it be great if current JWs of like mind -- those who don't have a clue that a discussion site like this even exists -- could read them, too. Many of them probably think they are in the boat alone, but the truth is they have many, many fellow passengers.
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Think About It
The reasons were Doctrinal, I had never been badly treated in a noteworthy way, I had never fallen out with anybody.
I don't recall at the time having any issue with doctrine. I had seen enough hipocrazy to decide that I had had enough of the JW dysfunction forever. There was no room any longer to tolerate mean, cruel, superficial people.
Think About It
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Mad Sweeney
I didn't have the energy to stay.
Same here. I had hoped to quick-fade but it almost instantly became SUCH a HUGE hassle that I just dropped everything cold turkey. Fading slowly is such hard work.
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WTWizard
Jehovah welshed on His promises to make me appeal to the opposite sex so consistently that I decided that I would return the favor by welshing on my dedication to Him. Since there was no one in my congregation that I gave a fxxx about after they kept shuffling things around, I had nothing to lose by blowing them off.
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not a captive
As others have said in other words: When you find yourself between a rock and a hard place, are you really being strong if you act just to avoid being crushed?
In my life-before-Witnesses I read the Bible and tried to understand God without much solid doctrine (I'd been a Catholic). There were times that terrible troubles or dangers to others(not only myself) came up, when I considered that these matters were more than just selfish concerns, I took them up with him. Outcomes that I could not attribute to chance unfolded. If I entirely gave up on the use of my brain and my senses as reliable tools for understanding. If I only decided that what others declared to be real would be my reality then and only then could I say that God was not a real presence outside my own self. As a result I was convinced of God being a kind teacher.
But my understanding of religion was very traditional. Churches disappointed me for ten years after---then I ended up with the Witnesses.
Rarely did I tell other Witnesses of those earlier events that first drew me to God. But when I told anyone, it was as though I was telling a really dirty joke. Little by little I realized that I had given up a friendship with God for a formal religion that made me deny the very love of God that the WTS claimed to extoll!
I had become sickened and somewhat passive. My children came to belief that I was a naturally unhappy person--but I knew that wasn't true. But I had been putout of touch with my own feelings and my own mistakes and my own God. After remembering how I used to relate to God so much more happily even in my ignorance-- I couldn't take it any more.
February 2009 I presented information that had bothered my conscience for years about the WTS literature. It really should have made the brothers happy to discuss it with me --but in my heart I knew it would get me in trouble. But since I was already suffering so much I went ahead.
That set the machinery in motion--In the Organization,their destruction of my soul was going to finish what was left of it. But as I saw how the best of my friends reacted to my personal action on behalf of the God I love--I was moved to think. They were afraid for me. Afraid! Even though I love God they were afraid for me. And no one talked about God. They talked about the Organization.
Thinking about God gave me strength. And I realized that the WTS Organization doesn't give a rat's @&& about God and they don't love people either. The way the Organization slowly corrupts sincere people into sick, negative sad-sacks who aren't allowed to touch their antiseptic God is more disturbing than any of the religious horror stories they ever told me.
Thinking about God gave me strength.
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Lozhasleft
lOZHASLEFT SAID - "After much suffering and abandonment including losing all of my five adult children and many friends from over 30 years of faithful service...I chose to move on with a new life...and after some years I started to research ...wow...there was a shock..."
This is exactly the kind of thing I'm so amazed at. Now, maybe you didn't really have much of a choice about how your family would treat you once you were disfellowshipped, I'm still very impressed with how people like you seem to be able to see things as they really are, accept it and move on. Most people I think would do everything they can to be reinstated if only to maintain a relationship with their family. What an aweful thing to be put through... I hope you have found some peace
Thank you ..yes I have found peace, and happiness. It maybe sounds a little flippant the way I worded it but I assure you it was painful in the extreme, the worst thing I've ever had to deal with in my life so far, and there's been some really difficult times. I explained to two of the elders from my JC, a few months after it, how I felt and how impossible it would be for me to trust them again, and one just shrugged his shoulders, while the other refused to make eye contact. Deplorable. I asked them to leave my home then. I couldnt deny what was staring me in the face but the shock and disappointment was huge. I subsequently got very physically ill, and when I recovered I determined to turn things around and build a new life. I had to do it or crumble. I'm glad I did, and my life now is so different, so full and so happy....amazing. Only in the past few months though have I been able to talk about it on a forum such as this and be able to read and enjoy Ray Franz's Crisis of Conscience...
This has been an excellent thread with so many moving stories...
Loz x
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moshe
If you tell the truth, then you won't have to worry about leaving the KH, they will give you the boot. If you want to avoid the "boot", then you will have to lie, lie, lie, about what you think and believe about the JW religion. It wasn't a hard choice for me to leave the KH and it apparently wasn't a hard decision for my JW wife to divorce me. Trying to make other people do what you want is as hard as holding onto mercury, so it's better in my opinion to live the life you were meant to live, free from the WT cult and stop trying to force other JW relatives to see things your way. It might take them 20-30 years to finally see the light, meanwhile you have wasted the ONE life you have, trying to please those JW relatives, by being their doormat. Those lies can ruin your health, too.
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Scarred for life
I didn't have the strength to stay. I would have killed myself if I had kept going to meetings and being a JW. I chose to live and that meant divorcing everything JW. I was young. I didn't have a spouse or children. My mother's family were all JWs. My father's were not. I knew I had one life and I was going to live it the way I chose to not how some religious nutcase organization told me to.
Of course, there are things that are sad but it would have been sadder to have stayed.
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Leprechaun
'How did you find the strength to leave?'
Well first the off, the question should be "How do you find strength to “Stay”!
1. Do you like to be shunned during sometimes, some of the hardest times of your life spiritually speaking, or otherwise.
2. Do you enjoy watching others being shunned, and then expecting your children to learn this form of debased behavior?
3. Do you enjoy being told you must conform to a set of rules as though they from the almighty himself, contrived originally by Joseph Rutherford, things to just mention a few, all holidays, blood transfusions, shots at one time, that has along with the prohibition on blood has caused the untimely death of countless thousands.
4. Do you enjoy being told not to use any other bibles and research books other than the Witness books and magazines.
Tell me what major facet of your social life, that is not controlled by the so called governing body (slash) faithful slave of God?