Welcome BigD and thank you for sharing.... It is a hard and cruel awakening when you are older, my husband is 68 & and I am in my 50's.... So looking back is very ..... well very much a lot of things. :(
We too, had doubts, but pulled them back in, assuming that "God's Organization" was always the best way to follow.... but some things just could never really be squared away. Like, blood fractions?? Really?? Yet you were still not supposed to store your own blood?? And the heavenly, angelic trumpet blasts in the book of Revelation being Resolutions made at certain assemblies back in the 1920's (these same resolutions that no one remembers or mentions?)
And why did we not do more for widows and orphans if that was form of worship which God approved?
Why did the "load" one carried in the congregation never feel refreshing and light?
Have you read Crisis of Conscience? I'm almost afraid to recommend it to you, as it might make you plenty angry. But it was written by a former member of the governing body, and he was in his 60's too when kicked out.... He spent most of his life thinking he was serving the true God, even forfeiting having children with his wife. Oh boy, does he ever have some things to say, all documented. I read it with tears pouring down my face and have never felt so betrayed.
A friend of mine says she believes we are all put here "to learn something" and that the religion must have given me something I needed in life. So I try to remember the best and good things about it, but then I also think of the high price and the things we can never gain back or recover, and I too feel very angry. And dumb. But stuff like that can hold us back from moving forward.
Be gentle and take your time with your wife.... Keep reading, keep listening... and do not blame yourself for the path your life has taken, your parents really thought, as we all did, that we truly had the best way of life.
