How many times have you read a post here and thought, "Wow, I thought only I felt that way about (insert spiritual/JW activity here)!"

Crisis of Conscience

I was inspired by a few different things people said.

One dealt with if you pray(ed) regularly with your husband/wife. A few people described how awkward they felt in doing it. I felt like that for the longest time! It just never felt right. Who could I tell though besides my wife?

But as a witness we are taught that after time you begin to enjoy certain things or that maybe they become easier. (I'm still waiting.)

The other thing is the ministry. I'm generally a confident person. But I never felt/feel confident while in the ministry. I wouldn't want to be bothered at home. And I hate being pushed to take something I don't want. So who am I to think that someone else likes it and wants it? I just can't get with that.

Anyway, please share some of the things that you used to feel were only your thoughts and through JWN finally discovered you were human in thinking it and not alone.

chicken little

Praying together was awful, after two months of marriage we deceided that we would just do our own, end of story. Family study with hyperactive kids.....nightmare, we would do 5 minutes then stop, it saved our marriage. I even said that at an assembly we were asked about our family study, I told the truth, lots of sisters said they were so relieved to hear me say it. My husband never was any good at keeping record of his time, he was a pioneer and out all the time so he just put down from when he went out of the door until he came in. Great way of thinking now I come to ponder over it, at the time I was worried he was cheating.

Hated collecting a huge pile of magazines and worrying how to place them, that was in the days when we had to pay for them and we had little money. I hated the tract work, each pioneer was given something like 500 tracts to place, I shoved them everywhere.

Hated the blood card, never carried it, hated the blood documents, never filled them out. The list goes on..................

teel

Praying at the table - there was a recent thread about this, and it was exactly how I felt. How am I supposed to avoid saying the same thing over and over, 3+ times a day, for years? There aren't that many ways you can say "thanks for the grub".

lisavegas420

I hated it all. Hated it! Not only that, but I knew Jehovah could read my thoughts, mind, heart so I wasn't foolin' him. I had to continue to do it (jw crap), and pretend to enjoy it, just to keep peace with my parents. Hated it!!!

lisa

FreeAtLast1914

As it turns out, I hated most of what it took to be a JW, though I didn't realize it at the time. I was born into it and just thought everyone around me enjoyed it, so I wrote it off to something being wrong with me personally.

Especially field service. I loved to wind up in a group where all we did was stop by a laundry mat or two, then we would "outline" the territory (since it was new, you know) to get a feel for the layout. Of course, then it's break time. (the one thing I loved) The longer the better. And I hated when someone in the group was timing us and would pop up like some lame cuckoo clock figure, saying "Our fifteen minutes are up. Time to go." But then it was RV time, and I usually would say that I'd already visited mine, which meant spending the rest of the hour in cruise mode.

Commenting at meetings always had a weird feel to it. Trying to find ways of "putting the information into your own words" sucked because that's all you really did. No original thoughts, just a mindless jumbling of what's in the paragraph, only for the conductor to say, "Great comment!" I hated it.

Prayers at public meetings sucked even worse. If you gave one that was too short, the elders would visit you and "help" you to see what you left out. If you gave one that repeated a phrase too many times, the elders would come a callin'. If you failed to mention the organization or was reluctant to go on about how great the Governing Body was they would "knee-cap" you after the meeting. Seriously, I was literally handed a list of things not to say in a talk or prayer from the platform. I told the brother who delivered the list, "You know I'm not going to follow this, right?" He smiled, and said, "I know."

Which brings up another pet peeve of mine: the brothers, in their public prayers, endlessly gushing about how awe-inspiringly irreplaceable the GB is, but rarely if ever thank God for his "inspired" Word! Whether it's actually inspired or not is another question I've had to consider since then. But I always thought that was an odd quirk of JW prayers.

nancy drew

I knew something was wrong when I started dreading the assemblies, conventions and co visits and I especially hated the false excitement a couple of weeks before the fakey talks about how we were all looking forward with anticipation to a week of increased activity. I hated the corny statements " I just can't wait for the co visit their so wonderful". They always had some ridiculous counsel about head coverings or no one should see star wars because it has the word wars in its title. I remember one bozo telling everyone they shouldn't see titanic because of the breasts.

another thing I hated was being in service waiting the car and someone returns all excited "we just started a bible study" yea tell me how its going in a couple of months. all this artificial happiness and elders giving talks asking" are we doing these things brothers & sisters?" knowing full well no one was. It all just started making me sick.

gubberningbody

I don't know. So many things really. These things were REALLY noticeable after I became an elder.

Like they always say..."It has the ring of truth." - this with regard to the experiences of people in the Borg.

You just can't make this shxt up. Honestly, that's the problem with attacks made by other X-ians. They attacked JW's from their own cult reference, not from the vantage point of a JW. Only JW criticism from those who've been there and done it is believable. The rest come off like they're selling a product in competition w/JW product.