I have two living siblings, an older brother, and a younger sister. My brother and his wife have had to move many times due to his job because of promotions, and new opportunities. Everytime they moved, it would be weeks before they were settled enough to begin attending meetings again. After about six or seven moves, they just didn't get started again. (Seriously, they must have moved twelve or more times,it seemed like every three or four years he was changing jobs.) He is very successful.
My brother had a heart attack last month. He and his wife live some distance from us, and my sister and I drove together to Memphis to be with them during this crisis. He didn't suffer too much damage, but he needed a triple bypass, and had one two days after the heart attack. Consequently, my sister and I spent several nights together in a local hotel, sharing a room. We knew he would be fine but we wanted to give my sister-in-law support. She was so distraught.
My sister and I still live in the same town and we are extremely close. We share everything with each other. Because of that, she has been aware of some of my feelings while I was reading all the volumes of the Studies in the Scriptures. She and I have always agreed in the idea of a complete resurrection of everyone who has ever died, and didn't believe that god would destroy billions of people who didn't take the Watchtower. It just never made sense to us, and we paid attention to the fact that the bible didn't say he would destroy the people at Armageddon, it says he will gather the nations together for the great day... We understood this to mean only the system of governments.
This however, never shook our faith in the organization as being the channel of communication for his people. We just figured that one day they would understand this and "new light" would happen, and that we were "running ahead" of Jehovah and he would make this clear in due time. (I know, I know. Cult thinking) This was not a thing in which the rest of the family shared our opinions, but they didn't really argue the case too strongly, and it was never anything they felt needed to be made a big deal of. They just thought we were wrong, completely wrong.
This of course, has always made field service a problem us. What do you say to a Bible study when you get to the Armageddon part? We always handled that with some version of "Jehovah in his infinite mercy will handle that issue with pity and understanding when the time comes. We don't need to worry about that as his justice is perfectly balanced with love and mercy."
In the past few years, we have practiced a form of field service that skirts this issue by not getting ourselves into situations like that. No return visits, no bible studies, only street witnessing, etc. etc....
We never openly discussed this. We just said we didn't really enjoy field service, or that we had been too busy to go this month, and would go out and street witness for an few hours at the end of the month so as to make some time. Basically we just handed magazines out without discussion, like we were passing out leaflets or something. "Here's some reading material that might be of interest" we would say.
She and I meet frequently for dinner and a "girls night out". Shopping or movie kind of thing. Finally, during this drive and the subsequent amount of time in the hotel due to my brothers heart problems, we had a real block of time together.
Although this forum has been a tremendous amount of help to me as an outlet to talk about my realization that this is not god's chosen channel and my heartbreak and extreme anquish in discovering and accepting this fact, it was still something I wished I could share with my sister. I had already come out to my husband (who was perfect okay with this) and to one of my children (who says he is still a believer, but is okay, and assures me that he would never, ever shun me, and would be disfellowshipped himself before he'd do that) and to one of my grandchildren who is not yet baptized, and when I brought this up, told me that he has too many doubts to do it. He doesn't feel the answers to his questions are satisfying.
Everyone I have spoken with so far, has, however been extremely shocked that I could say and do this. My son was especially shocked, he practically fell out of his chair. I mean, I am no spring chicken, and to suddenly say this now....well, it was very surprising.
I really wanted to talk frankly with my sister though, and our brother's surgery offered me the time to do it. So, I just came out with it. I just told her gently and simply what my reasons were and how I would never attend meetings again. She was crying and begging me to reconsider, but immediately assured me that I was her sister, and nothing I could ever do would change that. When I woke up in the morning, she had written me a letter, asking me not to leave the organization, but continuing to assure me that it would not change our relationship if I refused. She said she completely understood my reasons, and really, in most respects, agreed with me. (My sister is one of the sweetest women in the world, and I am lucky to have her. I know that her sense of personal integrity is high, her generosity large, and her capacity for love is expansive.)
We didn't really get a chance to talk for two weeks due to other obligations, but then our brother suffered a blood clot in his leg, and was readmitted to the hospital for observation and care. So we drove to Memphis together again.
The morning of the second day, we are in a restaurant and she suddenly broke into tears. She just blurted out that she knew that this wasn't the truth, that she had already had some doubts herself and that she had always pushed them down and refused to examine them, but that now that I had expressed it all together, had said it all aloud, that she was now unable to shut the lid again. She's been praying incessantly and crying herself to sleep. It's all she thinks of day and night. She is heartbroken and completely devastated.
My sister is a widow. She really was in love with her husband until the day he died. They had two daughters, and the oldest one drowned in a boating accident when she was three. She and her husband never got over it. Between her daughter and now her husband, she has spent most of her life holding tightly to the belief of the resurrection that she felt was surely coming soon and that would reunite her with them yet in her lifetime. This new teaching of the generations has really bothered her. She hoped the time left was very short.
She is so terribly unhappy, and told me that now that she sees that the Wizard of Oz is just a man behind a curtain, and that the veil is lifted from her eyes, she can never again believe. She keeps praying that Jehovah show her that she is wrong, and that the organization is really his channel, but nothing changes. She just can't make herself believe it, and god is not taking action regarding her prayers. I know exactly how she feels, it is what I felt as well, and, I guess in some ways I still do. The fairy tale felt so good, it was so comforting. It's horrendous to discover that you have lived a life in sacrifice to something that doesn't exist.
I feel so terribly sad for her. She is so heartbroken, and she doesn't know what to do. She thinks she will just fade into inactivity, and since her children live in other parts of the country, they'll probably not even discover it. When they visit, they don't go to meetings, they just spend all their time together. When she visits them, she'll just take her bible and songbook and attend meetings for a week.
I am not at all sure that I did the right thing in bringing this to the front of her mind. I feel like the source of her great disappointment and unhappiness, and that I destroyed her dream of seeing her husband and daughter again. It's like she is suffering their deaths all over. It's terrible for her.
So, on one hand, I am glad she knows the truth, and can live the rest of her life as she really pleases, and on the other, and right now, it feels that I have made life ugly for her. When you are as far along in life as we are, so many of the choices you would have if you were even as young as forty or fifty are denied you. There are just so many things you can't change. You know that you have children in their forties who have grown up in the truth, and she and I both have grandchildren who are adults, or who are approaching adulthood. What do you do?