'We are all scallywags, but God loves us anyway' - My story

by Laika 29 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Laika

  Perhaps the most profound moment of my life occurred when I was sat in a car with my Dad. We were travelling home and having a very JW conversation on the Paradise, at least, it was until my Dad slipped in one of those rare moments of honesty in the watchtower world:

  "Not that I'll even be there"

  That moment really hit me hard. I looked up to my Dad, he had his flaws, like anyone else, but he was a good man, a popular congregation elder, a 'spiritual example' Of course he was going to be there, if he wasn't good enough, who could be? I asked him why he thought he wouldn't get to paradise.

  "Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be there, but I have no chance, I'm a right scallywag"

  I tried to talk my Dad round by talking about Jehovah's forgiveness, of course, he'd heard all this before and knew it as well as I did, he just nodded and moved the conversation on, but I couldn't stop thinking about that conversation for many days, and I still think about it often now. I believe the reason why it effected me so much, was because I too thought I was a scallywag with no chance of paradise, though I didn't also verbalise these thoughts. Yeah, I could play the game as well as anyone, I would pretend to be 'spiritual' answer at meetings, do good hours on the field service, act like I had it all together, I even played this game well enough to get myself appointed an MS. But it was a game, inside I did not feel 'spiritual' I rarely missed meetings, but I often found them boring and switched off, I did lots of Service, but I always hated it and never put much real effort into the preaching, and I was consciously aware of the personal sins I battled in my life. Occasionally, I would be moved to remake a personal commitment: From now on, I shape up, I work harder on Service, I pay proper attention at meetings, I do more in depth study, I stop those sins etc.. etc... It never lasted, I might be able to do it for a few days, maybe a few weeks, but soon I was back to going through the motions on field service, drifting off at meetings, and so on.

  Because of this, I used to have visions that when paradise came, my friends and family would be looking around for me 'Where's Laika*?' (*some names have been changed) they would ask. Then they would find out I wasn't there. Jehovah had destroyed me because even though I looked spiritual, it was all an act, I didn't actually love Jehovah enough, deep in my heart.

  I have no way of knowing this for sure, but nowadays, I think that most JWs feel something like this, maybe not all the time, but at least some of it. Yet, like me, JWs rarely confess to it. Your popularity, status and identity as a JW comes from your spirituality, or at least your appearance of it, and to confess that is a sham and admit your spiritual weakness is to hurt your place in the Congregation. This is why I called what my Dad said a rare moment of honesty.

  Jehovah's Witnesses thus become very good at lying. I remember a brother I was sat next to at a Convention, I had sat there for the whole programme and been bored out of my mind as usual, and at the end of the day, the brother turned to me and said 'Wasn't that wonderful?' I agreed, of course, but thought 'How could he have found it wonderful, he spent half the programme walking around the Convention site, and most of the rest of it asleep in his chair next to me, he barely got half an hour of the programme!' But for either of us to say 'Thank Jah that's over, I was so bored' would be unspiritual, so we just smiled and agreed. If you miss meetings as a JW, never say 'I just like to take a break sometimes' even if it's true, tell them you were sick or some other excuse, even if that was not the case, or you will soon find yourself out of favour in Watchtower World.

  This is getting longer than I originally thought so I will split this story into different parts, I adapted my title from a quote by the Rev Will Campbell: 'We are all bastards but God loves us anyway' - just mentioning so I'm not accused of stealing! ;)
• 

  NoRegrets

  Thanks for sharing this great experience. My dad was flawed and plagued with mental illness, but he had those moments of epiphany where he made an honest observation. One time, on a way home from an assembly he said something along the lines of "it's impossible. I can't do it all. Work shift work and raise a family and do everyting the society asks of me". Sad to see when a person is being led on and they know it, yet they beat up themselves over it instead of recognizing that they are being abused.

  No Regrets
• 

  humbled

  Thanks for this writing.

  Like the two of you, I had known that I could never be a "poster child" for the JWs. Fortunately, I wasn't a "born-in".

  I was a mother of 5 children at the time I converted (2 more came later). My life on a remote mountain farm with few modern conveniences and many old-time chores to perform meant I could not participate in all the service that a full-on JW was called to do. Especially my husband was NOT on board with any of it.

  It made me look at the often conflicting demands of responsiblity to GB/God and to life as I knew it and had to live it. I often had to research the bible to see where the GB had to get off my head and let me still be okay with God. I was in for 22 years. I could cry everyday when I thing about it--and I often do. That kind of tension set me up for the kind of desperation and strength to finally challenge my self, God and the WTS to a show down.

  I am still recovering from it.

  Yes, God does love scallywags. I love your fathers, too.

  Maeve
• 

  Laika

  Part 2:

  For most of my life I thought that it was just me who was lying when I talked about how 'spiritually upbuilding' a meeting was. After my Dad's 'scallywag' comment I was coming to believe that everyone was living a sham and I realised how pointless it was to pretend anymore. But there was no point in trying to 'get serious' and serve Jehovah properly, I had already tried that and failed many times. Thus I decided to try for a more honest spirituality, at least then I would not be committing the sins of lying and hypocrisy.

  But there's a problem with trying to be honest in Watchtower World, apart from the fact that it makes you very unpopular, there are other kinds of dishonesty required to be a good JW, not just sham spirituality, but also things such as the famous cognitive dissonance, where instead of exploring your doubts you come up with a way to ignore them. Once you start exploring your doubts there is only one way to go in Watchtower World, and that is all the way out.

  One day, when I was sat on my computer with some free time on my hands, I started flicking through some Wikipedia articles and ended up reading some about the early church fathers, this led me to read some of their works, just as an intellectual exercise because I was interested in what they believed. Reading this without Watchtower eyes, like when I read the bible, meant it clearly stood out to me how much they focused on Christ, along with their clear belief in his divinity. I did not think much of this at the time, I was just surprised at how quickly the apostasy had crept into the Church, and I moved on.

  However, another day, I was forced to revisit this when on service I came across someone who had just started attending a pentacostal church. He was still open minded and willing to discuss his beliefs, the main thing we talked about was the trinity. I decided to go back and thought what better brochure to take then 'Should you believe in the trinity?' But when I was preparing for my return visit, I of course noticed that part, the one on what the early church fathers believed. Reading it felt like a punch in the gut. It was a lie. There was no other way to describe it, I knew what the Society said the early church fathers believed was not what they believed. But what could I do with this information? I couldn't tell anyone, they would insist I was mistaken and I would have to admit this was probably the case if I wanted to avoid trouble. And besides, the main thing was that the Trinity was not true, I adamantly believed that still. I never did go back on that return visit, I couldn't bring myself to do it, but I also I had to ignore this information, for now at least...
• 

  Billy the Ex-Bethelite

  So much of the JW message is "You're not doing enough! Do more! DO MORE!" And if you even think for a minute about naughty sex, that could lock you out of paradise. That's part of the reason that so many JWs are on anti-depressants. If a sheeple is working hard to measure up, they are still very far away from the JW standard for perfection. For me it was a recipe for unhappiness.
• 

  BluesBrother

  In private moments I have heard several sincere and active dubs express self doubts and wonder if they were "good enough" to be preserved into the New World. I blame it on the meritocracy that is the NW Society, with its emphasis on numbers and placements and hours.

  The ones I know well enough to be honest (family) say that the most discouraging things are the experiences of the Pioneers who carry on with,proverbialy, a wooden leg and dying of cancer while raising 5 children! (you know the kind of thing I mean) These only make the normal ones feel bad, that they are not doing enough - even though it is their best.

  The false WT smiles and gushing praise for a boring talk used to get to me to..Cult members dare not "say it like it is", or perhaps they think that they are at fault for not enjoying it
• 

  Laika

  Part 3:

  Another profound moment in my life came at last year's Convention. I was sat there, listening to the programme, when the speaker stated something like 'We do not learn Hebrew and Greek to test the New World Translation and find out if it is really accurate...' I leant over to my friend who was sat next to me, and jokingly said, 'Makes it sound like they're hiding something' In another moment of JW honesty, he instantly replied 'Yeah, it does' And then suddenly what I had just said was not a joke anymore. It really did sound like they were hiding something! It had been many months since my issue with the Trinity brochure and I had not thought about it in a while, but then whilst I was thinking this through I recalled it and felt a panic come over me. Obviously I had experienced doubts before, I am convinced everyone experiences that, no matter their beliefs, but you learn to ignore them, focus on those 'bible truths' and get over it. Yet this was different, this was the first time I really, strongly felt I may have been misled. There was only one way to really know if the reason they had told us this was because they really were hiding something, and that was to do exactly what they had just told us not to.

  However, I could not be bothered to actually learn Hebrew and Greek, that would be a massive effort, nor was I about to read apostate websites. I apparently had not made the connection that telling us to avoid apostate websites was also a form of them hiding something, I can be very slow like that. So, the next best thing seemed to be, pick up another translation, read that, and try to analyse the differences between that translation and the NWT. So the following week, I went to a bookstore and picked up the cheapest bible on offer, a paperback New International Version.

  I started to read it at the New Testament, and soon my goal to do an in depth study of the differences went out the window. Now that I've looked into this a bit more subsequently, I think the biggest problem with the NWT is less it's inaccuracies, which obviously exist but are not really that massive, and more that it's so poorly written that it's very hard to read and get the flow of a text. Reading a non-NWT version of the bible was like reading it properly for the first time in my life. That's why my planned study went out the window, I couldn't tear myself away from the book long enough to do a proper study. I sat there with tears in my eyes as I felt like I was learning the real person of Jesus for the first time in my life. I couldn't help but notice how Jesus constantly criticised the lies and hypocrisy of the pharisees which seemed so close to the dishonesty that bothered me so much as a JW. Then, I soon reached what is now my favourite story in the whole bible, the story of the lost/prodigal son in Luke 15. Obviously I knew this story as a Jehovah's Witness, I had read it before in the NWT, but this was different, reading this story then would fundamentally change the way I now see God, and that would not be in any way compatible with the Watchtower's Jehovah...
• 

  Satanus

  The niv is a great bible for general use. Its what i used during my christian phase.

  S
• 

  Laika

  I really appreciate everyone's responses so far. I also want to add that I have been lurking on this site for a bit so I am aware that not everyone here has taken a Christian path on leaving the Watchtower Society. I am not here to convert people but to celebrate our mutual freedom from the society, and just sharing my own journey and thoughts. :)

  Part 4:

  Could there be a better description of a scallywag than the prodigal son in that story? First he basically declares he wishes his father dead by asking for his inheritance early and then squanders his inheritance on a life of sin. When you read this through the Watchtower eyes, the key part is that the son is repentant, and that's why Jehovah, the father, is able to accept him back, but without the Watchtower eyes, it is obvious that the son's repentance is completely irrelevant to the father. The father has no idea what the son wants when he runs to meet him, and when the son gives his prepared speech, the father pays no attention, instead calling for a party to celebrate his son's return.

  As Jehovah's Witnesses, if we wanted to be 'Jehovah's friend' we had to act in a way that would please him. Thus how Jehovah felt about us at any given time would be based on the whims of our actions, if we committed a certain sin he would look very unfavourably on us. If we did lots of good works, we would get closer to him and he would like us more. But in this story, the Jehovah figure, the prodigal's father, is not like this at all, he is not the least bit interested in what you do for him before deciding how he feels about you, he simply loves you, absolutely and unconditionally. The older brother is just like the JW who tries to earn God's favour, but soon learns that this is not at all how this father works.

  This, I think, is why what the Christians call grace is seen as something that cannot be earned. You cannot make God love you more than he already does, just as you cannot make him love you less, because you are already wholly loved.

  Personally, I also think the God of grace is the only one that makes sense to me now. Part of the problem with the Watchtower rules was that as well as having to do more, we had to do it with a genuine love. This is another reason why so many JWs feel like such scallywags, we might do a lot of spiritual activities, but we were not really trying that hard as we were not doing them out of love for Jehovah, at least not entirely, but with ulterior motives. We wanted to prove ourselves spiritual to others, and prove ourselves to Jehovah, but of course we knew that unlike others Jehovah could not be fooled, so their was this tension between what we looked like we were doing and what we really felt about it. How can you ever prove yourself to the God who knows your every thought? If 'the Kingdom' was going to result in my death at Armageddon because I was not good enough, this did not sound like very good news to me.

  But now, having read this story at this time, I felt for the first time like I really knew God. The experience was incredibly freeing, I no longer had to live this dishonest way and try to fool people around me to find a status in the Congregation, my status didn't matter as my identity was no longer wrapped up in what others felt about me but in what God felt about me. And of course, because I felt I could not upset or annoy God, there was nothing wrong with exploring all my doubts, tearing apart everything I had ever known. I was totally free to explore faith and the world and do whatever I wanted. Really, the journey was just beginning.
• 

  EmptyInside

  I understand exactly how you feel. I always felt the exact same way. I always felt guilty no matter how much I did. It just wasn't good enough.

  No wonder I was always depressed as a Witness. That's all I ever hear out of my Witness mother's mouth,is how guilty she feels for having limitations in her old age.