I was invited to be a guest speaker at the Saturday night AA speaker's meeting. This meeting usually has a large crowd and they get somebody with longtime sobriety to come up and tell his story of "what I used to be like, what happened, and what I'm like now" as an example for others. I'll have eight years in January, so I guess that makes me fairly longtime.
I told them:
I grew up in the sixties when there were peace demonstrations that turned into riots, civil rights and women's lib issues coming to the fore, the Vietnam War, the hippie movement and Woodstock, and a big swirling mess of ideologies coming at us from all sides. My family was abandoned by my dad, and my mom was a single working parent who held a bachelor's degree in journalism and still couldn't earn a decent income working for the newspaper, simply because she was female. My mom worked hard and was tired at the end of the day, and although she provided for our material needs she wasn't able to do much as far as giving us training in how to live life, and when I came of age I was clueless and in desperate need of some guidance.
I looked for it in mainstream religion and didn't find it; looked for it in one-on-one bible study groups with friends and didn't find it (they were fun and we felt good while we did it, but I didn't get any guidelines for living out of it), studied with the Mormons and saw through that... and by the time Jehovah's Witnesses came to the door I was disillusioned and disgusted, and I decided, "I'm going to accept their bible study and ask them questions that force them to admit they don't have any answers."
Turned out they did have answers. Clear, simple answers, straight out of the bible. They had answers for why everything's in the mess it's in, why God hasn't done anything about it, what happens to you when you die, why we're here, what God expects of us, what hope there is for a happy future... I mean they had it all, neat and seamless and all wrapped up in one neat little package. And to my young, inexperienced, thirsting-for-knowledge mind it was like turning on a switch. I grabbed it with both hands. I asked them, "How do you keep from shouting this stuff from the rooftops?" And they explained to me about field service.
"Field Service" is the term they use to refer to going door to door selling books and magazines. They don't say "selling" because of what it implies; they like to call it "placing" magazines, but selling is what you're doing.
As I got on into the religion I began to encounter problems. Turned out they don't encourage you to use your innate talents in the furtherance of the message. They don't want you to take it upon yourself to explain the scriptures, or come up with novel new ways of spreading the good news of the kingdom, or really do anything that takes any initiative. They frown on independent thinking and actively discourage it. All they want you to do is listen to what they say, the leaders, the governing body; just listen to what they say and accept it without question, and go out in field service selling magazines.
Turned out, field service was their answer to every problem. The way it was explained was, when you're out in field service, you're "preaching the kingdom", and that's where God's holy spirit is, it's blessing the preaching work. So if you're feeling depressed, you need to go in field service and sell more magazines so you can get holy spirit and feel better. If you kid is acting up and getting in trouble, you need to take him in field service so God's holy spirit will set him straight. Selling magazines was their answer for every problem.
Because their little package of answers sounded so clear and logical to me, it never occurred to me to question whether they were what they claimed to be. I was disturbed by lots of things I saw, but I never made the connection. Things got steadily worse for me over the years because I wanted to use my own brain and skills; I wasn't content to just be a mindless zombie selling magazines and parroting answers. I needed to think for myself. And this went against everything the religion taught, so I was constantly butting heads with the elders and getting more and more frustrated. It built on itself until I was just a big mass of emotional stress and tension, and one day somebody at a meeting said something from the platform and it just went all through me, and I got up and walked out.
Now, understand, even then I still believed this was God's chosen religion, the only one. There's a bible scripture Jehovah's Witnesses like to quote: "God will not let you be tested beyond what you are able to bear; but along with it he will make the way out for you to be able to endure it." Well, for 12 years I'd been praying to God, asking for him to make the way out for me to be able to endure it. "Please give me strength to endure, give me wisdom to understand, help me make this work, I want to serve you right. Give me what's missing so that I can be what I'm supposed to be, help me understand, give me faith." And the result of 12 years of praying for that was that I was walking out.
To me, this meant that God obviously didn't want me in his religion, or else he would have given me "the way out for me to be able to endure it". I viewed it as God having rejected me from his religion. So I said to God, "Okay, I see how it is. You don't want me. Fine. You leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone."
There's another bible scripture, speaking about people without hope, that says, "let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." And buddy, I did. with a vengeance.
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Next I told the story of my drinking and how I got into recovery, and I gave them a unique slant on the 12-step program: how you do the 12 steps when "God as you understand him" has rejected you and intends to kill you at Armageddon. Then, back to JWs again, after I'm in recovery:
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In 1996, I got internet access and discovered some websites on the internet that delved deeply into the teachings of Jehovah's Witnesses, examining them critically... their prophecies and predictions, their changing claims and teachings over the years, their methods and thought control tactics. Now, I'm not going to stand up here and tick that stuff off, and dog a particular religion. That's not why we're here tonight; we're here for recovery, a positive thing, not negative. So let me just say that, again, it was like a switch was flipped in my mind, and I was able to get past my concept of "God as I understand him" being a god who didn't want me and intended to destroy me. Over time, as I've studied and applied this program in my life, I've developed a different and much more comfortable understanding of God, one that works for me. Again, it is not my place to tell you about "God as I understand him" because each of us needs to come to our own understanding of God; the understanding that works for us.
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And then I talked some more about recovery and applying the principles of the Serenity Prayer: knowing what things you can and can't change, and acting on that knowledge. It came off rather well, I do say. :)