Here it is, though I have the URL embedded in the heading of my original post. All you have to do is click it!
Comments You Will Not Hear at the 11-9-03 WT Study
by blondie 41 Replies latest watchtower bible
-
-
blondie
Sorry, I missed that. Pretty neat trick. The few times the WTS acknowledges any good done by an outsider, it has to be qualified. I always admired Mother Theresa, but heard an elder say that she should have been preaching instead of tending to people's physical needs. I said, "What makes you think she didn't do both? It's hard to preach to people dying from hunger and disease. Even Jesus' tended to people's physical needs first before preaching."
Blondie
-
jgnat
I just finished reading your link to the White Rose, Blondie. I learned something new today. What an awesome story!
-
blondie
they keep on harping on about how wonderful the truth is and how great it is to be in a spiritual paradise.
Actions speak louder than words. My parents said they loved me while they were abusing me. That was difficult thinking to work out but I have.
SM, I feel for you. I remember the last few meetings I attended this year. It was creepy and people were creepy. It is a matter of trust and unconditional love. How can you trust people that will turn you in at the drop of a hat for an imagined wrong and cannot love you unless you are a "perfect" witness. I'm glad my review can help and JWD is a good support group.
Maybe you could switch to a different congregation, move your cards, and then not go at all. That might get the elders off your tail. It worked for me and it was worked for quite few on JWD.
I just remember that my self work is determined by how much I love myself not how others love me. Jesus is portayed as understanding and accepting, even eating with the sinners.
Blondie (with you in spirit at the KH; imagine me sitting in the chair next to you)
-
blondie
jgnat, part of my family is from that area. I first read about the White Rose in HS and mentioned to a brother who just about bit my head off suggesting their efforts compared to JWs in Germany. This story is not unique as your site shows. What I have not been able to find is a story where a JW risked their life to save anyone other than another JW from the camps. I'm sure it was their obeying Caesar unless they were required to disobey God. I supposed letting Jews be taken to the camps didn't break any of God's laws.
Blondie
What is that saying about not stopping the Nazis who came for the Jews, communists, ...then there was no one to help me
-
-
blondie
Well, Frank, that was great1 It gives me renewed strength for the next article which may have the vomit alerts Cathy is looking for. Thanks for my wings too. Irreverent came down and just burst out laughing. Where does that guy live, he says. Translation: We should visit him. We would like to make a Canadian tour and see our friends up there. We aren't that far away. BTW I had waffles, link sausage, freshly ground/brewed coffee, orange juice this morning. I did buy him the wafflemaker, which he dearly loves. He is a chef at heart. I can't get him out of the kitchen.
Frank, I just hang them by their own words. Hopefully, a few that read here wake up. But I'm not impatient. I was so dense it took me ten years to wake up and 2 to get out.
Hope things are fine up there and that snow and cold is holding off. No snow here yet though it has been below freezing.
Blondie
-
fjtoth
Thanks, Blondie (and Irreverent). I'm just 10 minutes away from Canada Bethel, so come visit me when you go through for a tour of "the Branch." Seriously, I sure would love to meet you two. You constantly amaze me with your insights.
You think YOU were dense!!! I was in there for 30 years before I started to realize I was being fooled. It took me another 20 years to finally make the break, and I nearly had a heart attack on the day I made my decision to leave. It was such a traumatic experience. Ah, but the joy and happiness that have come since then have been beyond words to describe!
Frank
-
blondie
Frank, well, as I have said elsewhere,
It's only too late when you're dead--Malcolm Forbes
We'll make it a plan. We were briefly in Canada this fall, just over the boundary up by the locks. Now that Irreverent is better we can travel farther. We did tour the Canadian Bethel a few years ago. We toured the graphics department. Were you in there? Leaving Bethel after all those years would be very hard...it can be like a womb protecting you from everything outside. No more trips this year though. My vacation is all used up. But January is a new year.
When we get up there, may be you can show me how you make those great pictures.
Blondie (and Irreverent who is still chuckling)
-
fjtoth
Blondie, I left Bethel and JWs in the summer of 1994. It was on the same day O.J. Simpson was being chased by police while riding in his white Ford Bronco, and a friend who left JWs since then has told me that at Canada Bethel some saw a connection! (Very few would have suspected O.J., and very few would have suspected me.) So I probably wasn't around when you visited the graphics department. I'm not great with graphics, but I got Adobe PhotoShop cheap at a computer show, and that makes it a breeze and a pleasure to work with graphics.
After I left Bethel, I lived and worked as a tour guide for a few years near those docks you saw, as well as at Niagara Falls. Sometimes I wish I was still there and at the same job, meeting people from all over the world and telling them of my background as a JW. I'm sure I undid a lot of the "witnessing" some of those people had heard over the years.
While I'm thinking of it, I have to tell you a funny experience that should get a real chuckle out of Irreverent:
One day in the summer of 1996 I was serving as a tour guide at one of the large hotels in Niagara Falls. I was just saying goodbye to a group when a busload of people stopped in front of the hotel with several persons waving out the windows and shouting my name and calling me "Brother." It was a congregation from near New York City where I had given several public talks and where they hadn't yet heard that I left the organization. Some of them ran out of the bus and greeted and hugged me and emphasized how glad they were to see me again since I left Brooklyn to serve at the Canadian Bethel. We spent about a half-hour together, and I just didn't have the heart to dampen their spirits by telling them I was no longer a JW. The leader of the group was a former Brooklyn Bethelite who had worked with me there for a few years, and he took delight in telling me about many of the others at Brooklyn that I knew pretty well. It was a touching experience. But it was also bittersweet in that I couldn't help wondering how they were going to feel when they got back home and started showing around some of the pictures they took, especially those of the entire bus group with me standing in front and at the centre (with my usual big wide-mouthed smile )!