Sorry for the delay in posting back all, now that I’m a worldly materialistic person work keeps me busy J
Due to all the welcoming comments and the requests from my first post ( http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/7/157384/1.ashx ) I thought I would elaborate on how some of the ways I got my family out the way I did. (I will try and keep this reasonably short J )
Because I had already decided just after we got married that I didn’t believe the crap anymore I started fading straight away, and I almost made a huge mistake, I was getting on quite well with an elder at the time and mentioned to him that I was a bit disillusioned with it all. That mistake taught me a lot. For the next couple of months I was bombarded with shepherding calls, drop in visits and ‘encouraging’ invites to dinners to elder’s houses and out witnessing. My wife was also told so there were a few interesting discussions at home as well. Needless to say I started pretending that I was ok again after a few months of all that…..
After the dust had settled and everything was back to normal again I decided to take things a lot slower and put a bit more thought into it. I started by very slowly reducing the number of hours witnessing, as well as very rarely answering at the meetings. I used to use any excuse I could think of from back aches to extra work to feeling sick.
Eventually my wife came and asked me what was going on. At this point I took a different approach. I told her that she ‘was right, I haven’t been as active as I should be’. I suggested restarting our family study and see if that would help. I said that maybe because I had been in the ‘truth’ for so long I was getting bored with it. So I suggested that we make the family studies interesting by picking topics and studying them together instead of just going through a book. I started the suggested topics by picking a nice easy one, I can’t remember but I think it was something to do with the memorial (I think it was around that time). The important thing here was that I was trying to make it seem as if I was trying to work at it. So I picked a topic that wasn’t going to get argumentative, and I made sure to go along with whatever the publications said.
Then I got her to pick one and so on for a couple of weeks. At the same time I increased my hours witnessing and going to meetings. Then when I felt the time was right I introduced a topic I really wanted to discuss. I did a lot of research on my own (instead of studying the watchtowers J ) until I had all of the GB’s arguments on dates looked at. Then to start the discussion off I said that I was out witnessing and someone asked the question about the witnesses use of 1914. I said that I had found it really difficult to answer and that the householder had asked some really tricky questions.
That way when I brought up arguments it wasn’t ME saying it, it was a ‘householder’. It took a lot of studying but she finally admitted that it didn’t make sense. That was the start. From there I brought up another topic, this time I think it was birthdays because one of the girls asked about it from a conversation with her friends at school. At the same time I started the slow fade again. This time my wife started it as well. And the rest is history.
I hope this helps some of you out there, I know it won’t work for everyone, but it did for me. The one piece of advice I can offer, is never directly say you don’t believe it, try you don’t understand it, or you couldn’t explain it.
Cheers,
ImFreeAtLast
