in a dead silent...cold congregation
lol. The first time it was in a big hall which several Portuguese congregations, including ours, had rented for the Memorial. I can still remember the stare of the speaker when, just after saying something to the effect of: "probably nobody here has partaken tonight," he saw the broken bread in the returning plate...
what was your mindset back then? Why did u parttake?
That's a conclusion I reached months before when I was still in Bethel. I had been reading the NT for some time, and much of it was echoing louder and louder in my mind. Before I even realised the consequences, I was very spontaneously taking for myself what the WT official doctrine limits to the "anointed". One day it really hit me as I was reading Romans 8. Tears of joy, literally, sorry for the cliché. But the next second I realised all it implied -- I would have to take this stand, and in the same breath the WT doctrine had crumbled in my mind beyond repair: I was both a Christian and an apostate, and there was simply no way back.
But I was scared of the consequences and the inevitable misunderstandings it would bring with a host of JW friends, and I felt very, very weak. One thing I prayed for is not to be left alone through whatever was coming.
The day I left Bethel several months later, one friend I had met there and was to be assigned with as a pioneer came to help me for the move. Before we left we had a walk in the nearby forest as we used to and, to my surprise, he told me that from childhood he had felt like partaking in the Memorial, that the elders had repeatedly talked him out of it, but that now he wouldn't go against his convictions any longer. Then I told him about my experience.
So that's where we were coming from.
