When I look back at the last 10 years of my life it's amazing the different changes that has taken place mentally.
10 years ago I was very much a JW, but struggling as a late teen, trying to balance my youthful desire to have a good time with my desire to please God. It was a tough battle, sometimes God won, other times he didn't, but when it was all said and done I thought God and I were cool with each other.
Then I became a husband and a father, trying to keep up with the extra responsibilities that were upon me. Balance family, work, meetings and service. Thinking back on it, its funny how I was expected to make meetings and service the priority over work but I rarely did. I took work when I could even if it conflicted with meetings. I remember my book study overseer, upon finding out that I was working a Saturday morning shift asking, "What about Saturday service?" This was the elder who was given his house by his father worked at a large factory as a tradesman and ... well we can just say he was well off.
I think it was around then that I really started giving up on the whole JW lifestyle. I had to leave the area for a business trip for a couple weeks, and the memorial happened to fall in those two weeks. I told everyone at home that I was going, but I didn't. I felt guilty about that for a little while, but did get over it. I started finding excuses for not doing talks, not because I found them difficult to research and write and not because I didn't like standing in front of a group, in fact I could write up a very good talk in 20 minutes and loved public speaking. I just couldn't be bothered. The best way I can describe it was that I was mentally drained.
Well, that led me to the next step ... me leaving. It was a tough step, but after careful research I stopped everything JW. My wife stayed in for a year or so after me and that was a tough period of time, especially when she "ratted me out" to the elders because I was looking at "apostate" websites. The elders came to the house to try to encourage me to return, that's when I asked them about the UN association. They said, "I don't believe it. Ask the CO when he's here next week." Turns out the reason they came had more to do with the CO visit the next week then actually trying to get me to get back because I never heard from either of them again. My wife did tell me though that at the next meeting they asked her if I was recording the conversation because they saw a red LED in my entertainment unit. Yeah, it was the "Stand-by" button on the stereo. They also asked if my wife was taking notes because she was on the computer in the adjacent room. No, she was preparing a talk actually but what was with the paranoia?
Over the next year, my wife finally decided to give up on the whole JW scene and we were officially religion-less. We still believed in God, and the bible, but didn't have an association with a group, that was until a friend of ours invited us to go with them. We did, and it was a great church. We met many great people, many who we're still in touch with today most of whom we're not but more because we moved 2000 km away then anything else. But we fit right in and in a very short time became well known within the group of more then 800 people. But something hit me one of the last visits at the church. The pastor said, "If you believe the bible, then you believe all of it. If you don't believe one thing in the bible, then the whole thing can't be true." That really hit me, because there were things in the bible that I knew couldn't be possible.
We moved to a new city, and after talking about it my wife and I decided that we wouldn't try to find another church in our new one. That pastor's push to get people to believe in the bible 100%, his "all or nothing" suggestion made me think. For me, is it all, or is it nothing? How can you not believe something that you have proved to yourself, and do it honestly? I couldn't, so for me the bible became nothing. Just a book, and upon further research a very historically inaccurate one at that (at least the OT).
So, now I guess I'm officially an agnostic. Maybe there's something else out there, maybe there isn't. I don't know, but what I do know ... maybe next week I'll think something different.
Kwin