Its so amazing how many things have happen to me on March 21, the first day of spring. To name a few, its the day I went to Bethel in 1970, it is also the day I was on the front page of the "The Oregonian" newspaper in 2002 for being shunned. I can't wait to see what is going to happen next, today! I believe all of life is a journey...... we can choose to bless it or curse it. I say enjoy the trip. Its like 2 people on a roller coaster ride.......they both are having the same experience but........ one person is screaming in pure terror..... the other person out of pure joy.
Anyway back to my "roller-coaster" ride......After Roy Baty's wedding in Kansas we headed to Califorina, to see my wife's Dfed father. .Her father, Robert Stillman had got remarried. He was a really nice man who liked to smoke a pipe. Debbie loved her father more then anyone else in her family. She hadn't seen him in almost 10 years. The love, I saw between those two was amazing! When they meet it was like a scene out of a movie. Father and daughter united again, in love. How strange to be sitting in his living room, watching a slide show of our wedding. He and his wife were seating there, he had this big smile on his face, smoking his pipe. This was a wedding he was not allowed to attend because he had left the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1958. I wonder what his "worldly" wife must have been thinking to herself, watching this slide show? I'm sure she must of thought we were sick and sadistic people! To not invite this poor man to his only daughter's wedding. Then come into her home and show them pictures of it. What a witness to Jehovah that must have been for her. I'm sure she could't wait to join up, she saw the love among them alright ...........
Then for some reason the "Witnesses" are so surprised, when people slam their doors in their faces..........Go figure.
We headed back to Rhode Island, after a month in California. Her Dad come out to see us 2 years later. My wife and her brother really put the sale on him, to come back into "the truth." He just couldn't do it. I think he was afraid, that if he screwed up again, the love would be yanked away from him.....and yes he would have been right. Plus his new wife hated Jehovah's Witnesses for some reason. So how does one choose between kids or wife?..........It's the old damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Small things turn into big things. As story goes......For the lack of a nail, the shoe was lost! For the lack of a shoe the horse was lost! For the lack of a horse the rider was lost! For a lack of a rider the battle was lost!
So were did I lose the first nail in my shoe?.......In the battle to make sense of a religion that I was raise in, that talked about love but really counldn't show it.
Even before I went to Bethel. I saw my mother pressure my father into baptism. I later hated his guts because he wasn't the "spiritual head" in our family. Parents do the same thing today with their children.They say the don't believe in infant baptism but a 13 old is O.K. How many 13 year olds can decide what religion they should be the rest of their life's? Let alone even a 30 year old? I was 17 when I got baptized........which was old in those days. Do the kids of today know, that if they do get baptized and change their minds later on, they are totally screwed?.......as in "Good By" family. Maybe that should be in "the questions" they ask you before you get baptized.
Question 36.........Do you know you will be totally screwed later in life, If you decide to leave this Organization? answer "Yes" or "NO" please.
Some kids are wise enough to keep stalling............That way they can go out and do whatever they want and still hang around their dumb families.........they call it "double Lifes."
Anyway the wheels started to fall off in my family in 1961. My mother whated to move to the next congergation over. It was Azusa California, we were 100 yards from their boundry line. The "brothers" wouldn't give them their "publisher record cards." It seems back then you could get them yourself and just take them were you were moving to. Then you would just hand them over to the "Feild Service Overseer.".......Boy! wouldn't that be great if you could do that today?......grab your cards and fade of into the sunset. That is probally why they don't let you do it that way anymore.......Anyway the "brothers" wouldn't give them their cards because they said there was to much of an exodus from their hall and they wouldn't to put a stop to it. Since we were a well known family, they wanted to stop it with us. They had some committee meetings, there was a much of yelling and name calling. My folks wrote a letter to the society.......They society sent the "3 brothers" a copy of the letter, Then they got really mad, there was more meetings. Bottom line my Father was DFed for "Rebelliousness to the Organization" my mother put on "pubic reproof."........My Mother believed until the day she died that is was still "God Organization" My father knew it wasn't. My father was the first person to get DFed for not going to the Kingdom Hall he was assigned to!
My father had alot of pride. He was a forman of about 30 men and some of them were JWs. So when it got around at work that he got "kicked out" of his church, the rumors went wild. "What would you have to do to get kicked out of your church?.............screw goats!" He went to two COs to straighten this mess out, but no one wanted to go up against these three "servants." So finally my father flew to Bethel and talked to Harly Miller the head of the Service Department, at the time. Harly set up a special committee back in Califorina. Bottom line the decision was over turned, my folks were not reinstated because they should have never been Dfed to begin with...........After that my father was done. As he said "If this is what you call love...........the world looks pretty darn good".......I thought he shouldn't blame God for what a few men did........but this was the first nail I overlooked, .......the second nail I overlooked was the fact, that all the other JW kids treated me like shit, when my folks were "out.".......It will always be guilt my association with them.......The real lack of love is making those darn nails fall out.
I was serving God not man. That is why I was going to show them........I would pioneer move to Kansas when I was 18, and then go to Bethel forever. As I said, I hated my father at this piont. So when I decided to move to Kansas 1,500 miles away to pioneer, my mother said SHE would tell my Dad. I found out 20 years later she did.........that night! My Dad came home from work the day I left and asked "Were is Keith?"..........."Oh" she said "He has moved to Kansas!".......I never even said, good by, to my own Father.