From time to time members of JWD will post an experience of receiving a letter or an email from a still believing family member or friend encouraging them to "return to Jehovah" or the "organization". Sometimes an intense amount of guilt is applied to the letter receiver. Guilt for having left Jehovah or for turning their back on their family/friends. Sometimes publications are sent, or scriptures quoted or referenced.
I feel for those that have received these communications and how it must hurt to be on the receiving end of that kind of twisted logic.
But yet sometimes I wonder which is worse...to actually have someone attempt to play their hand at trying to convince you back to the fold, or to be ignored completed and whispered about behind your back.
While I am not DFd or DAd, I am completely inactive, having only been in a Kingdom Hall less than a dozen times in the last 5 years. To the JWs that I knew, it is apparent that I have left the organization, not only in faith but in my appearance and habits. With the exception of a couple of early on sheparding calls and one brother who has tried miserably to get me to go to a meeting once in a while, hardly no one, family included has ever sent me a note, letter, email, anything trying to tell me that the end is so close and that I need to turn around. The subject of anything Witness related is whispered whenever I'm in the room or car. It's like their afraid to even mention anything in my presence. Once in a while a close family member will make a snide comment about coming back to meetings, but since it's done is such a snide way, I usually change the subject or ignore it.
In one way I'm glad that I'm ignored this way...so I can ignore them back. But then again, sometimes I wish someone would show some iniative and attempt to 'witness' to me. Sometimes I just want to come out and lay it on the line and dare them to prove to me that the end is around the corner, that the WTS has all the answers when they've been wrong so many times before.
Living a fade is easy and hard at the same time. Easy in that you don't have the shunning pressures that DFd or DAd people have. Hard in the fact that you can't just come out and say what you really think or feel about some subjects. You have to keep quiet when other JW family members go on about something that you know you can create a hornet's nest by making one or two comments...comments that show that you don't accept the official doctrine or position of the GB.
It's like waiting on the other shoe to drop. Any day now, maybe, someone is going to corner you and insist on your intentions and want to know what's going on. Some may fear that day, wanting to keep the "invisibility cloak of apostasy" on as long as possible...but as more time goes by, the more I'm ready to say what I think, what I believe, what I want and to hell with anyone who can't accept me for me as I am and not as they expect me to be.
Just a little venting this afternoon...felt good to express myself
Thanks for humoring me by reading this...