A bit long but please bear with me, this is about to get interesting.
Last Monday I get a phone call from this elderly lady I used to know in my old congregation. She first asked if it was me, then went into full frontal attack, you know, one of these when you feel as if person on the other side would rip your eyes out through the wires if they could.
"blah, blah, blah .. you've been filling S.. (my ex) ears with your propaganda ... blah, blah"
To cut long psycho blabbing short, it turns out my ex hasn't been to meetings for the last three months and imagine she goes "A.. (her husband) saw her coming out of Lucio (restaurant) with lots of makeup and in mini skirt (actually if I'm not mistaken it was her black skirt which is only an inch over her knees) blah blah .. and she just passed by him without saying a hello blah ..."
I mean there I could almost sympathies what impact petite, exotic-looking, Mediterranean lady in tight skirt can have on weak-hearted, sex-starved, old fart who's old enough to be her father…
And not only that but "she didn’t reply to I.. phone calls" (her son and an eldorado, married of course, whom I thought several years ago was kind of hitting on her but I could never prove it)
Finally, when she stopped to breathe some air I said "I'm not sure why you're telling me all this, in case you didn't get the memo we are divorced and I live in another country" "and isn't it interesting" she quickly jumps in "that you could still work your way into her mind" (never mind I didn't succeed while we were together)
"Sure" I said "didn't you know I can penetrate women's minds with a single hypnotic thought?"
Which of course was a provocation resulting in more blahs.
So I said “would you just please hop off my back since this has nothing to do with me” and I hung up.
Anyhow, since I had to fly there for business I thought to check on my ex and the little one. I mean last time I saw her I thought I sensed a subtle change in her language but then again something happened there that might have triggered sudden outburst of emotions so I couldn’t really tell at the time.
So I checked on them today. Well, what do you know, only literature I saw in the house that was her Italian translations of the Bible and Insight volumes. Rest was filled with psychology books. I mean I remember her asking me if I could help her choose psychology program at UoS but I didn’t make much of it at the time.
I couldn’t jump right into it so I thought to go slowly to get to the bottom of it. Well it didn’t take long for her to first start muttering something about gossip with the sound of kitchen utensils and implement landing a bit harder than usual in the sink.
Finally she sits down with coffee and lets it loose. Well at least two things happened from what I gathered. First it seems she had been a victim of some really heavy duty gossip and I mean real outback style, rugged and nasty, half-literate low blows from some people she considered real friends in congregation. Which made me think, WTBS really doesn’t need “apostates” to destroy it, they are doing it to themselves by controlling everything else except that widespread, shall we say in Greek, diabolos problem (English: Slandering). Of course, we can understand them, can’t we, after all diabolos is just a small problem among “true Christians” (didn’t Awake said something once to that effect). If Greek is too hard to understand I should point out that diabolos is also more commonly translated as Devil.
Anyway, more interesting second thing was that she was approached some time ago by a couple of preachers whom she thought initially were also JWs but it turned out they belonged to some other religion (The Way) that had almost identical beliefs and practices to JWs which instantly shattered her belief in WTBS being the only one “following original Christianity”.
I have to admit I’ve never heard of “The Way” so I did some search on her computer (oh yeah that’s another thing she also installed broadband lol) and lo and behold these fellows almost smell like dubs. Here is just one link but you can easily google the others http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_International.
I mean she is still believes in majority of WTBS doctrines and currently is at the stage of thinking of maybe what other congregation to move into (a.k.a more "open-minded one"), but is also definite about going to University and most importantly doing some serious research.
And while I highly doubt she will ever walk out of WTBS completely this example shows to me that WTBS is really falling apart where even staunchest supporters are rethinking their position inside da Tower.
Anyway, I’m flaying back home tonight with a grin on my face. I’m really happy for her, I can’t show it of course but she doesn’t even realize what kind of chains she had broken away almost single-handedly just by being led by her emotional ‘Italian genes’ lol.