Hi knight, All,
I did not receive a phone call or a visit during the first 10 years of my absence from all group activities. They obviously were indifferent. I worked in our cabinet shop with my father who was a local group leader. My wife had been a pioneer for years and continued with the group on various levels. We were both believers.
I was so busy trying to make money to help support our family that now included 4 beautiful sons that I did not think too much about religion. I did think of 10 questions for those two elders who visited. The elders were Greg Herrboldt and Loren Matz and they never did answer one of my questions nor did they try to get back to me on them. I did certainly return to them and several others including the CO and my father, requesting answers I had been promised.
Greg and Lorn invited me to the upcoming memorial and I did go. I hired Greg Herrboldt to paint my house right after that 10 year meeting and he was there on the day he told me he would be there and he did a good job and finished on time. I was very pleased with the job.
I really did want them to successfully answer my questions and show me how my concerns were my fault so I could go back to the only life I had ever known. I know now that I was holding them to the platform promises of answering questions and I was expecting something from them that they could not deliver. I was not aware then that the internal promise to answer internal questions was a teaching but not a practice. I was not aware then like I am aware now that serious questioners are snubbed and shunned as a strategy to end the questioning. My approach to the whole thing would be very different today. Then they were dealing essentially with a believing Jehovah's Witness. Today I am informed and secular.
Eventually I think they saw my lack of willingness to shelf my questions as pride and rebellion and they gave up on me. My son Brice told me I was not worth the time it would take to answer my questions. My exit was a very slow progressive thing. They had many opportunities to keep me as a group member. Their strategy of dodging my questions and flatly denying facts antagonized me and I started to dig deeper and my questions became more pointed.
Eventually they could not even begin to deal with my questions dealing with the authority of the Governing Body and the things contained in the prolific library of Watch Tower Corporation literature I have access to.
I guess they had never met anyone who had real all 7 of the Studies In The Scriptures, six written by Charles Russell, and who had read all of Rutherford's books. In the few face to face meetings I had with them, I called the meetings and I countered their every point with a reference to the Watch Tower publications. Their frustration turned to marking me and refusing any more meetings with me.
In a way I don't blame them. Their encounters with me had to be frustrating and unfun for them. They like fun things like building Kingdom Halls and having meetings. They had to have seen me as a mountain they could not climb and they just moved on.
I wish I could have had the resources like the internet and the Society's reprints and old books available from Randy Watters and Duane Magnani and others that are available now. I believe I could have completed my exit without making so much of a fuss and I may have been able to avoid many of the relationship ending confrontations I initiated with Witness friends and relatives.
My word to current questioners and soon to be walkaways is this. Understand that the teachings about the practices and the actual practices and not the same. Do not hold the Witnesses to their own teachings if you hope to slip away.
Happy day to all,
gb