As a JW...ever experience a coincidence and thought it was divine intervention?

by undercover 5 Replies latest jw friends

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  undercover

  I was listening to Internet radio and an old Black Sabbath song came on...from their first album, not a "hit", one of the lesser played tunes.

  Well, it jogged my memory for some reason and I remembered this incidence in school, about 6th or 7th grade. Black Sabbath was just gaining popularity then and I remember in one class where some guys were talking about it. I knew just enough about them that I "knew" they were demonic and not proper for a JW to listen to. One of the guys said they would bring the album in the next day and they would listen to it on the class record player during recess.

  I remember thinking or worrying about how to not be around when the demonic music was going to be played. I don't remember details but I remember enough to know that I was actually worried about demon activity.

  So the next day comes and the guys are all huddled around the record player in the corner ready to listen. I'm sitting at my desk toward the front of the room, a little apprehensive about being in the room while the demons were being summoned.

  As the first song started...the first time I ever heard any Sabbath...I heard the darkness and sinister drone of the distorted chords. It was like nothing I had ever heard. I was strangely attracted to it but scared that by hearing it and being curious about it that I was inviting demon attack.

  But before the first song could finish, the record player stopped. It just quit playing. The turntable was turning, the needle was on the record but no sound was coming out. The guys fiddled around with it and never could get it going.

  I was astonished. Here I was in a situation where the demons could get to me and Jehovah had seen to it that the record couldn't play thus thwarting any attack that was to be made.

  I don't know how long I actually believed that divine intervention took place to save me that day...I would like to think that by senior high school I had gotten over it, though I still wouldn't listen to certain music. It wasn't until I was in my 20s before I shook off the superstitions about demonic music and allowed myself to listen to whatever I wanted.

  Looking back on it now, I feel absolutely ridiculous ever having that kind of reaction to the coincidence of a cheap school record player not working.

  What a silly JW kid I was...but it was a powerful memory that flooded back as I listened to that old Sabbath song.
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  WTWizard

  I was at work, and they tried to play a Led Zeppelin tape. It turns out that those tapes are very crappy and tend to have very short life expectancies before jamming. Sure enough, they got the first song almost done, and the tape was eaten. They tried again, and it ate the tape again (I could tell that was going to happen--it didn't sound too healthy before eating the tape. Of course, the witlesses thought that Jehovah intervened by causing the tape to be eaten.

  Funny thing, now I have played Led Zeppelin CDs through with no incident.
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  neverendingjourney

  I had an incident come up early on in my embrace of JWism that stayed with me for a long time. In fact, this incident was one of the primary reasons I took so long to leave the Witnesses. It just seemed too much of a coincidence to be, well, a coincidence.

  I was raised a JW by “spiritually weak” parents who demanded that I do as they said and not as they did. From my earliest memories, I was the kind of kid who couldn’t wait to be old enough to leave this stupid religion behind. This all changed when I turned 15. I’ll spare you the details, but essentially I hit a rough patch in my life and I decided to give JWism a chance. I fell under the tutelage of an old-school elder type who took it upon himself to mentor me. He was a really smart guy who seemingly had an answer to all of the questions I had. His influence and my naiveté was a powerful mix. Those factors combined with my reading of the Creation book helped cement me as a firm believer in all things JW. Within a year I was a seemingly Bethel-bound regular pioneer.

  Anyhow, this elder schooled me in the old-school JW frame of mind. He taught me that missing meetings because of work was an absolute sin. If your job required that you miss meetings, it was your Christian duty to quit your job and trust that Jehovah would provide. I grew up in a poor family and the pressure was on for me to work as soon as possible to help my parents make ends meet. When I was 16, I took up a part-time job after school. I made sure to clear my meeting nights with the owners beforehand, and I got to leave early on those nights. This generated a lot of resentment with my co-workers.

  Well, the C.O. visit rolled around, and as it always happened, meetings got rescheduled that week to make it more convenient for the CO. We shared a Hall with a few other congregations, so we had weird meeting nights. I went up to my boss and asked her if I could leave early on different nights that week because the meeting schedule had changed. They were pretty tired of having to give me special treatment, so the boss decided to send me a message. She refused. At the time, I was crushed. I felt I was between a rock and a hard place. I was getting credit through my high school for having this job, so if I quit, I would fail the class at school. If I went to work instead of the meeting, I would be failing Jehovah and sinning against him. I was genuinely torn and I remember going to work the night of the first CO meeting praying over and over to God for forgiveness and asking him to help me find a way to make it to the meeting. Well, I’ll be damned if an electrical fire didn’t break out soon after I got to work. We had to shut the place down, and I was able to arrive at the meeting with time to spare.

  This kind of an experience early on in the conversion process serves to cement one’s faith. For years, any time doubts crept into my mind, I would think back to this day. I viewed it almost as a physical manifestation of God. It was something palpable. Something I could hold onto as proof of God’s existence. It wasn’t until many years later when I began listening to Christian radio stations on the drive home from work that I realized that people from all sorts of religions had experienced similar events which they viewed as physical manifestations of divine intervention. It made me realize that people from different faiths and different denominations were viewing various coincidences as signs of godly intervention. This realization along with the fact that Jehovah never seemed to answer hundreds of other prayers helped me realize that it this event had been a coincidence. Nonetheless, it was a powerful coincidence and one that influenced my decision-making for years.
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  undercover

  That's a good one, journey...

  Ya know, they give these kind of experiences at the assemblies all the time. And the drones applaud and exclaim "Praise Jah" when they see how things were "manipulated" from on high to save our brothers from breaking their integrity or to further the kingdom work some how.

  So when we experienced a coincidence we suspended logic and reasoning and gave credit to an imaginary source because we were conditioned to think that it was really possible since so many of our brothers have already supposedly experienced it.

  Just one more indication of the cult indoctrination methods used by the Society.
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  B_Deserter

  Man Jehovah must have been more concerned for you than he was for me. Black Sabbath instantly became one of my favorite bands and I listened to them over and over again as a dub without incident. I can't imagine though what it must have been like hearing that kind of music for the first time. Actually being there to hear the birth scream of heavy metal, man you are fortunate.
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  neverendingjourney

  There was another coincidence that had an impact on my life. This happened a few years after the first coincidence I recounted above. This time I was approximately 21 years old. I had been through a bit of a rollercoaster in my JW life. I began as a devout teenager when I was baptized at 16 and three years later I had run out of steam. The inconsistencies between what was in print and what I saw in practice just got to me. I suppressed internal doubts and disappointments, but I couldn’t prevent them from zapping all of my initial joy and enthusiasm.

  Anyhow, like I said earlier, I was roughly 21 years old and I had begun taking some classes that local community college. It turns out Jehovah didn’t provide nearly as well as I thought he would and I had to face the fact that I needed some credentials to find a decent job. I didn’t own a computer at the time and the internet was still kind of a new phenomenon. It was about this time that the Society began to fight back against the internet and warn JWs about the “dangers” that lurked there. I heard a few of the “friends” discuss how the vast majority of the material online was apostate. The word was that if you typed “Jehovah’s Witnesses” in a web browser, the vast majority of the results would be “apostate.”

  Well, like a kid you tell not to do something, I got curious and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I went to the computer lab at school and played around online for a bit. I went to the Society’s website, and then I typed “Jehovah’s Witnesses” into the browser and hit “Enter.” At the exact same moment as I hit the “Enter” key, there was a power surge and the lights went out momentarily at the library. The computers all shut down and had to be rebooted. This experience was enough to keep me away from “apostate” sites for a while. I took it as a sign from God that I was approaching dangerous territory.

  The funny thing is that a few years after that, after I had figured out by myself that this wasn’t the truth, I found JWD by accident and I wanted to upload my personal story. I spent some time writing it all out on Word and went I went to paste it onto the JWD, I kept getting an error message. Had I still been clinging to JW beliefs, even in a minor way, I would have viewed this as a sign of divine intervention, God keeping me from mixing with apostates. It turns out that JWD’s software back then didn’t accommodate cut and paste jobs from Word. Now the problem’s been fixed with this newer version of JWD, but it goes to show how easy it is to interpret a coincidence according to your preexisting beliefs.