@Ucantnome:
Just a thought on the Good news. The Apostle Paul said this.
Why? You're off-topic. @Fernando had suggested to the OP that she should inquire of her husband as to whether he was able to explain the good news to "someone in the field ... in one word," and explained also how he had learned that "the phrase 'good news'" appeared in the Bible "±152 times," so I responded to his missive, in part, by humoring him and providing my definition of the "good news," but his response, like yours, was really off-topic, as neither you nor he seemed to think it important to respond to the OP's question: What should I do?
At any rate, @Ucantnome, I just wanted to say "Boo" to you since what you posted was really illogical. You had made reference to the Proclaimers book, and then, asking quoting Galatians 1:6-9, you went on to quote the following from this book --
"A real milestone was reached, therefore, in 1925, when The Watch Tower of March 1 ... presented ... evidence that the Messianic Kingdom had been born -- established -- in 1914, that Christ had then begun [to] rule on his heavenly throne, and that thereafter Satan had been hurled from heaven down to the vicinity of the earth. This was the good news that was to be proclaimed.... [¶] "The good news of God's Kingdom continues to be central to the beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses...."
-- which was followed by this comment from you:
I think that this is different to the Good News that the apostle was preaching but maybe I'm wrong.
Yes, it is different. The Proclaimers book is not discussing the good news from the standpoint of what was being preached during the first century AD, but discussing the good news from the standpoint of what was being preached during the 20th century when it first became apparent, in 1925, that the Messianic Kingdom had been born, that Christ had begun to rule and that Satan had but only a short period of time remaining. The point being made is that this was good news to Jehovah's Witnesses back in 1925, and that this good news in particular also needed to be proclaimed as well. Get it now? In case you didn't know, the Proclaimers book is a diary that relates the modern-day history of Jehovah's Witnesses leading up to when the good news began to be proclaimed as to the establishment of God's kingdom in 1914.
Maybe you were once one of Jehovah's Witnesses in the past, but I would consider you to someone that may know how to read and pronounce the words on the page, but I'm not so sure that you accepted with alacrity the things you learned with respect to reading comprehension. Boo.
@sacdfan:
I can understand what you are saying, djeggnog, but he doesn't want to study with me. Even when I was attending meetings I had to practically force him to study.
Ok; I cannot understand how your husband's not wanting to study with you may have made you feel, but would it be correct to say that you became one of Jehovah's Witnesses because he was one of Jehovah's Witnesses and because you loved him so much that you wanted to be his wife? I don't ask you what it was he might have told you at the time, but I'm just wondering if you really wanted to be one of Jehovah's Witnesses at all? Let me elaborate here just a bit, @sacdfan:
Under the Law of Moses, there were some 613 commandments, which included the Ten Commandments, such as "Thou shalt not murder." "Thou shalt not lie...." Thou shalt not covet." However, when the law of Christ superseded the Law of Moses, the stern legalistic nature of God's commands came to an end and were replaced with kindly admonitions to right conduct like "let us not be judging one another any longer," 'let not a rotten saying proceed out of your mouth,' "abstain from fornication," 'a widow is free to be married to whom she wants, only in the Lord'; I hope I didn't lose you in making these comparisons.
Over time, some Witnesses develop an "attitude" -- for lack of a better word -- where they start thinking God's commandments to be burdensome. They want to serve God, but they feel he's too strict. "Do you see what things I have to give up?" they say. "Do you see what things I cannot do? That is why I think these kindly admonitions from the Lord to be a burden, and that is why I'm not serving God fully."
But when this attitude comes up, the first thing I would ask the Witness is, What things do you want to do? When it comes to things that are right, there is no restriction. If you want to be a loving person, God will let you be as loving as you want. If you want to be a merciful person? You can exhibit as much mercy as you want.
But Jehovah God does place a limit on the freedom we have. If someone wants to do something hateful or evil, then naturally God is going to make a law and prohibit such conduct. If someone wants to have immoral relations with someone else's wife or husband, shouldn't God put a limit on that? If someone wants to break into your house to steal your tv, your iPod, your money, jewelry, or other valuables, shouldn't there be laws to protect you from what is indecent, laws to protect your property from being stolen, laws to protect your children from drug pushers that want to make your children drug dependent and drugs addicts? God's commandments really aren't a burden at all.
If the reason your husband has been treating you so disrespectfully and disregarding his marriage with you should be because he is having an affair with someone else, you would then have to make a decision that is only yours to make: To forgive his unfaithful conduct toward you or to put him away and go your separate ways.
I don't envy your decision and I hope you do not have to make such a decision in your marriage, but if I were having an affair and I got busted, I'm not going to lie: I would cry, I would beg, I would probably say whatever it is I thought would convince my wife to forgive my betrayal of her, because I really love her and I would have to have lost my mind to betray my Lord by cheating on her, and Jehovah would not be too pleased with me either since he knows that I "get" what he purposes to do. I don't see how I could ever cheat on my wife, but other brothers -- even elders -- that we have had to disfellowship from the congregation didn't think they could ever cheat on their wives either.
It's sad to say his, but if your husband should be forced to confess to you that he has cheated -- and this is only talk, speculation, we don't know that he has done anything in this regard --- and he really loves you, then he's either going to be doing a lot of crying and begging himself, or you are going to have an uncontested divorce, which means you're going to have to endure maybe six months or a year or 18 months (I don't know!) of rebuilding your life as you try to figure out what it was you did wrong or what it is you could have done differently in order to have achieved a better result, when all you did was to accept the fact that he chose someone else to love.
Of course, if it should turn out that he did cheat on you, you could hurt him by not divorcing him, which would prevent him from remarrying the woman he chose instead of you, but the downside of your spitefully not divorcing him and not forgiving him is that it's possible that you will have sexual needs that will have to go unfulfilled, and during this period of time you will not be free to remarry, which can make you vulnerable in two (2) foreseeable ways: (1) You can become vulnerable to a "one night stand" with your husband and forever foreclose your right to divorce him later since the resumption of sexual relations with a spouse would be viewed by the congregation as a sign that one has forgiven their spouse their adultery. (2) You can become vulnerable to a "one night stand" or an affair with someone that is not your husband, which would then give your husband scriptural grounds to divorce you for you failure to live up to your marriage vow.
Again, I don't envy your decision, but people do change. You became one of Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a big change for someone to make a dedication to serve Jehovah as a disciple of Jesus, and get baptized in symbol of one's dedication, but if you should decide to disassociate yourself from Jehovah's Witnesses to study the Bible and worship God in another church, that would be a big change, too, for most Christian churches today worship Jesus as god and not Jehovah, and you could decide Christianity is not for you and you could end up in a Buddhist temple, a big change for someone that had formerly been one of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Being a JW has not helped my marriage - it has had the opposite effect.
Well, whether this is so remains to be seen, @sacdfan. Maybe through this experience, you have learned to be more tolerant of others, patient and understanding of the human condition; you may have come to learn things about yourself that you didn't know until now.
He does all the right things in the hall, pioneers when he can, is a complete dogdbody, gets made up to MS pretty soon because from the outside he looks so good. I am being mean, I know, he is a good man deep down, but he seems as hard as nails.
You can be mean, but don't lose your perspective. You may have to be the adult in the room should the need arise on your part to confront your husband in the future. In my opinion, even though I do not know your husband, if all that you have said is just as you have related it here, then even though he may be a "good man deep down," he hasn't been a good husband to you, he hasn't demonstrated to you that he loves you as much as he loves himself, which is just another one of those kindly admonitions to Christians found in the Bible that even if he hasn't cheated on you, he is at least guilty of ignoring this admonition.
He told me this morning he is going witnessing in the wilds of Scotland (or was it Ireland?) in July or August for 2 weeks. He didn't even ask if I'd like to go. You see, djeggnog, he doesn't seem to care if I am getting weaker - shouldn't he be trying to save me - to encourage me or something? Why didn't he ask me if I want to go? When I said it was a bit unfair going off for 2 weeks without me (a bit like holidaying alone) he said I have the wrong mind set and I need to correct my thinking.
Please don't be angry over what I am about to say, but, like you, I have a spouse, and if I wanted to go off somewhere for two weeks and I didn't ask my wife if she wanted to accompany me on such an outing, she would have the right to ask me if she could go with me. I could tell her, no, and she, in turn, could tell me that she is against my going away for two weeks by myself. She could object to my spending money for this trip-for-one, with the threat that upon my return from this trip to have given away or discarded everything in the house about which I care.
Of course, you don't have to carry out your threat at all, but this would force him to discuss with you his apparent inability to make sound decisions that would mutually benefit the two of you, and the apparent abandonment of his marriage, the subject of this thread. You could stop caring about the things that he cares about and concentrate on those things about which only you care. If you do most of the cooking in the house, you could continue doing "the hard part," but only serve yourself while letting him do "the easy part," and serve himself. Remember the object of these suggestions is to force him to talk to you about the things he has been doing and has not been doing with you, which have taken their toll on you emotionally, and have made you feel unloved by him and married to a stranger.
The last thing that you could do to force him to talk to you is to change the locks on all of the doors when he leaves on a day when you are planning to be home all day. Of course, this means that his keys to the house will not work so that he would have to talk to you on whatever topics you wish to discuss with him, albeit on the telephone. If he should decide to make a scene in an attempt to make you open the door to let him into the house, this would be unfortunate, but you can threaten to call one of the elders about the scene he is causing, and whether or not he causes a scene, you can ask that elder to call him on his cell phone to ask him to explain to you, his wife, why it is he is planning to go off for two weeks on a trip without including you in his plans, and this would then raise a question as to his fitness to serve as a auxiliary pioneer if he should not longer be viewed by the congregation as exemplary.
Nothing that I have suggested here is criminal, and changing the locks on all of your own doors is not a criminal offense -- I have lost the keys to our home at least twice and have had to change the locks to all of the doors, once without her knowledge because I had been forced to leave a message on her cell phone about the locks being changed and she didn't turn on her cell phone to hear my message until after she had gotten home and was forced to ring the bell to enter her own home (since her keys didn't work) -- but if you want to force your husband to talk to you, you can make this happen. If you don't talk to your husband, you will never be able to figure out if your marriage is worth saving. Maybe once he is made to understand by you that he will no longer be permitted to take you for granted, you will force him to tell him his intentions toward you and toward his marriage.
@its_me!:
And please ignore Jdeggnog's insensitive and asinine comments.
I don't believe any of the comments I made here to the OP were either insensitive or asinine.
If he likes the Borg so much, he really shouldn't be on this site anyway.
You have the right get to share your opinion, but I don't give you the right to dictate what things I decide to do, whether here on JWN or elsewhere. Why do I have to like what things you like? You are apathetic about your life and certain people, and I simply cannot afford to be you. @Simon decides who may be a member on here and who may not be, not you. Actually, I've discovered quite a few nominal Christians that exchange posts here on JWN, who have never been Jehovah's Witnesses, so I see no reason why it is you feel Jehovah's Witnesses should not be permitted to post messages here unless (1) you are an apostate, and (2) you believe JWN to be an apostate-only website. Until @Simon should make JWN strictly an apostate-only website, you're going to have to accept the fact that I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses that posts messages here.
@djeggnog
