Excellent post, Teejay and some very good replies as well. I have never really been a happy person. My father committed suicide when I was fifteen. Mom went berserk, spent some time in a mental hospital and I had four siblings to tend to. She began drinking and going through men like there was no tomorrow. Two years later I was married and on my own. The next twenty years were a little harder. I have always felt the weight of being responsible for others bearing down on my shoulders.
I don’t suppose this makes me a good candidate for a response to this thread but here goes anyway. Teejay you touched on some very real issues here. I will try to reply to the examples that you give by taking them at face value. (I don’t know those people and that makes it easier to do so.) One of my favorite sayings is: “The richest person in the world is not the person who has the most but rather, the person who needs the least.” Jesus said it better when he said that: “…because even when a person has an abundance his life does not result from the things he possesses” Luke 12:15, NWT. Your rich friend once entertained a hope of everlasting life in a perfect world. Now all he has are the riches of this world and a life that will end one day. Whatever he achieves or accomplishes will perish with him and that can make a person feel as though he has no relevance. Death would not be so bad if it weren’t so damn permanent!
Your mother, on the other hand still entertains that hope of everlasting life in a new world where God rules and all is right with the world. She feels loved by God and death to her (if it comes at all) will merely shield her from the culmination of the Great Tribulation at Armageddon. She will awaken in a world where all the anxieties and pains and trials of this world will be things of the past. She will be able to fulfill every wish she ever entertained, develop all interests, and do it all while feeling elated every second of every waking moment of her life…which will never end. I’d take that over a Porche any day.
The key word in both examples is ‘temporary’. Both your friend and your mother view their situations as temporary. THAT being the case, which life would you prefer? I think it’s easy enough to understand that IF (big, big word here) that is indeed the case, MOST of US would choose the latter life.
For most of us here we have come to realize that the Society is not what it pretends (actually believes!) itself to be. With that realization came abandonment of those hopes of everlasting life for most of us. For those who were once JW’s that hope must have really meant something to them…to put up with all that a Witness has to put up with…there must have been a great longing for that new world. Now most of us have lost that hope. How can we be happy? We can find some measure of happiness in certain aspects of our lives but what of the hope that once sustained us? How can we pretend to discard what was so precious to us at one time and say now that it really meant nothing to us? Perhaps some of us don’t care to remember what once meant EVERYTHING to us. Perhaps some of us cannot bear to remember it.
Joel: Your words touched my heart also. I know how you feel, brother. Your words “I have found nothing else to believe in” reverberate like a million clashing cymbals in my mind. Perhaps it’s time to remember that just because the messenger personally proved to be less than what we expected, and although the message may have been somewhat corrupted by him, there is still hope.
One final thought. I would gladly put up with the silly rules, the less than loving attitude of some Witnesses, all those meetings and the field service and all the time involved in working at the conventions, the errors and shortcomings of elders and traveling overseers, the forsaking of worldly goods and pleasures, the insults at the doors, the scornful looks of doctors and nurses when we tell them we can’t take blood and would rather die than do so…the condescending remarks and those looks of contempt from worldly people when they hear that we are a Witness. I would gladly put up with all of that…and more… if only it was THE TRUTH. Perhaps if we could remember that those who stay really believe it to be so…that we, at one time, believed it to be so…then we could better understand the brothers and sisters we left behind.
