Good advice, Frenchy. I try to practice tolerance, but it is hard to do sometimes. The best thing I can do is not answer someone like Fred Hall or You Know. I find myself becoming sarcastic and aggressive when I do.
Waiting, I always enjoy your posts. I guess maybe the reason so many of us work with people with problems may be for the same reason we ever thought there could be a perfect world, or a group of saints in Brookly, NY. Gullible, idealistic, and caring. Now you can add wiser and a tad angry. You asked about my children in another thread. My kids turned out well. Both were sharp as tacks. Both were valedictorians in high school with full rides to college. One was a National Merit Scholar. I think I mentioned that I tricked a real smart woman into marrying me??? Biggest favor I ever did the kids. One became a Witness and started pioneering and doing part-time work, the other became a electrical/computer engineer and works in Orlando, great job, $10,000 dollar signing bonus! He works with some real nice people. My daughter the Witness, goes door to door talking to strangers about religion and is afraid to talk to me about it. My son is always polite and when home reads the bible with us and prays with us before meals. He avoids the subject of religion, especially with his sister and though frank and honest with me on the witnesses, has shown no interest in any religion really. He is moral and ethical, as is his sister, but also has real compassion which his sister used to have in spades but seems to have traded in for spiritual arrogance in the last ten years. She is thirty, he is twenty-six. I hope your family is well and that your kids are as close to you as they should be. That is one of the great faults I find with the Witnesses, that they preach love and practice shunning and judgement. Whether it is hating the preachers and Christendom or their own who have turned from their sanctimonious path, they have given up love for self-righteousness and can't see it or allow it to be pointed out to them.
Mommy/Wendy, I took your advice and wrote my daughter today for the first time in months. Thank you. I had tried writing her every week after the first ill-thought out attempts she made at df'ing me on her own. Just newsy notes, avoiding confrontation, trying to keep the lines I had forced open, unclogged. I kept it up until our first meeting, a meal which my wife had thought would heal the wounds. They insisted on not going to either our or their home. That was a real tip off to the type of interaction we would have. Shallow, superficial like you would have with the friends of friends. No real questions, no real answers, everything glossed over. We were all real polite, everyone seemed to have a nice time but I could tell it was all just for show, and that nothing had really changed. The Stepford feeling mentioned before on this board, and after that and the crushing pain it caused my innocent wife, I stopped writing. Until today. My wife has been e-mailing her every week. We are to meet at my son's place this Sat. and have a meal with some other family members (my brothers daughter, raised in the truth but never baptized, also an engineer) coming in from Dallas. If it goes as befoe it will be all smiles and no substance with my daughter. I hope I am mistaken. Wish us well, please. Thanks for the good advice and it is good advice whether it works for us or not. Tolerance and love. Worthy goals.
Xandit, DriveslikeJehu, people like you are a big part of why I like to come on boards like this. I am so glad you are here. I wish you would speak up and support what you think. As there are some people with some bruises and tenderspots you will get a few sharp reactions, but when you consider the number of people involved it would seem to me that this many people who are really interested in what you say, hanging on every word in fact, would be hard to resist. How many doors would you have to hit to find this many? Like Frenchy, I am not Df'd or Da'd though if I were allowed to address the congregation back home on a few subjects close to my heart, I imagine I would be PDQ. I wish I knew just what you believe about a lot of things. I wish we could really talk. I guess you risk a good bit just in coming here. I thank you for that and for your tolerance.