Were you " SPIRITUALLY IMPOVERISHED"?

by refiners fire 19 Replies latest jw friends

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  refiners fire

  SHEESH! Im just about the ONLY spiritually impoverished person on the site. Except "LIbra Spirit". Everybody else was a regular goody two shoes, Especially "Sister Holy" Prisca. And as for Beck well....she was just WICKED from her CONCEPTION, simply not the same thing as being "spiritually impoverished" .

  I was so spiritually impoverished that, two weeks after my first baptism when an elder asked me to do the closing prayer, I got on stage and totally froze in terror! Eventually i managed to mumble about three sentences and an amen. Now THATS impoverished. And I DESPERATELY wanted to do one of those endless, holy sounding prayers to make everyone think I was spiritual. But God wiped my mind clean just to expose me for what I was....IMPOVERISHED!

  Edited by - refiners fire on 2 August 2002 22:18:25
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  Incense_and_Peppermints

  Or did you have the truth in your HEARTS?

  i did. i was faithful and devout and really tried every day of my life to be one of jehovah's loving children. i prayed a lot - upon awakening each day, before every meal, before bookstudy, and always before settling in for the night. and i never asked jehovah to give me anything i just told him i loved him, or thanked him for being such a loving "father". (i never asked for anything because i think i knew subconciously that i would never get anything from jehovah.) i would see other kids doing "wicked" things at the few parties i was allowed to attend and thought of that scripture about the cup being clean on the outside but dirty on the inside and so i would try doubly hard to purge those wicked thoughts about my hypocritical brothers and sisters so that my mind was pure... it was quite exhausting, as i remember... the worst was going to farrell's ice cream parlor on friday nights and praying in front of worldy people and listening to their snickers, and then having them stare at us for the rest of the evening.
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  refiners fire

  i would see other kids doing "wicked" things.... and thought of that scripture about the cup being clean on the outside but dirty on the inside and so i would try doubly hard to purge those wicked thoughts about my hypocritical brothers and sisters so that my mind was pure....

  IP. You were so holy I cant believe it. You were practically a Catholic Saint. Other people are doing VILE things and you have to purge condemnatory thoughts about them out of your mind! I mean, most dubs would have at least drawn a perverse satisfaction out of feeling superior to those "dirty cuplike" ones.
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  Incense_and_Peppermints

  IP. You were so holy I cant believe it. You were practically a Catholic Saint. Other people are doing VILE things and you have to purge condemnatory thoughts about them out of your mind! I mean, most dubs would have at least drawn a perverse satisfaction out of feeling superior to those "dirty cuplike" ones.

  the totality of their control over me was real and pervasive and never-ending. this is why this is so monstrous - to think that jehovah examines every single thought in your head and will condemn you for even one tiny bad thought, let alone action, is, well... did you ever see "the manchuraian candidate"? i saw that once and it freaked me out so bad i never watched it again but it stayed with me...

  (((refiner))) for some reason...

  p.s. no, i never felt superior to anyone, and i don't now. and ihave a problem with people who think they are superior to their fellow humans. ooh what's that song about "what if god was one of us"? i can't remember who sang it but he just might be on the bus sitting there right next to you, looking like a wino, seeing how you treat him. obviously the message is you don't know that person's story they could have been a king at one time... ~~~~~~~~~*

  Edited by - Incense_and_Peppermints on 2 August 2002 22:54:44

  (damn typos)

  Edited by - Incense_and_Peppermints on 2 August 2002 22:56:31
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  refiners fire

  (((IP))))) back attcha.

  Im determined to prove that I was the most spititually impoverished person on this site.

  I was SO impoverished that I only had 2 Scriptures in my memory recall catalogue. mark that 2 !!!

  Matthew 24 v 14... well if you couldnt remember THAT one you must have been a vegetable.

  And Phillipians 4 v 8....because that DAMN Pioneer/MS I worked with used to publicly quote it at me EVERY DAY at work when I read a novel at lunchtime. God. I hated that guy!!
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  Prisca

  Phil 4:8 is one of my favourite scriptures.......
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  Satanus

  RF

  You think you were spiritually impoverished?? I was so spiritually impoverished, that i never got my time in, in all my 150 yrs in the truth. I never brought anyone into it, had no bible studies, and all my rv's would conveniently be not at home. I know they were hiding, becuase they couldn''t stand for my idle wt prattling. I never prayed to jehovah. I just prayed to the devil, begging him to leave me alone. It worked. I had no persecution from the worldlings. It was a different story within the wt though. When the bro taking the field service groups arranged everyone, they would all go off and leave me there w nothing. But i was used to that. I just made the rounds to my not at home rv's, not getting enough time in again. I couldn't place any mags in door to door, so they used to pile up. I would fill boxes w them after a while, and sold some to used book stores. After they stopped buying them, i would drop off the boxes at laundromats.

  I used to underline the whole study article. That showed anyone checking that i regarded everything the wt wrote as important. I couldn't figure out the answers, so i had one answer for every question the wt conductor asked, 'jehovah'. I backed that comment up w the one scripture i knew by heart, ps83:18.

  Once, i was asked to give a public talk, don't ask me why. I think it was the co's shoes i polished. Anyway, my hour talk was one half hour long. Everyone said they enjoyed it.

  But, i was happy to be an imperfect cog in jahoover's perfect machine org.

  SS

  Edited by - saintsatan on 2 August 2002 23:38:19

  Edited by - saintsatan on 3 August 2002 0:10:42
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  refiners fire

  ..."I never prayed to jehovah. I just prayed to the devil, begging him to leave me alone."...

  SS. Too damn funny...

  ..."I used to underline the whole study article. That showed anyone checking that i regarded everything the wt wrote as important"....

  I give up man...you were more impoverished than I was.

  Edited by - refiners fire on 3 August 2002 0:8:45
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  Scarlet

  I never prayed. I never knew what to say.

  Meetings Always tried to get of going

  Field Service Once I was old enough to drive me and my friends would say we were going on calls and then would go to Starbucks and after that meet up with our families for lunch but we all counted the time.

  Personal study. I would skim and underline what i thought they would ask. I found personal study boring. I had it down to a science of 10 minutes tops.

  I remember the last meeting I went to back in 1999. I gave a talk that night and I said to myself what the hell am I doing. Why am I here? After that I never went back.
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  DanTheMan

  The WT "Big Four" - what a masterfully designed religious treadmill

  Meeting attendance:

  Here's a funny story. When I was a newbie, I was so serious and straight about everything. One time, when I was going to miss book study, I called the conductor to let him know i wasn't going to be there. He just laughed and said "OK buddy, we'll see you next time". Over the years it fell off some, but not much. I enjoyed the meetings. The friendships and communal atmosphere kept me in long after I started feeling like not all was right in Watchtower World.

  Personal Study:

  Hit and miss, more miss as the years went by. Sometimes the Awake! would have an interesting article or two, but the Watchtower seemed to get weirder and weirder ("you expect me to offer this to people?"), especially after 1995 and the generations thing. They seemed to get more repetitive and counsel-heavy. The ENDLESS counsel in the pubs and from the platform was a big part of my starting to chafe under the WT-yoke.

  Prayer:

  "Jehover, please forgive me for this that and the other...please help me with this and that problem...I'm sorry i fall so short in this and that way..." That's all my prayers ever consisted of. Kind of sickening, in retrospect, how much guilt and shame I suffered from and how much being in the WT reinforced those feelings.

  Field Service:

  "Hi, my name is Dan, we were offering these Bible-based (tm) magazines to you and your neighbors today. This issue of the Awake! is about police officers and how important they are in our society. Is that something you would be interested in reading?"

  "Yeah, OK, I'm a police officer myself."

  "Oh, I'm sure you'll enjoy the articles then. By the way, if you don't quit your job and join us, Jehovah is going to kill you at Armageddon."

  I didn't go out in field service much.