A couple of weeks ago my wife and I took a vacation to celebrate our anniversary. We spent one day on the beach with some wine and had a long and wonderful conversation about the courses our lives had taken. She reminded me of something that had happened as we were escaping, and after reading the post from Ray Franz, I thought I'd relate to the board.
In the spring of 1988 I had reached the end of my rope with the WT. I'd sat through a long program at a circuit assembly about how college (and school generally) was a waste of time, we should be encouraging our kids to pioneer, blah blah blah. Our two older children were going into middle school. They are very bright, and I could not see them wasting their lives selling magazines. The thought came to me that if this religion was right, then the world had to, in fact, end sometime. I knew the WT had been preaching the nearness of the end for a long time.
I started doing my own research, which lead eventually to stashing a copy of "Crisis of Conscience" under my side of the bed, where I could pull it out and study when wife wasn't around. Although we were slowing down on meeting attendence, a number of wife's family and friends were still in. As far as I knew she was still pretty much loyal to the WT.
So one Sunday morning in May 1988 she comes out of the bedroom with COC in her hand. I thought "Oh boy, it's going to hit the fan now."
Then she smiled and said "This is MY copy." She had found mine and realized we were both doing the same thing. I don't think we went back to the KH after that, although we did go to a district convention that summer when her family came over to go to it.