Spiritual GIANT, or Mental MIDGET???

by LDH 13 Replies latest jw friends

  • LDH
    LDH

    There was once an elder in our congregation, he and his wife were Regular Pioneers, of course. And of course, they cleaned windows for a living.

    They lived in the basement of a decades old building, in what amounted to a studio apartment. I think the square footage was about 8. Church mice could've loaned these two money.

    Of course, being a young JW and believing most of the malarkey you are told, you tend to look up to these men as spiritual giants, even though most of what they talk about is pure, unadulterated bullshit.

    Let me give you an example.

    K* and D* always enjoyed their coffee. So much so, that on their Reg. Pio. budget, they brought along two thermos fulls in the car so they wouldn't have to spend 60 cents at McDonalds. This went on for YEARS, as long as I can remember. I regular pioneered too, so I worked with them frequently. Then all of a sudden, the coffee stopped. It became very obvious very quickly that K^ and D* didn't have their coffee.

    K* turned into an even bigger butt-munch and his wife was a raging bee-yoch. After a couple of days of this intolerable behavior, K* and D* apologized to the car group for their terrible attitude.It seems the Awake! had featured an article about coffee. (by ASnake! correspondent in El Salvador, LOL). Of course, the article seemed innocuous enough, featuring pictures and nice facts and information about coffee, but never-the-less, got down to the nitty gritty and warned true Christians about the dangers of being addicted to caffeine!!! Oh, the horror!

    K* and D* immediately saw in themselves the dangers of being caffeine addicts and decided to go cold-turkey!!!

    At the time, it seemed like such a wondrous sacrifice on the part of these two superfine Christians. Truly, they were Spiritual Giants.

    In retrospect, I now know they were worshipping a God who wanted them to:

    • drive a ten year old clunker
    • live in a basement apartment with brick walls (in Upstate New York, where the winters are mind-blowing)
    • clean windows for a living, even though K* had a severe, visible case of scoliosis and couldn't even walk or stand straight
    • buy their clothing from yard sales or wait for hand-me-downs
    • sell his books for upwards of 100 hours a month, even in the frigid NY winters
    • spend the rest of their time writing and re-writing talks, 'demonstrations' and working on getting their 'Bible Students' to the meeting

    and to add insult to injury,

    • now they couldn't even drink a cup of #(*%$ing coffee without having a guilty conscience!

    The god of the Watchtower can bite my ass. Truly, K* and D* have gone from Spiritual Giants to Mental Midgets in my mind.

    You know and Mental Midgets? Share your story here.

    Lisa

    Extra Large Mocha Frappucino Class

  • anti-absolutist
    anti-absolutist

    Yeah, I know a few mental midgets: Charles Taze Russell, Joseph Rutherford, Nathan Knorr, Fred Franz.....

    Brad

  • Satanus
    Satanus

    Longtime elder, many yrs pioneer, lifetime window washer, still privileged to be washing at the age of 69 yrs. He and his wife raised two kids. Both, no doubt mental midgets as well. The woman who married him had been going to university, attending some of the same classes as david suzuki. But she didn't start out a mental midget. She was a rebel, and got stuck in the antiworld, antihuman wt.

    SS

  • be wise
    be wise

    Heh, Heh Mental Midgets, that's a good one Lisa. We should make a JW dictionary and put it under Spiritual Giant.

  • rocketman
    rocketman

    Not sure I have a story (early AM memory circuits still in slumber mode), but I love your "class" designations Lisa. "Extra Large Mocha Frappuchino Class" is a winner!

  • minimus
    minimus

    Lisa, you should have never let the cat out of the bag. All this time I thought you were so smart. You actually believed these people were spiritual giants because they gave up everything, including coffee???..........I am for you......minimus, of the mental giant class

  • notperfectyet
    notperfectyet

    Lisa...put that x-tra large Mocha Frappuchino down!

    Take a deep breath.......

    Feel better?...GOOD......

    Now...read this.......

    we were powerless over coffee-- that our lives had become unmanageable.

    2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

    3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

    4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

    5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

    6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

    7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

    8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

    9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

    10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

    11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

    12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

    Twelve Traditions->

    Now...because the nice window washers said they were sorry...wasn't that enough?...

    Your anger seems to alert the rest of us that you too..may have a problem...

    Meeting tonite at 8:00 sharp...bring a friend.............

    Luv you girl.......

  • manon
    manon

    Oh yeah, did I ever know people who traveled down this road. It's considered righteous poverty. My sisters sister in law & husband did the whole poverty=spiritual success routine opting for a life of missionary abroad work, stint at BHQ & GS the whole razzle dazzle. Its looked upon as a noble choice amongst JW circles.

  • hillary_step
    hillary_step

    Lol....Lisa,

    It is the mean ones that I cannot fathom.

    It reminds me of the time as a young and very innocent Regular Pioneer that a brother, let us just call him Sid, asked me to accompany him on service one Saturday morning in the middle of British winter, complete with a biting and snarling snow blizzard. At my suggestion that we wait for better weather, he whined a huge tale regarding how the elders had demanded more service time from him so that he could then join their club and how depressed he was and needed somebody to talk to. I stupidly lamented, sucker that I was, am, was, am...

    We used his car and he took me on a return visit in the middle of nowhere. The man we visited gasped when they saw us, and spontaneously uttered the phrase common in England at moments of shock, 'Bloody Hell', as by now the snow was heavily deposited and the roads were quickly becoming impassable. It just so happened that this RV was only a couple of miles from Sid’s warm house so we slowly returned to his home for a coffee. After a while Sid began to look very depressed and I asked him what was the matter. He told me that he was running out of gas and could not afford to run me home! I had been warned how mean he was, but had always considered this to be a congregation joke and had not taken it seriously, though his service bag, held together by numerous different re-stitching styles should have pre-warned me. By now the buses and trains had ceased operating and this meant a five mile walk home in eighteen inches of snow, against the wind.

    I will always recall that as I slipped and shimmied along their steep drive ending up in a heap at the bottom, I scowled up at his window to see Sid and wife waving and grinning like chimpanzees after a dental de-scale.

    They were not spiritual giants, though Mrs. Sid did possess a pair of unspiritual giants that had young male Pioneers spending many an hour comparing their rude nick-names for her. The consensus of opinion was that Sid never actually mated with her as he was to cheap to buy contraceptives and would not take the risk of impregnating her lest he would need to take time off work to visit her in hospital.

    Best to you Lisa - HS

  • minimus
    minimus

    Hillary, that was sooo funny!!!!!! You should write a book.My question is why didn't you stay at Sid's place.

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