A poster recently inferred that I was never a JW, but was only on this site to spread a 'political' dogma. Not true!
Anyway, cleaning up some old files this morning, I found an old 'story of life' post that I made (I think) on another XJW site. So here's a 'sortof' explanation ow how I left the YHWH/JESUS prison farm:
Somewhere, the other day, I heard Kenny Rogers singing, 'Lucille' and was instantly transported back to a time when my long imprisonment in the prison of Yahweh and Jesus was coming to an end.
In the last
two years of my Christian enslavement, I somehow became conscious of the song,
and hung on to it, playing it often (secretly) as it somehow expressed my
predicament.
Why does
that song have that power? Hard to explain, but I think that the song conveyed
a certain sympathy for the two key characters in it. Lucille the burdened
housewife caught in a cycle of poverty and grinding work, thinking that there
must be a better life somewhere else, and her husband, a hardworking,
unthinking character who accepted that grinding work was his destiny, perhaps just
doing the best he knew how, without any real appreciation of wife’s feelings.
With 1975
far behind us, the promised land of the Paradise
earth seemed as far away as ever. I had started to think my spirit was
imprisoned, like Lucille’s. I’d turned to music, mostly classical piano pieces,
wanting something beautiful that was missing in me. I took an Art class,
learning how to make etchings. I stood down as an elder. All the time, thinking
that my spirit was trapped. And when, one day, I heard that song on my car
radio, there was an instant appeal. It was not a gender issue, it was simply a
human issue,
Lucille's
line, [quote] "I finally quit living on dreams" [/quote] presented my situation
lucidly. I'd been living on the painted Christian dream of life in a Paradise. It had been promised as only a few years away.
The few years had stretched into decades. I'd seen faithful brothers and
sisters, older than I was, come to the end of their lives, not seeing the expectation of their faith, and their dream had failed, as they entered the common grave of all mankind. My youth
had vanished in the work in the field, I was approaching old age. Reality woke
me. The dream was only a dream
Would I be
like Lucille's husband, slaving away in the field, while the promises faded
into darkness ? Or, was there something else? Again the words placed in
Lucille's mind:
"I'm after whatever the other life brings!" had meaning to me. I'd offered my life as a sacrifice to Yahweh and Jesus. But the promised reward was crumbling to dust in front of me.
What of all
the legitimate things I had sacrificed? If death ends all, then I had
sacrificed them for nothing but dust.
Worse, like
Lucille, I had to walk away from things I loved. More accurately, they would be
ripped away from me, by those who would claim that they were protecting my
family from my faithless apostacy. And I knew that my former wife would never turn
away from her concepts, she had built her life's framework around the dream.
And, that
was how it turned out. I lost many things that I held dear.
But I regained my freedom, my right to be me, for better or worse. I am me.
Yahweh and Jesus became the illusion. I was Free, free to dream other dreams