The year is circa 1989 in San Antonio Texas, our congregation is doing a quick build. This experience would change my life and the life of two other families in our area. I was one of the department heads of this project and what I saw and experienced left me seeing reality for what it was and not what I had been told it was.
During the foundation phase I saw pettiness incompetence and egos clash in the “spiritual paradise”. The first day of construction was uneventful there were the crowds of single people cruising looking to score, all the hard worker bees, all the goof offs, all the spectators. The second day a teenage girl went to her car, as she was backing up she crushed a five year old into another car and killed her. Bethel was called at once, and a lawyer was dispatched to the scene with cash.
The third day the mood was somber; people could not believe what had happened. This shock turned into social denial. In coming days it was as if nothing had happened. The parents of the child that was killed went into a severe depression as you might imagine. The family of the killer was covertly ostracized so much, that they had to move to another city. A year goes by and the father of the girl comes to see me as a pro bono client because he was unemployed, still depressed and broke financially, they had spent the money from the cash settlement he had received from Bethel.
About six months after the building a guy from Bethel named Dixon was sent to do the grand opening ceremony. The hall was very beautiful it was state of the art and the decorations used made many call it the Taj Mahal.
Having inside info into the strategy of the society, the lawyer was dispatched to pay off the family and to get a judgment proof insulation in case the family became apostates and decided to sue. While I can’t disclose other details in a public forum such as this I can tell you it was pennies this father got for the negligence of parking attendants that led to the loss of his little girl and years of grief.
This experience showed me the ugliness and pettiness in people when they worked on a large project such as this. The illusion of a spiritual paradise was just that a fantasy created with semantics. It also showed me the greedy self-serving attitude of the Watchtower; this experience was just one more reason for me to df the Watchtower.