Please Respond To Survey! 25 more needed please.

by Big Jim 113 Replies latest jw friends

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  Free2Bme

  Through my mum when I was 7.
  Dunno if she can be truly called a door-to-door case as she had been witnessed to by her cousins.
  No idea how THEY got it originally.

  Free
• 

  Simon

  I was born in and so was my Wife

  My mother was 2nd gen. My father was a convert.

  I hate how I sometimes 'resent' my parents and grandparents for not seeing through it. I can not see how anyone not brought up in it could fall for it (no offence intended to those that have).
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  chipster

  born into it...parents were baptized in NYC 1958..i was six. father's mom associated with cong, so did aunt and uncle.. guess the whole family kind of followed suit. wow, never really thought about it.

  interesting survey.
• 

  Amazing

  The short of it: I was working at an engineering job, and my supervisor was a Reg. Pioneer. He started witnessing to me, and placed the Truth Book with me. The rest is history.

  The long of it: My mother had recently died, my best friend moved away, I moved 500 miles away to stay with my brother because my dad abandoned me. The Viet Nam war was tearing the nation apart. The Hippie movement and drug culture were challegning every American tradition and institution. Colleges were having protests and riots. The Civil Rights movement was gaining great momentum. Martin King and Bobby Kennedy were assasinated. My religion, the Catholic Chruch was becoming irrevelant and stale. I was not sure about anything in life ... and then enter the JWs with their end-time prophecy about 1975, world conditions, armageddon, Matthew 24, and the October 8, 1968 Awake! "Is It Later Than You Think? - What Will The 1970s Bring?" and the Truth That Leads to Eternal Life and its claim of 1975 being the time for Armageddon ... and the rest is still history.

  Amazing
• 

  Billygoat

  Amazing,

  Are you still a JW?

  Billygoat
• 

  peterstride

  Born into it also. My dad was born into it and so was my mom. They both left years before I finally saw the light and came out of this destructive cult.

  I married in the cult, and my wife had also been born in it. She was a pioneer, so she was out almost every day. I averaged between 15 to 20 hours in service, had 3 bible studies (more than she did), did the magazines, did microphones, picked up the literature for the congregation I was in. Any other wife would have been very happy with me, since I was on my way to becoming an MS.

  Yet, my pioneer wife would still get upset if I came home from my full time work, and I didn't go out in service with her. While not going into details about how upset she would get, I ended up calling in the elders and asking them to remove her from being a pioneer, since there was no way she could go out and tell others how to live their lives, when she didn't pracice that. She was removed.

  That, and other things that she did (after we got married) made my mind up to break up with her. I still believed in the WTS at that time, but I didn't want to be married to someone that I didn't love anymore, for the rest of my life.

  While trying to get back in, I took a friend's chalenge to research certain things, just to prove to him that the WTS was right. Imagine my surprise when I found out otherwise. That made me research things even more, and also made me read Ray Franz's books...and then I saw the light.

  It's like having the rug pulled out from under your feet, finding out that the religion you thought was the only true religion in the world...to be false. Everything crumbled.

  But then...I really started living, and finding out things for myself, instead of blindly believing what a group of old men in Brooklyn that call themselves the "faithfull and discreet slave" spout as inspired words from God.

  That's the short of my story,

  Peter Stride
  Toronto, Canada
• 

  silentlambs

  my wife and i were born into the wt. both of our fathers were po's and we were the first born of our respective families. always the example always on the assemblys and working in all the departments. i must say i enjoyed the work in helping the friends the most. last year i was the overseer of the parking department, did not hardly catch any of the program, it was great. got everyone out in record time. i guess it was kind of like a game, a way to forget the problems and do the work. my parents are both reg pioneering as i write and my wife's mother a reg aux. they of course have nothing to do with us though we are not df or da. i am sad for them and ashamed to have parents who have allowed themselves to be programmed to no longer understand what real love and family are all about. you have to take the bad with the good, i am glad to be free with my wife and children. being a witness taught me much, gave many good memories, yet demanded a terrible price. i hope it has made me a better person, perhaps a little wiser than the average joe, a better understanding of what real love is all about, and that people are just people all trying to find the best way to get through this thing called life. i must say i feel more at peace, my eye hasen't twiched in six months.
• 

  DCs Ghost

  1972 my mom was conned at the door,
  she had just finalized her divorce from my dad and was snagged during an emotional low. I was 2 years old at the time so for all practical purposes i was raised as a dub. In 1976 she married some shmuck that had just been assimilitated and he slowly and gradually moved up the ranks in the hall. Thus preventing me from making the break for it in my teen age years.

  dc
• 

  Roamingfeline

  Well, the story of my assimilation is a bit convoluted. My first contact with it was when I was 13, back in the fall of 1968. An elderly woman started studying with my mother. My mother had lost her mother to a heart attack the previous summer. Mom studied for awhile, tried to force all the kids (my three bros and I) into a study, and took me to several meetings. I got to know the other teens a bit, and liked them. So when my mother figured out that something wasn't right with a religion which breaks up families, I still stayed in. But, I went back out again about the age of 16, only to flirt with it again when I married and had my first child. (The old fear of armageddon thing) Two sisters I had previously known came to my door one day, and that started it all up again. My husband even studied, but only temporarily. I went back out again before baptism, and shelved it for another few years. Fast forward to 1985, when my grandparents were dying, along with my best friend's mother, from cancer. Then my own mother got cancer. An old friend came to the door one day, and I listened to her reasoning. BIG MISTAKE. I got sucked in all the way this time, and was baptized in 1986, which doomed my marriage, as my husband HATED this cult. I left in 1995, after the "generation of 1914" doctrine was changed and I finally woke up to the lies I had been swallowing all those years, out of fear of death and longing for a better life.

  And that's pretty much it in a nutshell.

  RCat
• 

  bonnie38

  As a child I lived with my aunt. She was very Catholic, but she was interested in the Bible. When I was 11, she broke her leg and was out of work for 6 months. She agreed to a home Bible study (she had bween informally witnessed to at her place of employment). Every week she told me what she learned, and I believed that it was the truth. She had no intention of leaving th Catholic church. When she went back to work she stopped her study. I wanted to study, but she would not allow that because she was afraid that I would leave the Church. When I started high school, she agreed to let me have a Bible study. The rest is history. I left the Church, got baptized, postponed college to pioneer. My aunt eventually resumed studying and was baptized 3 years after I was. She, unfortunately, is still a JW.