Great to hear that you had a wonderful time, our Christmas was great too thanks! We had a no presents deal this year as the doting grandparents went mental last year with my kid. He still got plenty of presents, from those darned disobedient grandparents, but it was more manageable this time!
Onager
JoinedPosts by Onager
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How was your Hoilday?
by Still Totally ADD inours was great.
for the first time we had christmas with our youngest son and his family.
it was all their first christmas and what a fun and happy time we had.
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Merry Christmas 🎄
by snare&racket init’s that awesome time of year again...... food.
drink.
tree.
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Onager
Merry Christmas one and all! We'll be watching Muppet's Christmas Carol.
My son was up at the window yesterday looking for Santa in the sky. Then we ate the Panettone that we should have saved for Christmas and made hats from the boxes:
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Coping with a change of heart
by Strugglingrsa inafter 24 years of active service as a witness my marriage came to an end causing massive trauma.during this tragic life event for a period of approx 8 months i went haywire.
drinking.
partying.smoking.i was disfellowshipped.i met a wonderful non witness along the way and am remarried.what i don't get is this.if an announcement was made that i am no longer a jehovahs witness then why does the bible principle in corinthians about not even greeting he who calls himself a brother still apply.
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Onager
I still struggle to not notice the sorry state this world is in.
Strugglingrsa, Have you heard of the book "Cider with Rosie" by Laurie Lee? It's a story set in the beautiful Cotswold valleys of England that draws hundreds of thousands of tourists each year to appreciate it's beauty.
I walk my dog there sometimes as I live nearby. From the top of Swift's hill, looking down the valley, you can see curious, regular, shapes showing through the grass all the way down the valley. They are the locations of farms and villages where everyone in them was killed by the Black Death plague. In the 14th century the plague killed an estimated 40-60% of the entire population of the country. Would you prefer to be on that hill in 1349 or would you prefer to be there today?
The world has got all sorts of serious issues going on these days, true, but it has been much worse for most of the rest of human history. It is the JW conditioning of your mind that is turning the normal state of affairs into "brink of the apocalypse", the fact is that, on average, this is the best time to be alive in the whole of human history so far.
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"Jehovah will satisfy all our desires in the new system!" Are you sure about that?
by nowwhat? inbill ,a non witness is killed driving home after work, providing for his family.
he left behind his wife and 3 kids all under 8 years of age.
armageddon comes the very next month.
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Onager
I don't know, the Amish life appeals to me. Only problem is I bloody HATE pandas!!!!
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Coping with a change of heart
by Strugglingrsa inafter 24 years of active service as a witness my marriage came to an end causing massive trauma.during this tragic life event for a period of approx 8 months i went haywire.
drinking.
partying.smoking.i was disfellowshipped.i met a wonderful non witness along the way and am remarried.what i don't get is this.if an announcement was made that i am no longer a jehovahs witness then why does the bible principle in corinthians about not even greeting he who calls himself a brother still apply.
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Onager
Hi Strugglingrsa,
I too struggled with smoking when I left the JW's. I stopped when my son was born, but even now, 4 years later, I'll have the odd cigarette when I'm in the pub. It's awfully hard to stop. This is what I tell myself though:
"You are basically an awesome human being, who occasionally fails in your goal to not smoke."
You see, I don't deny that I fail, but I do deny that I am defined by my failings.
From reading your post I get the impression that you are the same. You are a good, decent, honest person and your wife is as lucky to be married to you as you are to be married to her!
You could consider your current position as a great opportunity to properly study the bible. Think about it, no avenue of study is closed to you now. Anything that doesn't sit right with you, you don't have to blindly accept and "wait on Jehovah", you can reject or accept it based on the facts. You can pursue the truth wherever it leads you and no man can tell you not to.
AS for the awful shunning situation, once you can change your thinking to the fact that you're a great guy, you'll see that they are only hurting themselves by excluding you. It still hurts, but the reality is that they are victims who are trapped in a lie, doomed to live their lives by other men's rules.
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Charles Darwin appreciation thread
by unsure incharles darwin was a gift to humanity.. he was a brave and brilliant man who revolutionized our understanding of life on earth.. since leaving the cult of jehovah's witnesses, he has become one of my personal heroes.. thank you charles darwin..
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Onager
Charles Darwin is ok I guess... :)
I prefer Alfred Russel Wallace though. He was more of a boots on the ground naturalist and not as obsessed with barnacles as Darwin. He also (possibly) came up with natural selection before Darwin, which spurred Darwin into publishing Origin, so even if he wasn't first, he certainly played a part.
It's this quote, from his book The Malay Archipelago that really made me like him though:
"The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause."
That butterfly (species) now bears his name, Wallace's Golden Birdwing.
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Xmas, love it or leave it??
by DATA-DOG ini have to say that i’m not enjoying the xmas season.
i have no emotional ties and i’m spending money that i have not set aside for xmas during a slow work season for my trade.. i’m not happy about it, because it’s foolish to spend money when you aren’t making any.
then i feel like i’m expected to do all this, and to be happy about spending money and time on persons that i’m not that involved with.
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Onager
I can't say that I love it as such, but I don't hate it either. It's a bit of cheer in a grey month and I get to see the family. Having said that I went to my 3 year old's nativity play yesterday and it made me distinctly uncomfortable. Seeing all those little faces squeaking out "Jesus is born, we love you Jesus...". I comforted myself with the thought , though, that the vast majority of the population of the UK goes through exactly the same sort of thing growing up but we're still a happily godless nation for the most part.
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Coming out of the Woodwork
by Solzhenitsyn inwho was i to think that we would be left alone?
it has been a dream for 2+ months.
a few calls i let go to voicemail but now the wife and i are getting bombarded with text messages.. this isn't going to be easy.. since we're not looking to throw a grenade into decades of relationships, text replies thus far have been..."thank you so much.".
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Onager
Sounds like it's time to not keep your old number when you get a new phone...
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Do you have any assembly memories/stories?
by RisingEagle inon an earlier thread about ice cream i remembered a snack that was sold at assemblies and that started me thinking about some of my memories of childhood at conventions/assemblies.
i guess it was the taste/smell association because even today when i go to various convention halls for home improvement expos, car shows and the like it takes me right back to the past.
i have many memories wrapped around the conventions and experienced different things because i have lots of elders in the family that were used, literally, for food service, the accounting office, security and dramas.
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Onager
I remember camping in the park near the stadium in Cardiff 30+ years ago. We caught Elvers (baby eels) in the nearby river but the best bit is that it rained and the whole site turned into a quagmire and us kids helped push the cars through the mud. After sitting through the endless tedium of the convention slipping and sliding about all over the place and getting absolutely covered in mud was absolute heaven!
I also remember making sandwiches with my brother at Dudley assembly hall and getting into trouble because we wrote things like "Comrade Mattski" and "Captain Sam" on our paper hats, which looked vaguely military to us. We only got that "privilege" once.
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New introduction
by formerministerial inhello to all of you,.
here goes an introduction of a new member.
i'm 45 years old now and we wake up my wife and i from borg a few years ago.. i'm living between spain and france, due to my work.. it has been always refreshing to listen and read many of you here.. i hope it will continue the same..
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Onager
Welcome from the UK!