Hi Steve... Thanks for your comments about my wife and me.
I suppose our shunning family members do deserve to receive the consequences of their own actions. Not necessarily because we have gone out of our way to bring them, but simply because of their own decision to abandon a loved one (arrived at either personally or by institutional manipulation.) I don't know if the following makes sense to you, but I'll try to put my perspective into words.
I know the life I left.
In it there are lots of congregation meetings, going door-to-door, assemblies, conventions, elder responsibilities and preparation for all the above. Further, there is constant pressure to "have a full share" in these things--and pressure to diminish involvement in almost everything else. There are Watchtower Society talks, "discussions" and "question and answer" sessions that themselves provide all the questions AND all the answers. It is a testament to the power of human potential that some can continue to find more and more ways to say exactly the same single thing over and over again. And it's kind of beautiful to me that--even though life was meant to be a vigorous adventure--some can still find ways to extract joy out of a self-imposed world of spiritual imprisonment to a life-limiting, kooky religious publishing company.
I'm not kidding about this: There is really nothing you and I need to know about the lives of our family members. There's unlikely to be anything that happens with their stories that we couldn't pretty much write beforehand.
My brother's wife is apparently suffering from something that sounds like the "environmental disease" I used to hear about. Some healthcare practitioners thought it was the mercury from her old fillings. Now they think it could be something in her walls or carpeting. Now this fifty year old woman, who used to weigh around 160 or so, is down to 90 pounds. Funny... She never struck me as one of those frequent sufferers of (I believe Scully once called it) "the malaise du jour." But I've always thought of her as the family member with the most potential to "wake up" about the religion. Perhaps "environmental disease" is precisely what she's suffering from. (Subjecting herself to the sick, sad "environment" of a world that is not real and a life purpose that gets harder and harder to stomach.)
It is we who have the real opportunity to live. And, since it is they who have chosen to turn away from us, and since we know we are not doing anything wrong in leading our own lives, we have hereby been released from any and all guilt or responsibility where they are concerned. While they consider it a type of discipline, you and I should consider it a gift!
We are free to read what we want, travel where we want, get involved in things that we want, learn about what we want, talk about what we want, love, rejoice and play with whom we want in the ways we want! Holy shiznit, Steve, WE are the ones who have something to talk about!
What do we want to hear from our JW family members??? What the latest book release was (containing, let's face it, only things that would make us want to vomit) from the summer convention? How some major announcement meant to frighten these poor, pitiful souls into subjection is about to be made? How another one of them has figured out a way to spend even more time going door-to-door, speaking to people who don't want to hear it, in order to convince themselves and others just how committed they are to something we know is untrue? Do we want to keep hearing about their lives so that we can continue to be stupefied by them?
I guess what I'm saying is they don't have much of a life anyway, so if they're determined not to share their lives with us, it is no great loss and probably spares us some frustration. In making the attempt to share our lives with them however, we rise above the immaturity they are threatened to impose--and give them a glimpse into a life truly worth living!
