Dear Olimpiad,
I am a newbie like you. I was so touched by your predicament. My husband and I were JWs for almost 50 years. We were both raised as witnesses from a young age. We knew nothing but the WT doctrines.
From the feminine standpoint, I do not know how I would have reacted if it had been him who saw the truth (real truth about the WT) first and would have told it to me in a strong manner. Joe was kind of forced into stepping down from being an Elder, which he had been for 35 years. He is a contractor and just prior to 1981 he had let a young man who was studying and out of work go to work for him. Since Joe worked for himself, he had no Workmen's Comp. This young man got hurt on the job. He did not make a fuss about it, he just went to his Dr.(he was on Medi-Cal) and got it fixed. The presiding overseer heard about it and called a meeting of the Elders. He did not speak to Joe of it personally (Matthew 18) but accused him before the Elders of breaking Caesar's law. Joe said: "I was not thinking, I will take out a loan and pay for his expenses while he is not able to work." He went to the Elders and told them that he had taken steps to rectify his error. He said if you brothers feel that I am an embarrassment to the congregation, I will step down. AND THEY LET HIM!!! He was devastated. Not one of them took his side. He said later that once he was in the audience and was able to look at the Body of Elders from that standpoint, that he began to see a lack of love there. A lot of things began to happen. Since he was no longer an Elder, we had more time together. For our whole life,Joe worked full time, then went to all the meetings,going early and staying late, field service, Elder's meetings, shepherding calls and judicial meetings took up all his time. For the first time in our lives, we had free time to just be a family. We began to read the NWT with a sister who said: "When I became a Witness, they said they would study the Bible with me, but they never did." We began to read and discuss the NWT after the WT study each week. When we got to Luke 11:11-13 and saw that God "would give holy spirit to those asking", it became the pivotal point in our walk out of the WT. Lots of other things happened. We saw a sister railroaded by her Elder husband, the other Elders went house-to-house among the sisters getting their viewpoints on what kind of wife and mother she was. Joe's brother had been a Floor Elder at Bethel, Missionary in Honduras as a Gilead graduate, District and Circuit Overseer. He was beginning to walk away. We saw this and were concerned about his spirituality. In spite of all that was happening, we considered ourselves, "good Witnesses". About this time, an article appeared in Time Magazine talking about Ray Franz' leaving the WT. He had been a close personal friend of my B-i-L. Somewhere in this article it talked about the "great crowd" being in heaven and I thought that Ray must certainly have taken leave of his senses. I KNEW that the Bible taught that they were on earth. Since I now had the assurance from the NWT that I could ask for Holy Spirit, I did and I began to read the Greek Scriptures to prove to myself that the WT was right. I read the NWT, including comparing the KIT three times. When I had finished, I was angry. Not only had I proved to myself that the WT was wrong, but that they had lied to me as well. In the Foreword of the KIT it says that they will translated each Greek word with one English word. They had not done that. I began to check the Interlinear translation with the Strong's Concordance and found that the "great crowd" was most definitely in heaven. Many other things happened, but to put them all down would take a book. Suffice to say that I stopped going to the meetings. Joe continued to go for 4 months and said that not one Elder asked for me or was concerned that I was not there. We both walked away, but since Joe was a prominent Elder in the area, they called us back and disfellowshipped us as "apostates". This was 1983. I believe that God put us together in that organization and brought us out together. We were in total agreement both in and out of the organization. I believe that we were drawn closer together because we felt we were alone. That we were the only people who had disagreed with the WT. Over time we began to see that we were not alone. We read Ray's book and marvelled that he saw the same things we were seeing. We began to hear of others who were leaving the WT. My thoughts about what if I had seen the errors of the WT and Joe had not. I would like to think that I would be gentle and ask him questions, but I know that I am very strong in my opinions and perhaps I would have laid the truth on him. I am glad, I will never know. The Elders told my son that my family left because of my "Jezebelian" spirit. Which is what the WT says about any woman who would dare question their authority. So now you all know.LOL My heart goes out to all of you who came out alone. I know that there is hope. I know people who have come out and years later their family is out too. Prayer is powerful. I know that God has everything under control and that there will come a time when my son and sister and their families will speak to us again.
With all my love,
Velta
