David Drozdowski

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Posts by David Drozdowski

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  20

  Share your Haysbridge, Surrey assembly hall memories

  by truthseeker in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  did you ever go to the haysbridge assembly hall in surrey?.

  post your experiences.

  the assembly hall i believe used to be a reformed school for boys and was completely renovated and dedicated in 1985.. it was the only assembly hall i knew of that sold souvenir pens, book marks and notepads.. .

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  David Drozdowski

  HAHA! My family has told me about the colour, but I think that red and white was weird anyway.
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  20

  Share your Haysbridge, Surrey assembly hall memories

  by truthseeker in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  did you ever go to the haysbridge assembly hall in surrey?.

  post your experiences.

  the assembly hall i believe used to be a reformed school for boys and was completely renovated and dedicated in 1985.. it was the only assembly hall i knew of that sold souvenir pens, book marks and notepads.. .

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  David Drozdowski

  Wow, 8 years since a reply, but that's alright... In spite of being bored mindless by talks, dramas, and so-called compendiums (or compendia, was that what the multiple section things were called?)... Anyway, I used to doodle a lot. I liked meeting people our family was fond of, seeing folks we knew we'd see there. I guess there was comfort, reassurance in it, that so-and-so was still "coming along"... I remember at Hayes Bridge, possible the last time I went with my parents, I had a notepad for doodling and decided to play naughts and crosses with myself. I worked out by myself that it was always impossible to lose if you knew what you were doing and how to win if the other person didn't know what they were doing... Yes, I was a very spiritual geeky kid :) What I absolutely LOVED about Hayes Bridge that they eventually did away with for some reason (perhaps along with that not-for-profit cleaning up when they stopped officially charging for publications and had suggested donations instead) was those 50p strips of tickets. My granddad used to buy us some before he was dissed, and I don't know what I did with the remaining few except try to save them up for something, but thinking about this now, it's crazy to think that I used to use 7x 5p tickets to by a caramel or mint something chocolate bar. No idea what brand, but sweets!!! And only 35p for a whole chocolate bar! I don't even remember what else they used to sell in those lunch rooms at Hayes Bridge...
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  48

  Jehovah protects his people. Did he ever protect you?

  by TimeBandit in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  hello forum.

  i started this topic because i had been thinking recently about a story that i had heard many times in different congregations over the years.

  kind of a jw urban legend if you will.

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  David Drozdowski

  I'm 30 and was a JW for the first roughly 12 years of my life, when I was allowed to choose and stopped going. Not very JW to let me choose at that age, but a lot had been wrecked in our family by the organisation and although my parents and several siblings have held on to this day, they eased up on the force component in the years leading up to be adolescence. That's just an intro. Do I still believe that God is Yahweh? Yes, just without the obsession with the pronunciation of one of his names. So have I been protected by God? Well, as it has been pointed out, that is subjective, so subjectively, yes. When I was 9 and shit started hitting the fan in our family life, aided and abetted by the congregation, we moved from Southeast England to the North of England, and I had (temporarily) lost two siblings and everything I was familiar with. I was depressed from roughly 9-12 years of age, and although I didn't attempt, I was suicidal. Somebody else can call this will power if they want to, but the only things that stopped me from trying suicide at such a young age were believing God loved me, didn't mess my family up, and had a plan, believing my parents loved me, and believing I wouldn't be tempted or tested beyond what I could bear. So maybe it was belief that saved me from suicide, belief that I ascribe to God. I can't trust that I had the strength within myself, honestly, because I knew what I felt like.

  More explicitly and recently, my mother, still a JW, has had chest pain from angina and stress go away multiple times when she has prayed. Not a coincidence, given that she knows how long her bouts would usually last, and I'm talking about instantly when she has been thinking about Jesus healing people before he taught them and how Jehovah doesn't show partiality, so why could she be healed?

  No giant myths or urban legends, no sensationalism, just stuff I know that I attribute to God, thus opening myself up to criticism from people who have not experienced that and don't believe it was God.