if you have it handy LMSA later that would be appreciated
It was a Friday morning. I ran
downstairs to fetch the mail. When I
came back into our bedroom,
Dijana had my mobile phone in her
hand and was staring at it aghast.
The previous day, while she had
been at work, I had been involved
in cybersex with a girl I had met
online. The girl had texted me back
since then, and Dijana had just read
the message.
My initial response was one of
anger. In a flurry of tears and
screaming I tried to wrench the
phone from Dijana. Then, as reality
slowly dawned, I realized she had
every right to know that the man she
had married and made so many
sacrifices for was a messed up
person with serious issues. Over my
single years I had developed a
fixation with chatting online with
girls, and this behavior had
tragically spilled over into my
marriage.
The hours and days that
followed were fraught with
animosity, tears, and much soul searching. I had spent the last three
months trying to correct the conduct
of a fellow elder in the
congregation, and here I was with
my own faults now in sharp focus.
The hypocrisy of it all stemmed
from my ability to compartmentalize
and excuse my darker side so that it
almost did not exist. I genuinely
believed that the only thing that
mattered was how many people
were hurt by my actions. If Dijana
did not know what I was doing
online, then she could not be hurt.
With the Friday morning discovery,
the naivety of this thinking became
glaringly obvious. There can be no
secrets in a marriage. Everything
will come out in the wash
eventually.
As you would expect, Dijana
was devastated. She assumed all of
this somehow reflected on her as a
wife. If I was engaging in online
sexual encounters with other
women, then in her mind, I must
have no feelings for her whatsoever.
I pleaded with her that this was not
the case; that I loved her and
wanted to be with her, but I was
fighting powerful inner urges and
needed help.
Initially I tried to talk Dijana
into simply forgiving me so that we
could move on without involving
anyone else. I intuitively knew I had
reached a crossroads. I explained to
her that two paths lay ahead of us.
One path involved soldiering on
and trying to fix our marriage
without involving others. The other
path involved my seeking discipline
through the congregation, losing all
respect and standing in the
organization, and being left with
really nothing to be proud of or to
fight for. I had a feeling of
inevitability that I was on the cusp
of a downward spiral from which,
due to the mountain of doubts I was
already suppressing, I would never
recover. The only way out of this
tailspin, in my mind, was for us to
deal with these problems between
us rather than involve the elders.
Dijana made it clear that she
wanted the intervention of the
elders, no matter the outcome. After
all, this was not a one-off incident.
Dijana had caught me in a similar
situation only a few months after we
were married, and previous
attempts at sorting out my issues had
clearly failed. There seemed no
other option than to approach the
elders this time. The trouble was, I
had just come out of a long and
bitter feud with Geoffrey, who I
knew would relish the opportunity
to exact vengeance. Dijana agreed
that Geoffrey was the last person to
involve in fixing our problems.
We therefore decided to move
back to my home congregation in
Wilmslow, where I would promptly
stand down as an elder, confess my
sins, and accept whatever
discipline was to be handed out.
Wilmslow would serve as a kind of
spiritual maintenance pit-stop on the
way to what we both decided was
our ultimate objective: a fresh start
in Croatia.
We had been discussing this
move for some time—but now that
fixing our marriage was of utmost
priority rather than pursuing any
organizational opportunities, there
was no longer anything holding us
back. Also prominent in our
thinking were Dijana’s parents,
whose health gave us cause for
concern. Furthermore, living in the
UK was becoming prohibitively
expensive as the country, which by
this point was entering the “credit
crunch,” slid into recession. We
were spending over £170 per month
just on property taxes before paying
any rent or utility bills, and we had
racked up a mountain of debt in
overdrafts and credit card bills. In
Croatia, we could live rent-free
with Dijana’s parents while slowly
paying off our debts. We also had
the option of finishing a semi-built
apartment above their home if we
wanted more privacy. We decided
to go ahead with this plan, and
moved out of the house we were
renting. Dad agreed that we could
move in with him for a couple of
months before we made our final
move abroad.
I drove to the home of the
coordinator for Wilmslow
congregation and delivered a letter
through his door. It offered my
resignation as an elder and went
into quite some detail regarding my
sexual misconduct. I had hoped the
amount of detail would be sufficient
for the elders to deliberate quickly
over how to deal with me, but this
would not prove to be the case.
In a series of disciplinary
meetings before a “judicial
committee” comprised of three
elders I was asked to go into
extremely intimate detail regarding
the nature of my online encounters,
what precisely these involved, with
whom and how often.
[96] These
hearings were extremely emotional.
I recall breaking down in tears on at
least one occasion. At the time I did
not feel the nature of questioning
was overly invasive or
inappropriate. I believed I was
receiving needed discipline from
God’s organization, and I simply
had to man up and see it through for
the benefit of my marriage. Of
course, I now cringe at the thought
of sharing such personal matters
with men who had no more right to
this information than my local
postman or storekeeper, but at the
time I was convinced it was
necessary.
[97]
Finally, a decision was reached
that I would not be
disfellowshipped. Instead, I would
be “publicly reproved.” This
involved an announcement being
read in both Bramhall and
Wilmslow Kingdom Halls that I had
been reproved for some unspecified
sin. Normally such an announcement
is deemed necessary only if the
indiscretion is widely known, but
for some reason (I believe due to
my recent dispute with Geoffrey) it
was decided that members of both
congregations needed to know that I
had done something seriously
wrong. As well as no longer being
an elder, “restrictions” would be
imposed. I would be prohibited
from offering comments during
meeting items or giving talks for
some months.
It felt as though my downfall
was complete, but I was prepared
to go through the disgrace and
humiliation if this was the price for
correcting my problems and starting
a new life with Dijana. After
everything that I had put her through,
she would be my focus from this
point forward.
Before long, it was time for us
to relocate. We had decided to tow
our belongings in a horse-box
trailer that we bought on eBay—but
we were unaware when collecting
it that it dated to the ’50s, and the
wheels (one of which fell off
shortly after we bought it) were so
outdated it was impossible to
replace them. We paid a Wilmslow
elder who was also a mechanic to
perform a makeshift repair and
resolved to drive at 50 mph or
slower all the way to Croatia.
However, we only made it as far as
Birmingham (85 miles) before
beholding the terrifying spectacle of
one of our trailer wheels rolling
past our car as we snaked downhill
across several lanes of the M6
freeway. After regaining control and
pulling over, we called the tow
truck and had it take the horse-box
back to Manchester while we
carried on in our old Ford Mondeo
with less than half our belongings.
The car had an overheating engine,
so we had to stop every two hours
to top off the water during the long
drive across Europe. I am still not
sure how we completed the journey.
[98]
After a stressful two days on the
road we were relieved to make it to
Croatia on August 30, 2009.
Dijana’s parents were delighted to
finally have us with them. They had
been without their daughter for three
years, and I could tell they had
missed her. Their house, where we
still live, is in a small one-road
village 20 minutes’ drive south of
Sisak. From living in the suburbs of
Manchester, we now found
ourselves in a quiet rural
community where people grow their
own produce and keep livestock.
Tractor engines chugging, roosters
crowing, geese honking and dogs
barking make up a large part of the
typical ambience. When we first
arrived, it felt like an idyllic place
to take some time out and build a
new life together without
disturbance.
The local Sisak congregation
was extremely welcoming. In the
time it takes to find your seat at the
Kingdom Hall you feel like you
have shaken the hands of everyone
in the town, such is the warmth and
enthusiasm. At the time, the
congregation had approximately
100 publishers and only a handful
of elders. There was initial
excitement when I arrived because,
being an MTS graduate, it was
assumed I could help ease the
burden on the overstretched elder
body. But I made it clear as soon as
I arrived that this would not be
possible, at least for some time. I
told them I was under restrictions
that had been placed on me back in
the UK, concerning which they
would shortly be informed.
[99] For
the time being I would only be
allowed to attend meetings and go
in the preaching work. Not that this
presented a huge problem for me,
since I could barely speak Croatian
anyway and would have found it
daunting to prepare meaningful
comments or talks.
It would take nine months for
my restrictions to be lifted, but by
the end of this period I had
undergone an unexpected
transformation. The cautionary
advice given to me by a close friend
back home was to prove extremely
astute.
Footnotes 96 - 99
[96] One elder from Bramhall was
drafted in to sit on the three-man
committee. It would not surprise me if
this was at Geoffrey’s insistence. I now
look back with some relief that, during
my brief time as an elder, I was never
called upon to deliberate at one of these
tribunals.
[97] When preparing this chapter I came
across the letters and emails I sent to
Wilmslow and Bramhall elders over this
period, which are still on my hard drive
and now make for disturbing reading.
The tone is self-abasing as I prostrate
myself, scrambling to avoid
disfellowshipping at a time when
rescuing my marriage should have been
my only concern. It is obvious that I
was a completely different, more
servile person than I am now, and
acting under powerful forces I was then
unable to comprehend.
[98] The car would die completely a
month after our arrival.
[99] Usually when a person moves
between congregations a “letter of
recommendation” needs to follow them
from their old congregation to tell the
new elders whether they are in “good
standing” or not. Quite often, the letter
takes some time to arrive—especially if
it needs to be translated by the branch
office.
