Sovereign Spirit
..One Woman's Path from Shameful Sheep to Spiritual Sovereignty
Chapter Six, Part Two
Because life was so stressful trying to keep the bills paid, keep up with field service, and make all of our meetings at the Kingdom Hall, it wasn’t long before we were missing meetings fairly regularly. Going to the meetings soon became a sort of last minute decision rather than a given. If we hadn’t been to the last one or two, we felt the guilt piling up, and made sure we made the next one. We rarely made our meager ten hours of field service time, and I even started writing articles online about Jehovah’s Witnesses and their beliefs and counted that as my field service time on occasion, which would have certainly gotten me a few finger wags if the elders had known.
Field service, from my perspective, was always a colossal waste of time. Not to mention, I was scared to death of it. I would spend the night before, practicing what I was going to say to the people we met at the door, and try to come up with some casual way to introduce the Bible to a complete unsuspecting stranger, which was an impossible venture. There’s no casual way to bait someone into your cult. I would wake up in the morning with my stomach in knots, always anxious about how field service would go, always terrified that someone would actually answer the door and I’d have to give my shitty presentation. Luckily, it was rare than anyone ever did. In all of my six years as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, I can count on less than two hands the times I actually ever spoke to anyone in the ministry.
This was both a relief and a disappointment for me. On the one hand, I didn’t have to endure the face to face confrontation with a stranger that made me so anxious, but on the other, I had made no progress for Jehovah’s kingdom. I had helped no one come to know “The Truth.” Of course, like always, there was plenty of guilt to be felt for that. It was also an incredibly frustrating experience because I would spend so much time preparing the night before, so much energy worrying and trying to come up with just the right presentation. I’d wake up early, and try my best to calm my nerves while I got ready. We’d go to meet the group at the Kingdom Hall and get our car groups arranged, spend our hard earned money on gas to drive all over town or out into long, back country roads, not to mention our time, which was invaluable to me, and I never saw any results from our efforts. I noticed that we’d work the same neighborhoods month after month, walk the same streets, knock on the same doors, always with the same result: Watchtower tracts or old magazines left in doors where we knew people were home but wouldn’t come to answer the door, and more wrinkles on my face from all the anxiety I went through to make Jehovah like me enough not to kill me at Armageddon.
There were certain things I was taught in my Bible studies with Jehovah’s Witnesses before I became a JW that I should expect from my husband when I got married. For example, I was taught that my husband would have a weekly study with me, and would pray with me every day. My study conductors made it seem like these were just things that would automatically happen in a JW family, so I expected that they would, and looked forward to sharing time that would help us grow together spiritually. I’d watched my Christian grandparents pray and study the Bible together every single morning at breakfast, and it was something I’d always admired and wanted for my own marriage. When these things weren’t initiated by my husband, I thought it meant he didn’t really love me or didn’t really care about my spiritual well-being. This, coupled with the fact that we were missing so many meetings and barely getting in any field service time made me wonder how strongly Steven really believed in his religion. I felt like we were bad Witnesses, and not only did I feel personally guilty about it, but I also began to brew feelings of blame towards Steven because he wasn’t “taking the lead” for our family in “spiritual matters” like I was taught he should. Looking back, I know he was just trying to survive, like I was, and was probably experiencing the beginnings of his own doubts about his religion, but didn’t know how to express them to me.
I began to have more questions about JW doctrine as time went on. Something that bothered me was the “this generation will not pass away” teaching, which meant, in short, that the ones who had been a part of the budding religion back in 1914, who had been approved by Jehovah, supposedly, to be the one, true religion, would not die before Armageddon came. It was around 2007 now, and since I knew few people make it to 100 years of age, I saw this to mean that Armageddon had to come very soon because anyone alive in 1914 would likely be dead or soon dead.
I had Armageddon nightmares all the time, at least twice per week. In addition to all the stress the JW life afforded me, I also lived in constant fear, largely due to these nightmares. In these dreams, I’d usually be running around in the midst of God’s foretold day of wrath, desperately trying to save my family and friends from Jehovah’s destruction, to no avail, of course. Fear was a prevailing emotion during my six years as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I often wondered how I would ever be able to watch the birds peck away at my dead family members’ bodies after Armageddon, as we were taught would be the case. I didn’t know how I would be able to be happy in a paradise earth, having watched almost everyone I loved slaughtered at Jehovah’s hand.
I was working as a Nanny during this time, and the children I cared for were being raised with partially Christian and partially Hindu influences. There was no way this family was making it to paradise, according to my JW beliefs. One afternoon, as the kids were napping, I was wandering through the hallways of their home, just thinking. I remember stopping in front of one of the children’s photos hanging on the wall. Lakshmi was such a brilliant light in my life, and had been since the day I met her. Her spirit made mine smile, and as I stood there, staring at the innocence of her baby picture, I thought about how much I loved her. She wasn’t even my child, and my heart swelled at the simple thought of her existence, her warmth, her playfulness, her curiosity, her sweet, giving spirit. The thought of her growing up and not knowing “The Truth” and consequently being destroyed if Armageddon came made my heart sick. This little human wasn’t even my own child, and yet I knew my love for her could never allow me to harm her, no matter who or what she became later in life. I wasn’t sure how I could ever possibly justify her murder, and so many millions of other children like her around the world. How could I give my worship and service to the god who would ultimately be responsible for it? The very first inklings of distrust for Jehovah - a god who promised to soon do away with the majority of the planet, humans which he claimed to have created himself and be the loving father over - began to take root in my mind.
In 2008, things came to head at home. My marriage and my emotional life reached an all-time low, and I was attending the meetings, when I could summon the strength to go, alone. In my downward mental spiral, I convinced myself my husband didn’t love me, and that life as it was was unbearable for both of us. Since I don’t wish to detail our situation in any further depth for simple reasons of privacy, and the fact that I’d rather this work focus on the religious aspects of my experience, I’ll just say that I made the decision to leave in Autumn of that year.
It isn’t something I’m proud of, and I have spent the years since deeply regretting it, although I do understand why my 25-year-old self did what she felt she had to. Some things you can’t undo, you can only learn from.