Jesus-Witnesses[From: Margie Capik * EMC.Ver #2.10P ]This is my testimony I uploaded a few months ago, I have added to it and updated as so many of you asked me to keep you informed. I don’t write a whole lot on the group, but you can bet you boots that I read your post everyday. I owe all of you a great deal for your help and encouragement. The following is my original testimony with some updates. My name is Margie. I joined your internet group just a few weeks ago and after enjoying all your letters decided I would tell my story and in doing so add to the long process of healing that has to take place when one escapes the “Watchtower”. I was raised as a Jehovah Witnesses. I knew of no other way of living and of course thought that there was no other way! As a child and teenager I was not very proud of my religion and tried to hide it as much as I could. I was tired of being left out of everything, and feeling like I was the weird kid on the block. I usually dealt with this by acting if it wasn’t happening. Over the years this presented a problem for me as I learned not to feel some of the most basic emotions, such as compassion. I felt somehow that something was wrong with me because I could not feel the zeal for the “truth” that so many of my witness friends felt, yet no matter what I tried it was just never there. I did all that was expected of me though, and that got me through. My mind seems to process information in a very analytical way and though I could not ever put it all together ... somehow I knew something wasn’t right. I look back now and realize that my mind was seeing contradictions, yet because my mind was under such control by outside forces I couldn’t put it together and make sense of it then. My questions that I had turned out to be valid concerns, and I wouldn’t even know it for years to come. My childhood was filled with little happiness as everything was off limits to me. I could not celebrate any holidays, I was not allowed to join clubs at school or the band. You could not have any association outside the religion. Any outside activity (i.e. sports, parties, proms, dances) were forbidden to a witness child, and unfortunately this caused me much pain in these years as I had many plans for myself and always strived to achieve. None of this meant anything to my parents though, the only thing they would show an approving attitude toward was whether I was going to be a “strong Jehovah’s Witness”, i.e. Pioneer (giving 100 hours a week of your time in field service without pay). This was not in my plans to say the least. So, I was always a disappointment to my parents. I did grow up though, and married a nice young witness boy (as I was expected to do) that was also raised in the “truth” (another name for Jehovah’s Witnesses). We had our first child and life got busy. I had always sought after friendship and thought I had many friends, yet I began to see something that just didn’t fit. My husband and I stopped going to one of the five meetings (the one hour “book study”). We went to all the other meetings just not that one. Then one day a friend of mine asked if I would like to go out with her on a night of the “book study” after the meeting to see a band play. I said yes and we made plans. She was late however, and when I acquired as to why, she said “I had to listen to a 30 minute lecture from my mother on how I should stop associating with you until you return to the Book Study group”. It hit me like a ton of bricks ... all of my friendships, all of my life had been reevaluated weekly. If you didn’t make it to the Sunday meeting you weren’t invited to the party that week, or you were left out of things until you towed the line again. I thought ... was that friendship???? That night made me never want to attend another meeting ever ... but I did and things just got worse. After all, this was the only life I knew, I was trying to convince myself that this was how it was supposed to be. Yet, somehow that day I began to see things differently. I kept telling my husband how the children seem to be neglected in the truth. There was no schooling provided for them on their level. I used to say that was like taking a first grader and putting them in a 12th grade class and insisting that they absorb all that goes on. How ridiculous. If they couldn’t sit still they were usually taken outside and spanked. (I got many such spankings as a little girl.) It was as if the children were in the way (that is until they were old enough to go out in service and pedal those magazines). Nothing ever centered around the children and that just wasn’t how I felt, especially now that I was a mother. I felt they were the most important thing in my life. I didn’t want our children to grow up this way. I grew up with what seemed to me to be a never ending story ... my mom told me when I was a little girl that I would never go to school, when I started school she told me I would never graduate high school, when I graduated (narrowly escaping those years that they encouraged young ones to quit school and pioneer, you know “75”, Armageddon, was just around the corner then, my sister and brother were not so lucky - both of them quit and never graduated high school), my mom told me I would never get married, when I married she told me I would never have children ... and so on. I just couldn’t stand the rhetoric anymore. Everyone seemed so cold and unloving, yet they said there was just so much love at the Kingdom Hall, but I didn’t see it. I thought it was ME! I was just not good enough. A sister in the congregation that I respected very much once told me “Margie, can’t you just be mature enough to over look the people and just love Jehovah’s organization?” I thought about that and responded, “I guess I’m just not mature enough then, I see the organization as the people, the organization reflects itself in the people - people are what it is all about - Jesus gave his life to save the people”. So I admitted defeat, accepted my immaturity and slowly stopped going to even more meetings. Not to long after that a young man that my sister had fancied for awhile got “publicly reproved” (a term used when a member is going astray and marked by the congregation as bad association, a letter is then read to the congregation and everyone knows to avoid this person) and was going through a very hard time. He was drinking and going out with young girls alone ... he was just being a teenager. Everyone began shunning him of course and this added to his confusion. He asked that my sister sit down with him and talk as he still loved her so much. I recall a conversation that I had with my sister when she asked me should she talk to him. I said, “Please do, you owe it to your friendship!” She said, “but wouldn’t that be condoning what he was doing?” I said no, sit down with him, maybe you can bring him around. She admitted that he had confided in her the he had considered suicide in his confused state. I told her it could not hurt to sit down with him over coffee and listen. I had her convinced to do just that, but my father got a hold of her before she could talk with him and told her she needed to be firm and show him “tough love” by not even saying hello to him. A few weeks later this bright young man who I dearly loved killed himself with a gunshot to the head in his car. (Yes, right here in FWB). That was the straw that broke the camels back! Meanwhile a neighbor had come to wish me well when my first child was born and we struck up a friendship that I had never before experienced. I had found a friend that liked me no matter what I believed (even though it was “weird” to her) she accepted me and I had found a friend for life. I owe a great deal to this woman, I can never live up to the love and caring this woman showed to me in the years to come. It was really her friendship that eventually lead to my departure of the Watchtower, and I will be eternally grateful. By this friendship I came to know the outside world and it didn’t seem as hopeless as I had been taught. I saw kind, loving and caring people that had more sincerity than many Witnesses I knew. My belief structure in the “Watchtower” remained intact though, because in my mind there was just no escaping it. Over the next 5 years I had two more children and hadn’t been to the Kingdom Hall in all that time. My mother, father and two sister were heart broken, and still tried to bring me back into the fold occasionally. My life had been a mess. We allowed our oldest child to celebrate holidays at school, but couldn’t do so at home because my parents would find out and we would be disfellowshiped (totally excommunicated - not even would a greeting be extended to us even by my own parents). I just couldn’t bear that. So we ended up allowing our children to lie to their grandparents ... this caused such distress in our lives. I could not hardly bare the deceit. I no longer even had my dignity. My oldest child was hopelessly confused by all this and we were all basically unhappy. We accepted our doom that we would die at Armageddon because we just couldn’t go back to that Kingdom Hall ever again. Then finally we decided that we had to stand up and face the consequences so as to give our children some sort of stability. We couldn’t just sit on the fence any longer and teach our children that lying was O.K., that our life was something to be ashamed of, so much so that we had to hide what we were doing. So, in Dec. ’93 we decided to make our break and celebrate Christmas and wait for our Disfellowshiping. We, of course celebrated this Holiday with a guilty conscience. My father found out and he immediately announced he must tell the elders and he made it perfectly clear that they would indeed “stand by their faith” and cut us off. We knew that and it brought us great pain. The waiting was so stressful that I began having migraine headaches every other day for 6 weeks ... waiting for the decision. But none came. We agonized over this terribly. Finally in March of ’94 my brother-in-law, seeing how distraught I was over this told me that they had made a decision 2 months ago. (I had thought possibly that my father had neglected to inform the elders and thought he was going to try to let it pass.) But he hadn’t, my brother-in-law explained that my parents did not want me to know the decision. The elders had decided that since we had not been to a meeting in over 4 years that they would take no action unless we wanted to return. Imagine that ... if we decided to shape up and return, becoming “good” Jehovah’s Witnesses we would be cut off and have to prove for a period of many months that we were repentant. Hmmmm ... how do you prove repentance. They believe that to prove repentance we would have to come to every meeting be shunned by all the members, never being allowed to talk to them until the elders decided that we were finally repentant ... sounds more like punishment to me! Anyway, my parents felt that if I knew I would not be disfellowshiped I might “go overboard” and do anything I wanted and this way they could continue some control over me and my family. I was heart broken ... I had taken such a step of courage and my parents looked at it as if I was “just a child and did not know what was best for me”. Since we were now out of the closet I decided to do something I had wanted to do for a long time. I had a close friend that was disfellowshiped when I was 16. One day she was my close friend and the next day she was dead to me. I could never speak to her again. It had always haunted me how I never got to talk to her again and how cold I must have seemed to her. I know she had to have suffered from that. So, I called her parents (still living in my home town) and got her number. I called her because I wanted to clear my conscience and apologize for treating her in such an unloving manner ... that I had since found out what friendship was supposed to be about and I hoped that she would forgive me. She did and came to town a few weeks later with another friend I had also known at the time. She brought me a gift - the King James Version of the Bible - I told her thanks, but no thanks. Been there done that! I had that life for many years and I wanted no part of it anymore. Besides, the God I knew wouldn’t hear my prayers or see anything I did as Christian. I did eventually accept her gift and tucked it away under a cabinet so I would not have to see it. I was thoroughly convinced that there was no God for me unless I was a Jehovah Witness. Try as they might they tried to convince me otherwise, but to no avail. We all kept in touch throughout the next year. To these two women I want to say, I have the utmost respect and love as it is their patience with me and their courage of conviction that has enabled me to open my heart and mind. After our 2nd Guilty Christmas the friend that had come with her that first day called me up and said she was in town and thought she had information that she thought I would like to know. She began telling me of - “God’s Stone Witness” the Great Pyramid. I was flabbergasted. She told me of the 1925 return of the ancient worthies of old (Beth Sirem), she told me about Christ return in 1874, the prediction of 1914 and so on and so on ... I wanted to know where she knew of this and she told me she had read a book by David Reed. Well, I wanted that book ... I wanted that book right then. Then very next morning I went and picked it up from her and read it that night. I was just devastated, but I couldn’t take one man’s word for it. So I told my husband that this was to begin a quest for the real “truth” and I was going to find it out or else. I told him if the Society had the truth I would accept that, but I was still not going back. And if I found they didn’t, I could lift from my heart this never ending guilt. So began a journey I would have never believed could ever come to pass. I began calling, ordering every book I could find and spent hundreds of dollars. I read nonstop for 2 months. It was the hardest 2 months of my life as I tried to decipher what was going on in my head. For the first 3 weeks I seemed to be in a paradox that I couldn’t get out of. I believed the Society had prophesied falsely yet they claimed not to be a prophet. Yet they said you can’t question these beliefs, yet they claimed not to be a prophet ... this went round and round in my mind until I decided to write out each reference to being a prophet, every reference to not being a prophet and see if I could make sense. What I realized was that your mind could hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believe both of them. Why? I realized that in every thought pattern there were strong thoughts and week ones. You can believe both, but in the end the stronger wins out. Was the Watchtower a prophet. Yes! Though they claim not to be, by not allowing you to question their authority by claiming to be the sole channel of communication from God (the strongest thought of the two) in your mind the stronger thought wins out, and you can then accept the mistakes the Watchtower makes with out questioning their authority. I was finally out of my paradox. It was as if a bomb had hit me, or a cloud of dust was lifted from my mind. I could see so clearly. I then read everything I could find and still am doing so. The mind control exercised in this religion excuse me, cult, is so devastating! It is such a complete makeover of the mind that it is almost unbelievable. If you could imagine what it would be like to be raped ... that is what this feels like to me. Like a raping of the mind, it feels as if you never had a thought that was completely your own. Your entire life taken from your grasp. Imprisoned in a jail with invisible walls. This has caused great pain in my life all which I thought had a purpose and to find out the deception has no purpose -well - it can make one question whether it is worth going on, and so I did. Yet, now, to be free ... oh, the feeling. I feel as though I have never lived. I feel things I have never felt, and my mind feels fresh like a newborn. When I set out on this quest it had begun simply to find out the truth, but the more I read the more I started to want to pray (something I hadn’t even wanted to do in the “truth”). It seemed that God wasn’t as cold as I had perceived him to be, and realizing that faith in the Lord Jesus as my Savior was such a compassionate feeling to me. I just had to find out more. Funny ... compassion was a feeling that I lacked in my life and was unaware of it until I began to feel it for the very first time. There I was a person who didn’t even want a bible in my home yet I felt so compelled to pray and read the bible. So, one Sunday morning only a few weeks ago, I decided I would do the unthinkable - go to a church. Yes, you heard me right go to the devil’s playground (so I had been taught). My dearest friend was a Catholic and I decided to visit her church. I enjoyed it though I was quite a bit lost. I did enjoy the sermon that day as he spoke of the love we should show to everyone around us, how Jesus had such compassion for us. It stuck in my mind that day and through all my confusion helped me get through the next few days. The next Sunday had approached and I was not doing well. I had begun a depression and felt myself sinking. So, I decided to try another church as I had never been to any of them and I wanted to see all of them. I got in my car not knowing where to go. I rode by several churches and they seemed to intimidating. So I rode around some more and came across a First Baptist Church with a sign that read “Visitor Information”. Hey, I thought, at least I will know where to start, so I parked my car and walked into the office. The pastor was there and asked could he help me. I said, yes, I would like some information about your church and explained to him that I had been a Jehovah Witness for 33 years. He asked would I like to join the Sunday School class going on at that time. I was reluctant, but I accepted (I don’t know why either because it’s not in my nature to walk into groups of strangers) and walked in to the unknowing. On the black board above the speaker was written “Spirituality verses Religion” Which is more important? The lesson went on to talk about legalism in the church and to avoid judging others, that it was the spirit with in us that it the most important and that man’s rule were just that “man’s rules”. I was so happy to hear such a lesson and when it ended I told the class that I had been a witness for 33 years and talk about RULES, well I knew them very well. I then for the first time in my life enjoyed a worship service more than I could ever tell you. The members have been very helpful and encouraging to me though it has only been a couple of weeks. I have to still hide all this from my parents and sisters for if they found out we actively disagree with the Society I feel they will take further steps to insure my silence by disfellowshipping me after all. I also feel that maybe I can drop hints and maybe open their eyes to the deception before they find out how we feel, as I know one day it is inevitable they will find out. My husband is not as far along in his conclusions, but I don’t think him to be far off. He hasn’t had as much time to read as his work keeps him busy. I enjoy all your correspondences through e-mail and hope to be able to contribute one day in a more definite way. Right now however, I still have many questions to work through, yet I know now that I am on the right road to get the right answers. To close this testimony I shall say, if there is just one of you out there who might read this that has a question in his mind about the Watchtower, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Remember, the TRUTH will always stand the test! At 33 I have just begun to LIVE! It is now 6 weeks later ... such a short time, but an eternity to me. I have continued in my study and I have had help from many people. All to which I extend my deepest gratitude. I have come to know Jesus, and my life is a wonder everyday. I can feel such compassion for people that I could never feel before. Sometimes, I have difficulty dealing with this as it hurts deep into my heart to see the darkness that I have come from and know so many people are still in. Yet, now when I sit in Church I no longer have a foreboding feeling, just a sense of peace that comforts the depths of my very soul. In my life there had always been a source of irritability, I just thought it was normal and everyone felt this way. Now, it is gone ... I have never felt a peace like this ... I wake up everyday and wonder...will it still be there tomorrow ... and yet it is still there. I know it will always be there for me now. As Jesus is the source of that peace and he will not forsake me. I have found the meaning of that verse where Jesus said ...“you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” I am FREE! It has been almost 6 months now since I began this quest and I made a very important decision. I decided to get baptized. It was a wonderful experience for me. The church has been so uplifting to me and has overwhelming made me feel comfortable. The one thing I think of every Sunday is how sincere these people are, as sincere as any Jehovah’s Witness that I ever knew. My husband has starting attending with me and is really beginning to open his mind. He is going through a transition period right now I think, he is trying to adjust to looking at things differently. It is hard to do, I know, I remember how confused I was about everything. But, I know he will work through it all and come to his own peace. He surprises me everyday, he is really opening up and living life again. It feels great to see him come to my best friend’s little league game and get excited for the kids - he doesn’t have to feel bad about going ... yea!!! Things that are normal for most have such a negative connotation for an ex-JW. It takes time to work through them, but were having a great time doing it. Best of all, I started talking to my brother-in-law, (the one in my testimony). I began slowly throwing a few comments at him about 3 months ago. He, of course, told me immediately that it was Jehovah’s Organization and he felt that Jehovah was guiding it. But, he just couldn’t stay away. It is really wonderful to see a person’s mind blossom and find freedom ... I see the changes in him already. He is becoming free. He has not accepted Christ, and maybe never will, but just to see him free from guilt and shame is better than anything. He is searching and I believe he will find his peace also. I will accept which ever way he goes. Everyone deserves the right to make that decision on his own. I know some of you out there do not subscribe to God at all. I can accept that too, we all have that right to a free will, to believe the way we choose. At least we can all “think independently” now. My sister, (his wife) however, wants nothing to do with me. She hates it that he even comes to my house. My parents don’t know anything ... YET ... I am still putting that off until I can really defend myself. I may not have much longer though, so I’ll keep you posted. If any of you see something like an atomic bomb go off, you will know my parents found out I got baptized in a Baptist Church. I have been busy spreading the word ... to add to my list of ex-Watchtowerites ... my sister-in-law, her husband and 3 kids. My sister-in-law was one of those JW’s that would put you under the table with quoting scripture. She left the organization about 5 years ago because of problems with her son being disfellowshipped and intended to go back one day when she had the courage. Now she doesn’t need the courage!!! Now, she was a hard nut to crack. She has found her peace with Jesus, but her husband wants no part of anything to do with God anymore. Her children are in limbo, but no longer are they in the chains of the Watchtower. What a year it has been for me, and I want to thank this group so much for the input, pro and con, for and against God, but mostly for all the info on the WT. I have to say I do not think I would have made it through this without your daily posts that kept me going some of those days. I was really confused and didn’t know where to turn. The e-mail letters of encouragement meant the world to me, I hope that this group will always be around to help ones like me, there are so many of us out there. Hurt and wounded. We all need to stick together no matter what we decided to believe in. There is such comfort in knowing that you are not alone, that others have felt the same way and have come through it, maybe even for the better. May God’s blessing be with all of you. With deep appreciation, Margie |