There are perhaps millions of people that sincerely believe they are happy while living in a high control religious system. At the same time there are possibly an equal amount of persons that are unhappy and feel confined. I myself remember a time while serving as an elder in Jehovah’s Witnesses being approached by a young man who felt trapped in the religion. He said to me “I feel like a bird in a cage”. I responded with a clever statement that I heard years ago uttered by a visiting circuit overseer: “Remember, the same cage that keeps the bird in, keeps the cat out”. It was just such black and white thinking that I myself fell back on to quell my own frustrations at the discouragement to pursue higher education, read material produced by those that left the religion, greet a disfellowshipped person, watch a particular movie, associate with non-witnesses, wear a beard and other manifestations of the bars on the cage.
What you need, I told him, is time with just you and Jehovah alone in the universe.
Looking back I realize the latter statement was the best thing I could have said to him. However, I could not even see how blinded I was. In my mind, indeed in the mind of many witnesses, the rules and restrictions within the organization come from God. We just need God’s assurance that the difficulty of carrying the huge weight placed on us produced by living up to them gains his approval.
Here is an example of what witnesses are accustomed to hearing:
There is no separating what the leaders say from what God says. How many others are struggling under the same misconception that in order to please God it is necessary to abide by a multitude of conflicting, ever changing unscriptural rules and restrictions imposed by imperfect men? Has anyone heard their stories? Is anyone interested in listening to what their life is really like, not just the sugar coated stories that regularly appear on the organization’s official website, but what it is really like denying who you really are inside on a daily basis, trying to live up to unrealistic expectations and the reasons why some just can’t do it anymore and choose to leave the organization and what happens to them?
The experiences in this section will hopefully accomplish just that. To allow these to tell their personal story. Rather than viewing what they have to say as an attack on the organization it would be the wise and loving thing to do to listen with the aim of understanding that what they are going through is real. Not arbitrarily labeling them as angry faultfinding negative persons. Is this not what you would expect a loving God to do?
If you have a story to tell and would like to share it, please send me an email at jaiken891@gmail.com
(Jeremiah 12:1) You are righteous, O Jehovah, when I make my complaint to you, When I speak about matters of justice with you. But why is the way of wicked ones successful, And why are the treacherous unworried?