Randy's Story

I was born into the "truth" in 1960 in British Columbia Canada. As a child growing up, my Dad would read to us from the Paradise book and we were raised with an old fashioned Saskatchewan dirt farmer attitude hardened and honed by the ways of the JW's. Throughout my childhood, we easily dealt with missing Christmas and all the other wonderful holidays for kids. If you never have them, you never miss them, although at times we definitely harbored a bit of envy for the kids of the 'world'.

I was the second of five children, my brother being the oldest and three sisters following me with 18 years between the oldest and the youngest. Basically we were three, growing up, my last two sisters weren?t born until we were in our teens. Fundamentally we had a pretty good childhood. We always lived way out of town and had miles of bush to play in and other than the repetitive inconvenience of having to get dressed up and be on our best behavior for the meetings, life was ok. About the only time we?d get exited about the meetings was when we'd get to go to an assembly. These were the only family vacations we ever went on. We used to get awfully exited at the prospect of traveling and seeing new things, of course we paid the price by having to sit up and pay attention for three days!

For some strange reason, my Mom and Dad saw fit to enroll me in school when I was 4 years old. The school wouldn't take me but as my birthday was in October, they told my parents I could start when I turned 5. So I started right out of the gate at a bit of a disadvantage, always smaller and younger than my classmates. For the first few years, school was fine. My being a JW made me a curiosity rather than an oddity. The only part in those early years that was tough, was when the class would do something special at Easter or Valentines day or Halloween. I always had to be excused and I oh so bad wanted to take part! I had a friend who was killed while riding his bike across the highway when I was in grade one, I still remember the disappointment I felt when I was told that I wasn't allowed to attend the funeral.

The curiosity finally turned into oddity, ultimately spawning an underlying sense of dislike by the other kids which started to manifest itself by grade 4 in the way of insults, fistfights, being overlooked for team sports, taunts, and any other possible cruelty one child can imagine doing to another. I remember being kicked in the back in grade eight for refusing to stand and sing the national anthem. We were taught not to fight back and to walk away from conflict like Jesus would have done. So many times I was thrown to the ground while yet another kid a grade or two below me sought to prove himself a real man.


One day in grade 7 my teacher started a theological discussion with me during class, about an hour before lunch. I never intended to get into a debate with him about religion but he was very insistent and I felt as if it was my duty to minister to him. The whole class watched as he baited me and I responded with the answers with which I was familiar. I'd been trained all my life for just this moment and we talked and argued right through math, then through social studies. Lunch came and went and not a single student left the room. The show was just too good. Our discussion ended when school did and things started to change after that. Some of the kids began to acknowledge me with respect for the first time and still others started to treat me with previously subdued scorn and outright hatred. I was beaten up a number of times till one day at lunch, one more kid was going to have a little fun with the Jobe. It wasn't his lucky day.

When first he pushed me I fell back in surprise, I got up and would have walked away but he would have none of it and pushed me again. He was laughing and all the boys from grade 6&7 gathered round to egg him on and taunt me further. I still would have walked away. I'd done it before countless times but when he pushed me for the third time, I snapped. I claimed afterwards that I remembered nothing about the fight that followed until I felt many hands pulling me off of that boy, but that has always been an untruth. I remember anger finally having its way with me and I relished every blow I landed with a kind of sadistic glee. His lips were split and nose bloody and I believe that if I hadn't been pulled off, I would have killed him. At that point I had a lot of years of anger to unload and it was his misfortune to have picked on me at that point in my life.

Things really started to change after that. I got messed with on a physical level a whole lot less. I'd proved myself, and a lot of the kids started to include me in invitations to do kid things. Life got better. Why??Because I'd taken the right road for the first time in my life. The road that was opposite to the one the witnesses would have had me go down. I didn't know it then but that was the beginning of a voyage of discovery for me.

After the fight, like I said, things really started to change. For the first time in my life, I had friends who weren't in the truth. Over the next couple of years, I grew to know them well and discovered a marked difference between them and the JW boys I had been encouraged to befriend. The most significant thing of course, was their benign normalcy, as opposed to the other JW kids and myself. The kids I was friends with, that were jws, were my friends through circumstance. Not because we shared dreams and laughter, but rather the same fears and constraints. We weren't friends because we liked one another, but rather because to befriend anyone else was out of the question. Bad associations don't you know?


The two JW lads that I was friends with when I was a pre-teen were both utterly warped people. Wilber Barren?s (NHRN) father was an elder and Wilber was as accomplished a thief and cheat and liar as I've ever met. Max Tinker (NHRN), for all intents, appeared to be a chubby redheaded underachiever. In truth he was one of the most demented people I've ever known.

I remember early in the beginning of our getting to know each other (at the urging of my parents) when he took me into his confidence for the first time. I'd been invited to his house after school to play. He lived nearby but we both lived far out of town with the wilderness at our backs. At his invitation, I followed him far back into the bush 'til we reached a small clearing. The clearing was his "spot" and it was a beautiful open area in the middle of the thick brush. There was room to run and play and there were big rocks to jump off of and downed trees to jump over. An eleven year old's haven, right? No. At first I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I looked from his eyes, filled with a tentative pride, to the horrors around me. Every space where it was possible was occupied with the rotting remains of an animal that had been pinned down (nailed in one case) and sliced open so that they died of disembowelment. Cats, frogs, squirrels, birds, a snake.

My parents were very discouraged when I dug in my heels after that and refused to have anything further to do with Max Tinker. I don't know what became of him but I hope he became a surgeon. Anything else would be too scary to imagine.

As I entered high school, I watched other witness children and how they behaved. There were 6 of us in my school with a total school population of about 600. The funniest thing about being in school with those kids was this. At the meetings, we associated and behaved as models of the true path. In school, we went to great pains to never acknowledge one another. We had no common friends and I think we were all loathe to be thought associated with any of the other JW kids, so great was the shunning by the others. It was as if by being cooler than thou, the other JW kids could avoid the same persecutions we suffered. My brother and I remained truer to our faith than the other JW kids, not totally but we weren't quite so able to shed our skins.


It was during high school that I first began to have an inkling that their just might be life outside the congregation, real life. Of course, I didn't know that, couldn't know it, or even think it. I wasn't capable of it and its only age and time that have enabled me to be able to put into words, now, those things that crossed my mind as wafts of thought, troubling and full of forbidding texture. Seeds of doubt sprouted and for the first time I ventured into that forbidden world of expressing them. I got stomped mightily for my fledgling doubts and was told that I needed further bible studies. I was forced into a personal book study and made to join the ministry school. I say forced and made to join but these are misnomers really, I never said no. I don't think I could've. I was 12.

Alas, I had a very active sense of injustice, and I didn't take too well to either of these efforts. I never went to an elder and I never again expressed my doubts aloud, but in my heart, I fell apart. I tried to maintain my religious status quo but it became more and more impossible each day. I was going through puberty and my glands were going a hundred miles an hour and I had a million questions about what was happening to me. I was discouraged from asking them. Each day I prayed to be shown how to stop my doubts and each day more of them cropped into my thoughts. As we were forbidden to use cuss words, praying became very traumatic because I started to insert unintended cuss words into my prayers, kind of like I had mental Tourette?s. I was so terrified at my thoughts, 1975 was coming and I felt sure that I would die. I was always told that having bad thoughts was equally as terrible as committing bad things. If I tried to suppress my thoughts, of course, those thoughts would roar to the forefront. It occurred to me one day that cussing in a prayer would be the ultimate denigration, so of course, every prayer that followed, to my horror, was both profound and profane. I always had to apologize at the end of my prayers for my mental cussing.


It was right around this time I was 12, in grade 8, that I started having the nightmares. Not your ordinary already growing foggy, boy that was scary type of nightmare. These nightmares were killers, if you'd have handed me a knife upon my waking from one of these, I believe I would have gladly slit my own throat. In each of the nightmares, I would inadvertently set about doing some task and end up indirectly responsible for killing sometimes a single person, sometimes many and always woke consumed with the most gut wrenching guilt.

I suffered, and I was told to read my bible more. I trembled and I was told to pray. I confessed the content of my dreams and my room was searched for things that may be possessed. I lost a few treasured artifacts in that episode.


I don't know if I can describe the guilt that I felt upon waking from those nightmares. I remember being totally crushed spiritually upon waking. I lived in fear of them, dreading the horror they brought into my life. Often I would wander in a stupor up the stairs wailing a death-song, crying and beating myself, looking for release. I never became totally conscious upon waking either. The dream and the guilt that flowed from it stayed with me until I could be convinced to return to bed. Often, in the morning I would remember nothing of the previous nights nightmare, but all it took was a nasty word from my father, a giggle from my brother to bring the whole thing back full force while I was awake. The ones I did remember were often hallucinogenic.

I remember specifically one dream. I had done my usual slaughter, awakened, consumed with remorse and guilt and grief. I wandered crying up the stairs and began walking towards my parent's bedroom. My dad had had enough of me by this time and I remember him (so clearly) coming out of his bedroom and smashing his fist into my face. I was thrown hard into the wall and as I slid down it, I recall seeing a trail of blood there. My mother came out then, and my dad retreated to the bedroom, she took me into the living room and used some Kleenex to fix me up. She talked me down from the dream. This was the first time I had ever become fully conscious immediately following a nightmare. I cried in her arms and she shushed me and rocked me and made me feel better. I am crying as I write this, my Mom was great. OK I'm better now. The instant my Mom released me I sank back into the nightmare and wandered back to my bedroom fully immersed once again.

The thing that really rocked me about that dream was the next day my Mom sat me down and asked me if I remembered and of course, the instant she mentioned it, I did. I told her I was afraid to see dad and she asked me why? I told her why. She enlightened me to the fact that my father had never even gotten out of bed, not once, not for any reason. She hadn?t cleaned the blood off of my face with Kleenex but she had held me in her arms. I?d dreamed a large part of what happened while I was awake.

I know in hindsight, with the wisdom of some years behind me, that those nightmares were caused by me compromising my conscience with my doubts about the truth. It made me feel guilty and the stress had to escape somehow. The subconscious can be a nasty, nasty place.

I know I've sort of deviated from the story here. I was talking about the other kids but these dreams were a huge part of my teens. I had them right up until I was 19. The last one, in the bedroom of the first woman I ever bedded with any regularity. I scared the shit out of her.


So it was that I began to develop close friendships with kids not of the truth. I wasn't very discerning in picking them either. I was so hungry for acceptance that I would befriend absolutely anyone who showed the slightest interest. The fact of the matter is that the regular kids weren?t too keen on befriending a JW. That left the outcasts. You ever notice how ne'er do wells have but a few friends. Well. I hungered for companionship and friends we became, I learned how to smoke dope and shoplift and smoke and curse and drink and break windows to steal stuff. I had a regular education on the days we skipped school to go into town and shoplift. I wasn't in school but I was learning. Wanna know how important my education was to my parents? I was on the honor roll in grades 8 and 9 and when my report cards arrived with duly noted 43 days absent, they never noticed. I wasn't totally lost yet however. I still attended the meetings and I was terribly industrious. I baby-sat and peeled logs and wrote others kids essays and worked as a part-time librarian at the local public library. I shoveled snow and delivered three different newspapers and sold the booty I stole.

By the time I was fifteen, it finally became obvious to my Dad that I wasn't walking the straight and narrow. He'd tried to talk to me about baptism on several occasions and I'd managed to keep putting it off. This was when my father sat me down and told me it was time to quit school. He'd talked to his foreman and I could start work the following Monday. I believe he thought if he could get me away from those bad influences, I would fall back into the hands of Jehovah. He couldn't have been more wrong.

The day I started work, I was terrified. I had made friends with worldly kids in school but this was different. They were a familiar quantity. The adults I would be working with were an unknown quantity and I ascribed to them all of the evils I'd been taught worldly people were a party to. I was worried about my short hair; it was like a badge I wore screaming NERD. I was scared of these guys, but of course, I didn't know that I had no reason to worry.


The two fellows I worked beside were only a couple of years older than me and they reached out in friendship almost immediately. They took me into their circles and I met their friends and their families. This happened over a few months and I was thunderstruck. These people couldn't possibly be bad. They just couldn't die at Armageddon. It wouldn't be fair. As time went by, I had occasion to meet people who were devoted Christians. They were nice people, dedicated to their beliefs and the one thing that kept ringing in my head was something the JW's said you had to be. They were true of heart.

It wasn't long before I asked myself the question that really began the era of my 'adult' wondering about the teachings of the JW's. I wasn't stupid, and in my short time out in the world, I'd met way too many people who I considered 'true of heart', spiritually, as defined by the JW's. I knew that if I'd met this many in so short a time, then there had to be literally millions more out there just like them. I realized that this was why we had to go out in the ministry, to save these guys, but that begged the question; did these people need saving? And if these people, true of heart, pious of faith couldn't be reached by us, they would die? It was just so unfair! How could god be so merciless, so unfeeling, so bereft of understanding? God is love, God will kill you if you don't become a JW. I could feel this, but was simply unable to give it voice.


At the time, asking myself that question wasn't a huge epiphany, but it was one of the questions that stuck in my mind like a flag on a mailbox. It was the first really legitimate thought about the validity of the JW I'd had and I finally did ask it firstly of my father, then a book study leader. Neither of them was able to give me a satisfactory response. They leapt to their books and their bibles and their Aids to Bible Understanding and replied about how you'd expect, but in both cases, neither of them was able to give me an answer that really made sense. To see beyond the dogma of the witnesses and realize just what a grave injustice killing these nonbelievers would be. I'd been so uncertain for so long and finally, the legitimizing of my doubts ensued.


Other things happened throughout that epic year when I was 15. My brother met and started dating his first girlfriend. This was all done without the knowledge of my father. Lord knows what he would have done if he'd known. Girls were just so off limits. My mom knew. She was starting to sway about this time also, though I don't think she realized it then. She found out just by sound reasoning in the changes in my brothers behavior. When confronted, he confessed and she kept his secret from Dad. She knew what he might have done. My brother was nearly 18, out of school and had a full time job. His girlfriend was a Jehovah's Witness. She was 17 and so in love with my brother. My brother was my idol in those days and I knew them very well. I mean I knew him as well as anybody but when he was with her, he was a changed guy. He became 'them' in every sense of the word.

My dad finally figured it out when my brother tried to sneak in late one night (for about the 10th time). I was downstairs in my bedroom and I can still hear the shouting, the accusations, then the denials, then, my mothers voice spilling the beans. Then the sounds of a scuffle and the thumping of my brothers body as my father threw him down the stairs. He left that night at my fathers command and he never came home again. I didn't know it then but it was the end of a large part of my childhood, my partnership with my brother. It was also the deciding moment for my mother, who decided that night, that she had to get out of her marriage to my father.

My brother and his girlfriend were married the following summer. That was 23 years ago and they still are. My brother spent a few years adrift from the truth but he never left entirely. He's now an elder. That night was the last time my brother and I were, well, my brother and I. Life hurled us both off in opposite directions. Sometimes I dream of us as kids and I tell him how much I miss him...

As for me, that night I determined that I wouldn't spend one more minute under my fathers influence than I had to. Two weeks after I turned 16, I got my driver's license. I moved out of home the following weekend. I know I'm painting a dark picture of my father here and truth be known, he was a harsh disciplinarian and while he was forbidding back in those days, he's since remarried and mellowed dramatically. We disagree about the Dubs, but otherwise, we're pals. At any rate...

I was free! ...and the world was my oyster. I immediately stopped going to the meetings. I grew my hair long and said hello to the world. My father never spoke to me for 6 months. Now the thing that really bothers me about the way I was raised is this. All of the moral standards I had learned over the years were derived from the JW's. Initially, my parents may have had their own quality morals but they replaced them with the teachings of the JW's. When I discarded my affiliation with the witnesses, I discarded the only identity I'd ever had. I found their teachings so suspect that I simply discarded the lot, morals and all.

So there I was, sixteen years old, out in the world for the first time on my own, naive as hell and totally without any idea of where to draw the line. I mean, I'd been told that worldly people were bad, misguided souls who walked with the devil. They weren't! I'd been told it was wrong to do drugs. It couldn't be! So from the time I was 16 till I was 22. I partied. I drank and got stoned and slept around and I very nearly lost my mind.

When I was 22, I crashed hard and had what I assumed was a nervous breakdown. I valued my intellect way more than doing drugs so I quit doing them right then and there. It took two years to recover fully. I never touched drugs again but I had another seeming nervous breakdown when I was 25/26. Now I say nervous breakdown, but that wasn't really it, either time. What I had was a recurring set of panic attacks so strong I would literally hole up in my house for a week at a time. I thought I was going crazy. The first time, I had gone to my doctor, who sent me to see a psychiatrist. I only went once, I'm sure that fellow would've driven me crazy.
It was finally a drug counselor who helped me pick up the pieces. When I was trying to describe to him what was happening to me, he was able to finish my sentences. He knew what I was going through perfectly and it was his reassurances that got me back onto the road to recovery. Like I said, it took fully two years before they stopped entirely and when they returned when I was 25, I was able to deal with them on a much easier basis. By this time, they even had a name - panic attacks, and were recognized as a legitimate malady.

Now I know I can't blame my drug doing days on the JW's and the subsequent panic attack episodes, but I know a lot of people who simply never got into doing drugs. They went to school and had Christmases and played on the football team and went to sock hops and played in band and they never did drugs. The thing these now adults had in common as kids was a nice normal loving childhood. They were told that drugs could hurt them and that they shouldn't do them, ultimately it was their decision. So they didn't. I can't help but wonder what direction I'd have taken if I'd have had such a childhood.

After the meltdown, I spent the next few years trying to figure out who I wanted to be. I had an idea of the man I wanted to be and I worked toward becoming him. I lost sight of that determination over the years but now I look back and I realize that I was that man, even then.

When I reached the age of 26, my mother was disfellowshipped by the JW?s. Up until then, I had maintained that if you needed a religion to guide your life, the witnesses were as good as any, but the Df'ing of my mother changed that once and for all. My brother was one of the elders who partook in the ousting of my mother, who had simply drifted away. They ultimately got her for smoking and my mom, was so disgusted with them by this time that she wouldn't give them the time of day. They never knew that the cigarettes they saw on her table belonged to my aunt. When the shunning commenced, it was hell for my Mom. I spent hours consoling her and hours trying to convince my brother that what he had done and was doing were wrong, to no avail. My brother and the two oldest of my younger sisters (who'd become jw's) all lived in the same small town as my mother and they ran into one another often. Can you imagine how my mom felt when they would look the other way and ignore her greetings as if she didn't exist? Their treatment of her reminds me of that African tribe that sentences some of its law breaking members to death, not by killing them, but by total ostracizing them. They are not told to leave the village but from the time of sentencing they are completely excluded from any form of human contact or interaction, I understand most die very soon after. Partly from the emotional breakdown they suffer and partly due their ingrown beliefs that when sentenced in this manner, death is a certainty.
It took my Mom many years to get past the hurt and I don't truly believe she ever fully has. To this day she believes that one day they will see their errors and they will come back to her. She doesn?t even feel as if she needs to forgive them. What's to forgive? They've been misled. She loves them as much now as when they were babes suckling at her breasts and in thinking that one day, they might return, she might be right. Recently, my second youngest sister made contact with her and they have been visiting. My mom is ecstatic over meeting her grandchildren. Can you imagine? An added note here, its been several years since I wrote this story and my Mom is now in a home for the mentally incompetent. Her maintainence of her belief in her kids, finally blew out her capacity to discern fact from fiction. To ever single JW out there, I extend my hand with middle finger fully erect and wish them a hearty 'eat shit and die'!
All I can see out of this is that a parent's love for her children is so much stronger than the hatred that religion teaches. Honor your father and mother before god? Please, someone, tell the witnesses this is in the bible!
On my part, after spending many hours banging my head against the wall arguing with my siblings, I had enough. I informed each of them that they were to consider themselves disfellowshipped from my life and I have had little or no contact with any of them for over 14 years now. Even if they came crawling back to my Mom, begging her forgiveness, I don't know that I could. I was the one who held my Mom close in my arms while she cried and cried, trying to think of anything I could say or do to make things right. I was the one who had to be strong for my Mom and watch her nearly die of the hurt. It is my fondest hope that every night when they close their eyes, they sleep poorly.


At this point in my life I am a father of four beautiful emotionally healthy kids, who are religion free! I wont allow it in my house. We have Christmases and Easter and we go out trick or treating and our house gets crazy when one has a birthday! I like myself and my life. I feel at ease with myself.
I treat others with a courtesy that is almost Christian in manner and I have achieved a leadership status in almost every venue I?ve been party to. I am well liked and respected in this small town I live in and my life is absurdly regular given the tumult I've been through.

I am a voracious reader and over the years, I've read a great deal about other religions. I wasn't necessarily looking for an alternative place of worship, just satisfying long held curiosities. The one thing that runs true throughout all of the religions I've read about is that they all claim to be the one and only path to redemption. Isolationism runs rampant through them and I cannot abide by any faith that does not allow for the possibility that their beliefs are rife with uncertainties. So I remain Godless. I've no need to have a figure to have faith in for I have myself, and my pride.
I treat others in a respectful manner. I am unfailingly honest at best and mildly deceptive at worst. I won't hurt anybody unless threatened and I don?t advocate anger to force my opinions on others. I don't allow gossip to be a factor in how I form an opinion of somebody I've just met. I help my neighbors when they are troubled and I give money to charities when I can afford it. I drink rarely, and drugs are something I once did. When I was married, I never cheated on my wife and I never practiced deceit with her. I pay my taxes (grudgingly) and I pay my way in life. I live my life in the manner of someone who is abiding by the bible, while discounting it entirely. I live my life according to common sense and humanity and I keep it clean using my free will and the eternal optimism that is my guiding light.
If, when I die, I am marched before God for judgment and deemed unworthy because I chose not to worship, so be it. If how I live my life is not testament enough to the goodness of mankind, then I want no part of an afterlife that celebrates subjugation. In my mind, having freewill completely un-tethered by religion and remaining true to my own personal convictions is possibly the holiest form of worship I can imagine. Wouldn?t a man with no ties to either God or Satan, who lives his life in a manner that exemplifies goodness, be the ultimate testament to the rightness of the existence of humanity? My way of life is my tribute to my maker if, indeed, He exists. If He doesn't like that, then He can kiss my ass.