Christine – Ex-Jehovah’s Witness

christine

.:THE TESTIMONY OF CHRISTINE (David’s wife)

Despite the sexual abuse and lack of love and acceptance she experienced when she was growing up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christine still believed that the Jehovah’s Witness religion was “the Truth” and served as a Regular Pioneer. But deep inside, she felt unworthy, guilty and fearful of what would happen to her at Armageddon. Finally, she cried out in desperation: “Jesus said, ‘Take my load for it is kindly and light,’ but Jehovah it’s not light! It’s more like concrete!” When Jehovah opened her eyes to Jesus her true Shepherd, she found the love, grace and security she had longed for all her life.

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I was born in 1949 in England. When my mother was pregnant with me, my aunt who was a Jehovah’s Witness convinced my mother to start a “Bible Study” with one of her Jehovah’s Witness friends. The woman who studied with my mother was considered to be one of the “anointed remnant” of the 144,000 1. spoken of in Revelation 7 and 14. Thus, my mother and father joined Jehovah’s Witnesses before I was even born.

My mother started to hemorrhage during her pregnancy with me and nearly miscarried. The doctor told her that she had to rest or she would lose her baby. During this time, she prayed to Jehovah God: “If I have this baby, I will give it to you and it will serve you for the rest of its life.” True to her promise, soon after I was born, I was taken door-to-door spreading the Jehovah’s Witness “gospel” with my mother every week. Thus, I was born into a Watchtower family and raised to believe this religion was the only truth.

At birth, I had a sister who was 13 years older than me. She understandably became very jealous of me and started to rebel against our parents. She caused a lot of trouble for my family because she felt all the attention was being given to me. Eventually, she married at 18 years of age and had a baby boy when I was 7 or 8 years old.

During those first few years, I was a very happy little girl until one day my mother left me alone with a close relative who lived in the downstairs flat (apartment). This caused a dramatic change in my life because he began to sexually abuse me. I thank the dear Lord he never actually raped me but this event changed my life, and I became full of guilt and terrified of Jehovah God’s wrath from then on.

After a while, I gathered up enough courage to tell my father and mother what had happened to me. All my father said was, “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”  e then told me that the police would put my relative in prison and asked, “Is that what you want? He would be in prison and his son will not have his dad.” He went on to say, “I don’t want to hear about this again,” and told me to just keep away from him.  As this relative was also a Jehovah’s Witness by this point, he warned me that if this matter got out, it would also bring reproach on Jehovah and the Watchtower Society and he would be disfellowshipped.

From that day on, I totally changed from being a happy innocent little girl into someone who felt completely alone, rejected and unloved. If only my mother or father had sat me on their lap and explained that what happened to me was not my fault, I would have trusted them. Instead, I felt that I could no longer trust them or anyone else ever again. I remember thinking, “Why did God allow this to happen to me?

I only knew Jehovah as a Big Scary God who punishes the wicked. Due to the guilt I felt, I also thought that I had made Him very angry with me. I would sweat with fear; afraid of what would happen to me, but in the meantime my abuser was allowed to carry on a normal life as a Jehovah’s Witness. He was a Ministerial Servant and would get up on the platform in the Kingdom Hall to give talks. I asked God, “Why do you allow this man to get away with the abuse of a little girl?” Not long after I prayed to God, my abuser was removed from his position and never returned to it again. In fact, he was never allowed to do any preaching or public speaking again, and I said, “Thank you, Jehovah, for answering my prayer!

Even with this prayer answered my life never seemed to have any meaning. I thought that God did not want to know me anymore, but somehow something inside me gave me the courage to go on. My mother would take me around preaching every week and during those times we saw a lot of poverty. We lived in South-East London, which had its nice areas, but there were also some areas most people did not want to know about.

We would visit a big, old building called the Half Way House, used for young unmarried mothers and their babies. The place was so filthy that I can still smell it as I am writing this. The experience of visiting that place was horrible, and I felt pity and compassion for those people. But because I was a Jehovah’s Witnesses, I never really knew how to handle this very sad situation. All we could offer them were the magazines called The Watchtower and Awake! which never did anything to help resolve their many problems. Oh, how they needed to know that God loved them! But how could we tell them that, when as Jehovah’s Witness, we never knew that what they really needed was Jesus Christ to help them out of their pitiful condition? We did not even offer to pray for them, as we did not know how to properly pray ourselves. Therefore, we were unable to help these poor unwed mothers out of their desperate conditions.

My journey along life’s roadway seemed to be going from one horrible situation to another. My father started to have a Watchtower “bible study” with a man. The man was a loner, without family or friends. Yet, after a few weeks, my father invited him to come to live with us; even though he had no idea where this man came from or who he really was. My father was only interested in this man becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. After a short time this man became a “part of the family” and started to take an interest in me by buying me things like sweets, candy and jewelry. Looking back on this time, it seems very strange how my mother and father did not seem too concerned about his behavior.

After a while the man started to draw pictures of his private body parts. I was very shocked, but thought there was no point in telling my parents because they would just sweep it under the carpet like they did before. Eventually, one night he actually came into the entrance of my bedroom, which was right next door to his. (Yes, that’s right they put a man they did not know anything about in the bedroom next to mine!) He then asked me if I would let him do to me the things he had shown me in the drawing; as the Jehovah’s Witness lady he had just been out with would not let him do it to her. At that moment, my father appeared and asked him what he was doing outside my room. They disappeared into his room together and my father told him not to enter my room again. However, he was allowed to remain in our home.

During that period of time my parents started to go out preaching together every Wednesday night, and I was left on my own with the pedophile Jehovah’s Witness living upstairs and my pedophile Jehovah’s Witness relative living downstairs. At that vulnerable age, my parents would leave me alone from 7 pm until 11 pm and it was like living through a nightmare at 9 years of age.  But thankfully, those men never came near me again. Praise the Lord!

As I got older, I started going out with boys who were Jehovah’s Witnesses and they all treated me respectfully. But when I was 15 years old, I dated a “brother” who was ten years older than me. I later found out that he liked young girls a lot and now that I look back on the situation, I realize that I had been in a very dangerous position as he also tried having sex with me. I later learned from other “sisters” in the congregation that he made a habit of dating very young girls for this purpose. I could see he was a very dangerous Jehovah’s Witness predator.

During my last term at school, I was told by my head teacher that I could go to art college because I had a talent in that area, but my mother insisted that it would be better for me to serve Jehovah fulltime since Armageddon was very near. So, instead of going to an art college when I left school, I worked part-time for my parents in their Guest House and went door-to-door as a Regular Pioneer of Jehovah’s Witnesses the rest of the time. It was during this time that I met someone near my own age. As we got to know each other, we fell in love. His name is David and he also has his testimony on this website. He was a Regular Pioneer as well and gradually we started to get closer in our relationship. I knew I needed to tell him everything that happened to me as a child. Needless to say, he was very angry at these men, but we both knew that it was pointless taking the problem to the elders as they also would have done nothing.

After we dated for two years, we got married when I was 18 and Dave was 20 years old. Later we had two lovely daughters named Naomi and Lisa, but our marriage was not easy. The abuse had affected me more than I realized, and I became very jealous and possessive. I felt there was something missing from my marriage or my life. I felt very mixed up emotionally. Looking back, I now know that I needed the Lord in my life. As Watchtower Witnesses, we never prayed for one another because we tended to keep things to ourselves. Dave even felt embarrassed to pray with the girls and me, even though he was an Elder.

In the mid-1970s, I suffered terribly from chronic depression and was prescribed Valium, but all the elders could say was, “How can you suffer with depression when you believe in Jehovah God?” So again, the guilt started. Deep inside me, I felt unworthy, guilty and fearful of what would happen to me at Armageddon. During the following years we moved four times and lived in four different areas of the United Kingdom and Dave served as a Jehovah’s Witness elder in many of these locations. In one city, we sought to feel accepted at three different congregations within the city, but the more we reached out, the more detached we felt from everyone. A major straw broke when our youngest daughter Lisa was Disfellowshipped in 1995. This event caused a lot of hurt and stress due to the complete lack of love shown to all of us. I remember feeling like this religion had become like concrete blocks on my shoulders.

One day in desperation, I cried out to Jehovah and said to Him: “Jesus said, ‘Take my load for it is kindly and light,’ but Jehovah it’s not light! It’s more like concrete!” Later, I stayed home and began to read the book of Matthew while Dave went to a meeting. When I read chapter 8, verse 11, I was amazed to see that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will be in heaven. That was a very defining moment for me. Even though I was still trapped by fear and guilt, my eyes began to be opened.

By this point, Dave had resigned from being an elder and was feeling that he was always under suspicion by the brothers. This did not make me feel any better either. Eventually in 1999, Dave got onto the Internet and typed in Jehovah’s Witnesses. He started reading information that he felt was kept away from him for years, but I hated to hear him talking about the Society like he did. I screamed at him that he was becoming an apostate. I even prayed that Jehovah would blow up his computer and the very next day it did; the power supply blew up and caused a lot of damage.

Eventually he made me sit in front of the computer and read the information about the Watchtower’s involvement as an NGO with the United Nations (which the Society taught was part of the Wild Beast of Revelation 2.). I then realized that if it was “not hypocritical” for the Society to be an NGO for library access, why did they “resign” so quickly as soon as it became public knowledge?

It took another year for us to completely detach ourselves from the Jehovah’s Witness meetings. This occurred in June 2001. For the next 18 months, we were in a spiritual wilderness and did not officially disassociate ourselves from the Society until after this time, but we knew in our hearts that we wanted God more than ever. Then, suddenly in November 2002, Dave said he was going to go to a Christian church and I did not object. After two weeks, he gave his life to Jesus Christ and I followed two weeks after that.

An amazing transformation took place in our lives within a very short space of time. We were both baptized in water as followers of Jesus Christ in May of 2003 and started serving on the church’s Ministry Team within a short period of time. Dave was even asked to preach a few times on Sunday morning. After a few months, both of our daughters and their husbands also accepted Jesus into their lives. Then, in 2006 right out of the blue, the Lord spoke to me and told me that we had to move abroad, which is something I have never had the desire to do. The Lord directed us to a place that I didn’t even like when we first went there in 1995. It is a very hot place and I do not like the heat, plus it is 2,200 miles from the United Kingdom. We have two daughters and five grandchildren and the oldest daughter was diagnosed with lung lymphoma in 2005. However, in obedience to the Lord’s call, we sold our house in England and moved to Cyprus in 2007.

We believe the Lord has directed us to this place in order to serve Him more fully. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses live in Cyprus and we believe that when the Lord decides to shake this religion even more, a lot more of them will get free out of captivity and seek to know the Lord Jesus Christ as their only true God and Father. We know that Yahweh is looking for people who have an unswerving faith in Him and are obedient to His voice. Jesus said His sheep will hear His voice and they will know Him. Many hirelings claim to be speaking with the voice of Jesus, but if we are Jesus’ sheep, we will know Him and follow Him alone.

I know from personal experience how frightening it was to leave a religion that I was taught from childhood was the only “truth,” but when the Lord spoke to me directly, I knew that it was only Him that could set me free from my captivity to a false religious concept. If you are in this situation yourself, I urge you to ask the Lord Jesus into your life and ask Him to fill you with His Grace. I never even knew what grace was as a Jehovah’s Witness. Grace is the love of Jesus lavished upon us even though we do not deserve it and definitely cannot earn it. Ephesians 1:3-8 states:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight.” 3.

God’s grace encompasses every good gift that the Father wants to give us, by means of His wonderful Son Jesus Christ!

In His Love,

Christine

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1. The 144,000 are regarded by the Watchtower Society as the only ones chosen to go to heaven.
2. See Babylon the Great has Fallen, God’s Kingdom Rules, 1963, pp. 593-594
3. Quoted from the New American Standard Bible.

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