When I went to work a few weeks ago there was this woman handing out Swedish-language Watchtower brochures at my local underground station. I imagine she was a Jehovah’s Witness herself.
The weird part is that she was standing right beside a newspaper stand, where the headline was about someone leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses because ‘if I had stayed I would have died inside’.
The ironic juxtaposition in this scene really puzzled me. Was this woman hoping to explain to people how it really was inside the Witnesses and allay any doubts people may have? Did she not know the headline was right behind her? Or was she hoping to recruit new members who did not believe the headline?
Hello Janet! To me this woman seems relaxed and in my opinion is too far away from the announcement to have a connection to it. But what I surely know is that the shown statement is true. I have had Jehovas Witnesses on my doorstep throughout the last years quiet often and discussed with them a lot. Not belonging to any established religion, I was able to discuss freely, knowing why I don’t like religious communities 😉, and they after a while stopped coming by. The tragedies I heard about about this community of single people, told me by them when we were alone by coincidence, had exactly the same tenor als the sign in the picture says. One incident still moves my (mother-)soul. The woman told me her story and described how she was forced to make the decision between her “faith” and her daughter…………her only child did not stay in the religious community and so they forced her to break up the contact to her daughter………….I do not want or need to say more. This is brainwashing, inhumane and slow death for the soul and free mind.
The photo is a little misleading because I did not want to get her face in the shot. The newspaper stand has two sides, with the same poster on each side. So she not only had the poster facing me to contend with, she had one inches away from her on the front of the stand, facing forward. I figured that maybe she did not understand Swedish but figured out she had to have done so, in order to deal with people who wanted to speak to her.