In Part 1 of my series on my evolving relationship with God I explained that as a child God was basically my supernatural defender. I counted on him to keep the demons at bay and help me not to have bad dreams. This changed, however, when I had my first encounters with sexual topics and learned that Jehovah was disappointed in me. I asked him to forgive me for whatever bad stuff I may have done, but I never heard a word from him. On to part 2.

When I was in late elementary school my conception of God changed radically. Several factors played a major part in this but the most important one was, I think, Armageddon. As a Jehovah’s Witness kid growing up in the 1980’s the end of the world seemed a very real danger. As a Cold War kid in the time of President Reagan a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed a virtual certainty unless God stepped in first. I was assured over and over again by my parents, teachers, Watchtower articles and talks given at the Kingdom Hall that mankind possessed enough nuclear firepower to destroy every living thing on earth many times over and that we were teetering on the brink of extinction as a species. We saw movies like “The Day After” about nuclear holocaust. What my parents and the Watchtower Society told me, however, was to not worry because Jehovah would never let that happen. He had a plan and his plan was a different kind of Armageddon. Not nuclear, spiritual.

See, it was actually a good thing that mankind possessed such terrifying weapons because it proved that we were truly living in the last days. There was clearly only one solution to the Cold War nuclear crisis: Jehovah God. His plan was straightforward. Whenever he gave the command, his son Jesus would lead an army of angels to earth to kill all the wicked people on the earth, cleansing the earth of the threats that it faced. The survivors (presumably mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses) would then rebuild a paradise earth. Thanks to a bunch of numerological math that I didn’t really understand at the time, we knew that God had started his end times clock tickin’ in 1914 and that the generation of people who were alive at that time would live to see Armageddon. Of course, by the mid-1980s they were getting pretty old. The pressure was building. It was going to be nukes or angels, but either way the world was going to end.

I was sure it was going to be angels, but for the first time in my life I wasn’t sure they weren’t going to kill me when they came down to cleanse the earth. I started to get really really paranoid. I woke up every morning and listened for the sirens that I figured would tell us that bombs or missiles were on their way to kill us all. I had dreams about God destroying the earth and in those dreams I was always terrified that I was going to be killed like the people around me were being killed. When I woke up from those dreams I didn’t feel like it was OK for me to say “Jehovah, Jehovah” and feel better. I felt like God and I had to get back on good terms first.

You might think that I was chiefly concerned at this point with my own survival at Armageddon, and of course I did want to survive it, but the choice between two end of the world scenarios actually got me thinking in a different way. It introduced my first seeds of doubt. Nuclear war, thought I, was a pretty massive and evil thing. And Jehovah darn well better put a stop to it. But what if, I wondered, what if Jehovah wasn’t really real? I mean, how did we KNOW that he was there and that he was going to do all these things? I knew what the Bible said, I knew what the Watchtower said, I knew what my parents believed, but all of those things seemed to require an initial belief that God was there and that he was a Christian before they could function as evidence. I needed a stronger reassurance. I needed to know that Jehovah wasn’t like my imaginary friend Jimmy Pattern who I pretended to play with as a child. At a district convention in 1985, when I was 11 going on 12, I got that reassurance when the Watchtower Society published a book about creation versus evolution. It was called “Life – How Did it Get Here? By Evolution or Creation?” and I felt it was the answer to the prayers I had been praying about whether or not God forgave me. He must have forgiven me to provide me with a book that answered conclusively all the fundamental doubts that had crept into my mind. My guilt over my sins actually cleared and after reading the book cover to cover in the first week I had it, I was no longer feeling like Armageddon was going to be a big scary thing. God was real, creation proved it. He had a plan, the Bible proved that. His plan was going to stop the nukes, the Watchtower Society proved that. And I could get through Armageddon by being on his side.

This blissful state of affairs lasted for a pretty short time. This was mainly because I entered puberty and started obsessing about girls. I was a nerd and 6th grade was the worst year of my life up to that point. Greasy hair, bad plastic glasses, no sense of style, too smart for my own good, in 6th grade I was picked on mercilessly, teased, tormented, had my books dumped, had my head kicked into my locker and lost all my self-esteem. In 6th grade I felt my life was all just one big humiliation. To top it off, I had started to notice girls, dream about girls, and even collect pictures of girls I thought were hot from newspapers and magazines. I didn’t quite understand why girls were suddenly the top of the list for me, but I was very concerned about making sure that my obsession didn’t drive a wedge between me and Jehovah again. Thanks to the Creation Book I felt like I was on solid ground in believing that he was indeed real, I felt that he had accepted me back in his good graces, and I really didn’t want to blow it. But, weighed against the cosmic creator of all things was… curvy parts, soft lips, shining hair, dimples, twinkling eyes, and of course, that mysterious thing that everybody always seemed so interested in… sex.

In 7th grade I took a sex ed class at school. For the first time I actually understood what all this sex stuff was about. One thing that they mentioned in this class was something called “nocturnal emissions” or “wet dreams” and that was new to me. They mentioned that most boys my age started to have them but I had not. This concerned me. Why didn’t I get these wet dreams? My brother Rhett admitted to having had one once and it got me quite upset. What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I get them? I worried that maybe my plumbing was broken or didn’t work properly. So, one day in the shower, after a long prayerful discussion with Jehovah in which I reassured him that I had strictly medical reasons for what I was about to do, I attempted masturbation. It didn’t work. Oh crap, it didn’t work! Sure, it felt nice and all, but nothing came out! I must be broken! I became even more upset.

Naturally, after my shower and a day of contemplation on it I figured that I needed to try again. It took a few desperate attempts but I was ultimately able to establish that my plumbing did indeed work. What a relief. Now I could stop. I was sure Jehovah was OK with what I had done and as long as I didn’t do it anymore it would be fine. I think that resolution lasted a couple of months until, like basically every other 13 or 14 year old boy on the planet, I tried it again, and again, and again. The feelings of guilt and shame returned but worse this time because this time I knew better. Jehovah was aware of what I was doing, he didn’t like it and I was a bad person for knowingly doing it anyhow. It would have been nice if my parents had explained to me what a normal thing masturbation was and how Jehovah didn’t have a problem with it, but they didn’t and I assumed he did and every time I did it I prayed for forgiveness and promised I would resist the urge next time.

This fundamental dynamic, me the sinner with the feelings of guilt and the problem I couldn’t get under control and Jehovah the universal judge looking down on me with grave disappointment, shaped my life for the rest of my teenage life. On the one hand, it drove me to strengthen my time and energy spent in God’s service, doing his will. I went out in the door-to-door ministry more often, commented more at meetings, studied more and just generally worked harder at theocratic things. On the other hand, I developed a secondary life in which I pushed the boundaries of how bad I could be. I learned to swear, I learned to shoplift, and I learned a lot of dirty jokes. I spent a lot of time praying about my condition, my personality, discussing with God just who I thought I was becoming. I saw myself something like the apostle Paul when he said he had a thorn in his flesh, I was fundamentally flawed in some way and I always had to fight it even though often I lost. Like Paul, however, I also really wanted to be good and tried to be good. So, my big question for Jehovah was “am I a good person who occasionally does bad things or a bad person posing as a good person?”

One day on my paper route when I was 16 I sat down on a bench and decided that the answer to my question was obvious. The answer was: it doesn’t matter which you are, just what is right. I am here, the earth is here, creation proves God exists, the end times are here, and I have a choice. Side with God or side with Satan. My motive for which side I join cannot be based on whether I think I’ll survive. That’s irrelevant. It has to be based on what is right. I believed Jehovah was in the right and I knew his side was the side I was on. At that moment I resolved that while I would try to clean up my act, more importantly I would dedicate my live to Jehovah and work hard on his behalf regardless of whether he accepted or forgave me. Maybe he’d kill me at Armageddon, but maybe I’d have saved somebody else by then and I’d know I did the right thing.

That was when I decided to get baptized and my relationship with God changed again.

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