“This is the Carpenter, the Son of Mary”
How Do You Answer When Asked “What do you Do?”

The Last of the Last Days—Over the Top?

We are now in the last of the last days?

My wiseacre answer would be that I’m not doing nothing until we reach the last of the last of the last days. Why inconvenience myself unnecessarily? It’s the same as when over the years the pioneer hour requirement is progressively lowered, then such a thing as ‘auxiliary pioneering’ is concocted, then the hour requirement for them is over time lowered, then it is even devised how to lower it still more during months of special activity. “I’m holding out for 15,” I tell people when I’m feeling punchy. And I have both pioneered and auxiliary pioneered, and I have auxiliary pioneered in all its varieties. (When it was a new concept, I recall someone telling another that they could always ‘artillery pioneer.’)

But why be that way—a wiseacre? I forgive it all. It may sound a little clunky, but I forgive it. I even recommend it—or at least acquiesce to it.

Soon we’ll be away from here—step on the gas and wipe that tear away!” That’s what the Witness organization does. They step on the gas. They don’t sit in stuffy boardrooms discussing schematics of the car. The hop in the driver’s seat and drive that sucker! It is not an armchair activity for them. It is a participation sport, and they are not afraid to push pedal to the medal.

It is a little like Carl Jung after the Holocaust, his values shaken to the core, because he had lived during its horror and had read a lot about it, and so he completely misses the meaning of Job as he takes shots at God in ‘Answer to Job.’ Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, didn’t just observe it. They didn’t just read up on it. They endured it. They lived through it. They were sent to the camps well before the far more numerous Jews, and their integrity saw them though. 

So it is that the Witness organization today consists of doers to match their prowess as thinkers, maybe even outrunning it at times, convinced the latter will catch up. Do they counsel obedience for others? They are that way themselves. They obey first, then they think it through more thoroughly afterwards. Should this result in a clunky expression from time to time, so be it. They are not afraid to go all-in, and I so prefer them to the bland people of this system who cannot do anything without hedging. 

Nor am I not going to be forewarned by it. I’m not about to let my ‘sophistication’ cause me to miss out. They deal with and want to counter the opposite view: “Why, from the days of our forefathers, all things are continuing as at Creation’s beginning!” People are rocked by unheard of calamities today—and yet in no time at all they have adapted to them and accepted whatever is the latest outrage as ‘just one [more] of those things.‘ The urge to spiritual sleep is strong. One week it is some new obscenity that rocks people back on their heels. The next week, it is “Que sera, sera. What ever will be, will be.”

Maybe the best indication the Witness organization is on to something is the line I’ve seen on social media, and the avalanche of ‘likes’ it invariably attracts: “In the future, historians will be asked what quarter of 2020 do they specialize in.”

 

Defending Jehovah’s Witnesses with style from attacks... in Russia, with the book ‘I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses—Searching for the Why’ (free).... and in the West, with the book, 'In the Last of the Last Days: Faith in the Age of Dysfunction'

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