Nottawayfer

So true, and thank you Abi. Even though I was never molested as a child, I had many situations come up in my life as a teen in which "no" wasn't taken as "no". There are many girls out there who do end up doing things because they like the attention of the opposite sex. In my case, I didn't have a real relationship with my father. I craved attention from men. I didn't know how a girl should be treated. I had to learn the hard way as many girls have. I have many regrets about my activities as a teenager and young adult. I was never taught to love or respect myself much less have any confidence. It took me a long time to figure out the attention I was getting was ripping me apart. It is sad when a child tells their parent(s) that something is going on in their life, and they don't do anything about it. I know there are a lot of different reasons. I just hope that our society learns to listen better when a child says something is going on in their lives. I was just discussing this kind of thing with a friend. She was raped by her step grandfather. Her mother was raped by the same man. She later on asked her mother why she let her be around him as a child. Her mother responded that she thought he had changed. This subject is a very emotional subject.

I agree Jardinero. I was only stating what I understood to be the problem with someone making a statement that they had sex willing.

I'm not putting any blame anywhere. I just understood that a lot of women posters felt that the other poster who shared she willingly had a 4 year affair with leadership was tearing down all the work done done to help the understanding that there was sexual abuse, rape, and unwilling women who were victmized. Going back to my own thoughts when I first started on GSC, I never knew about sexual abuse. I knew that promiscuity happened between leaders and willing participants. I never dreamed that anyone who had sex with the MOG didn't want to. I had blinders on. It took Chatty Kathy knocking me over the head almost all day long on a thread about 3 years ago for me to "get it". BTW, thank you very much Chatty Kathy :). But it was really one poster who had experienced abuse to make a comment that just let it all fall in to place for me. It was one little comment from that person which made me see the hurt and pain it caused. I was a changed person after that. There are a lot of women on this board who don't want the ugliness of sexual abuse at the hands of top leadership in twi to be covered over by someone's claim of "I did it willingly."

One day at the ROA in the 80s, I was eating breakfast in the full meal tent. There was a lady with her 3 year old daughter. We introduced ourselves. The little girls could only say, "Mommy! That lady has a mustache!!!!" in an extremely loud voice. The mother was ready to crawl under the table. I started waxing my upper lip right after that ROA. :blink:

(((((Abi and Sushi))))) The decision to put a pet to sleep is one of the hardest. Almost one year ago we had to pur our Hershey down. He had a cancerous tumor in the roof of his mouth. It knocked out one of his back teeth, and he had blood coming out of his nose because the tumor was way out of control before we noticed it. Our vet told us that if he started to lose weight or if the bleeding in his nose became regular that it was time for us to depart with our beloved. We fed him whatever his heart desired. We loved him big all the time, but we loved him EXTRA BIG after we found out he may not be around much longer. At the point the vet gave us the advice, we had no idea how long it would be. It was about a month. I would try getting a second opinion from another vet and ask the vet what would be a deciding factor to be the most humane from your dog. The hardest part of making the decision was because we didn't want to let him go. Praying here....

I agree something seemed up with Taylor. His pitch was off a few times in the beginning of the song. It wasn't his best night. I thought Kathryn did a awesome job singing the song. It's weird how everyone wants to sing Whitney Houston's praises still. She is a has-been who needs to clean her act up. Dont get me wrong; WH was a great singer, but I don't put her up as high as Randy did. Kathryn was brave and did the song very well IMHO. She has HUGE talent with her voice. The judges responses to her were very disappointing and misjudged IMHO.

JL!!! Are you trying to say I'm getting old??? LOLOL!!

Isn't it so funny what you thought was "bad". I went to a Halloween party full of gay guys the year after I left. I got an eye full to say the least....LOL! They are definitelly party guys. But I had fun, and I saw they are real people too. I still can't watch scarey movies because I have problems getting gorey images out of my mind after I let them in. The devil spirit thing doesn't bother me anymore. I know they aren't always watching me.

I got my first one 2 years ago. It didn't hurt, but it was not very comfortable having my chest sqeezed to the thickness of a pancake. :blink: I keep going back though so it must not be that bad.

Pickler needs to go! Chris rocked and so did Elliott!!! Chris is so dammmmmmmmmmn sexy!!

JWitt, That is terrible that you all were treated this way. I would definitely be looking for another place to go where you will be welcomed no matter what you believe.

Belle, I went out to my car one morning shortly after leaving TWI only to find a boot on the back wheel of my car. I was parked in my assigned parking spot. I had moved in the complex 3 weeks earlier (my move was days before Christmas). There was a parking sticker I was supposed to put on my car. It was in a folder in my boxes which were not completely unpacked. I was LIVID that this happened when I was parked in MY parking spot. The apartment complex hired a towing company to search through the parking lot at night to look for the dumb stickers. GRRRR!!!! If I had a problem with someone parking in my spot, I would have called them....grrrr! Anyway, I called the towing company and the guy was clear up in North County of San Diego. I lived in the eastern part of the county. It was during morning rush hour traffic, and it would take him an hour or more to get to me to take the boot off. I became even more LIVID. I spent my hour huffing and puffing and cussing on a thread here on GSC wondering if I was being punished for leaving TWI. Certainly my situation was no where as detrimental as the things you experienced, but isn't it amazing the voodoo that twi had on us? THAT was the lie. I've seen some christians have the same thoughts when bad things happen. My sister's mother-in-law had comments like this when we found out my sister's baby had a stroke. "Oh, the Devil is working overtime." I think a lot of people just HAVE to have an answer to everything and a place to assign things that happen. I also don't think the Devil has as much power as some christians want to give him. I am glad to say that I now think sometimes chit happens, and I don't have to have an answer for everything. I think some situations happen to help us grow (I'm not saying God makes them happen). But I know that I've grown since my divorce. I know that my experiences in TWI helped form who I am today (no credit to TWI of course). Edited to add a line of clarification.

Dorfus Chickenpants here. I'm waiting to see if someone fesses up to beng sleazy monkeyboob. They'd have to have some really crazy name.

I'v been to some good churches and some not-so-good churches. I've never made myself an official member at any of them. I figure they should let me come and participate whether I want to be "Official" or not. :) Most have been OK with that. I still can't find a church in Arizona like the one I had in San Diego. I am bummed about that, but I wouldn't give up my husband for anything. (He's the reason I moved.)

Jones??? No way! My mom is a Jones! We could be cousins Belle!

Herbie, I work in the County Assessor's Office which includes Cartography (Mapping) as part of our office. We are in the process of taking all of the mapping from physically-drawn maps to a complete GIS system available on our website. There is a small part of it done. However, we have a chinese-owned Canadian company doing the parcel layers for us. They are failing miserably right now. I am really excited to see it all done. We have done orthorphotography for one of the layers available in GIS. It's really interesting when you get to areas like the Hoover Dam or even closing in on my own house. Your PowerPoint presentation has some blue writing on some pages. Did you mean for that to happen?

I remember experiencing this kind of junk from people when I was on Staff. They had this whole mentality of not letting the sun go down on their wrath and getting things worked out as soon as possible. That might be all fine and dandy, but sometimes it takes someone more than 5 minutes to sort out their thoughts. It's not that you are even letting it ruin your life, you are thinking through the situation in your own mind to figure out what the heck happened sometimes. I remember leaving my room when a roommate and I got in to it. She was ticked I left. When I came back, you would have thought the Devil was attacking me at the door for leaving. I told her that I needed time alone to think and don't ever think it's wrong becauses he didn't feel the need to do it.

I remember his birthday being celebrated at HQ in November. I also remember him being just a tad younger than my mom. She was born in 1945.

I wish you would visit my neighbors when you have the urge to crap on someone's windshield. They could use it.......

Well, innies. You can see that your abundant sharing is being spent well on paying Mr. Linder and other WAYGBers in finding out about those who question twi. If twi has the truth, why aren't they comfortable with the fact that people can make up their own damn minds and leave them alone?

Is it that they don't understand and don't know they don't fully understand? I'm wondering why some are so opinionated about shoes they haven't been in.

Many who left during that time were still VPW and PFAL worshippers. They were afraid they wouldn't have a class. Those who knew they were on their way out the door brainstormed for ideas in keeping PFAL alive after they left. I was even approached to type up a manuscript of PFAL in case we wouldn't have it one day. Our territory coordinator told us that we should be able to teach it because we may not always have it. We didn't understand the fullness of what he was saying at that time, but it became more clear the next year and even later on. The guys who were fulltime clergy who didn't stay with twi had twits coming to their house to take twi belongings. If something was missing, they were hounded until they coughed it up. I saw it happen to our LC.

I guess he's not strange for nuttin.....LOL! Please tell Mr. Strange what in the world is iguana flavor?????

Likeaneagel, I assume you are asking about the time after VPW died and the POP was read. I think the 80s were different for each area. What you heard about what was happening depended on where you were and who was there. For me, it was business as usual since my local leadership still supported HQ. Our territory coordinator (higher up than a BC, but lower than an LC) had meetings with his BCs. I used to spend my whole weekend serving at those meetings. I remember hearing some knock-down-drag-out arguments because not everyone thought the same about what was happening. It became more apparent after people starting leaving and doing their own thing. They tried to act as if they were still doing exactly the same thing except without Martinfail. I remember when John Lynn and Ralph Dubofsky left and started sending letters to a lot of people. We were told that we should not read the letter or we were opening ourselves up to lying spirits. Man, I wish I had been a rebellious wayfer. That's all hindsite now. I was completely confused back then. I had been a TC at that time, but we still didn't get many bones tossed our way. Our BC and his wife were pretty tight-lipped. The only change was when I decided not to go in residence. I told the Territory coordinator and didn't get reamed for it. He said I was making a good decision because the Corps was no longer VPW's Corps. I decided not to go just because I didn't want to. I only decided to go in because of pressure from the BCs. In my area, the leadership were leaning toward support for CG. I also dated a 17th corps guy who was tight-lipped. Maybe he really didn't know much because he was in his interim year. The BC didn't like him, so maybe he didn't know much. But surely he was talking to his Corps buddies who were spread all over the place. It was a weird, confusing time. I wish I had been around people who shared freely. ROA 1986 was extremely weird. People were walking around like zombies. It wasn't until I got back home from that ROA that I heard more about what happened. I had no idea of the things the Trustees were being called on the carpet for. I didn't until I actually read POP after leaving TWI. At the time I got to read it, I could put things in to perspective because I had no allegiance to any of the groups involved.

Frijoles ice cream? Is that for real?