How a person disenchanted with faith turns to God

Raphael Narbaez, Jr. was a Los Angeles-based comic and lecturer. He attended his first Jehovah’s Witness meeting at age six. Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a Christian sect denying many traditional Christian doctrines, including the divinity of Christ, but preaching the Second Coming of Christ. Raphael gave his first Bible sermon (soon after the age of thirteen), tended his own congregation at twenty, and was headed for a position of leadership among the 904,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States. On Nov. 1, 1991, he embraced Islam, bringing to the Muslim community the organizational and speaking skills he developed among Jehovah’s Witnesses. Here he narrates his story.

I remember vividly being in a discussion where we were all sitting in my parents’ living room and there were some other Jehovah’s Witnesses there. They were talking about: “It’s Armageddon! The time of the end! And Christ is coming! And you know the hailstones are going to be out here as big as cars! God is going to use all kinds of things to destroy this wicked system and remove the governments! And the Bible talks about the earth opening up! It’s going to swallow whole city blocks!”
I’m scared of death! And then my mother turned around: “See what’s going to happen to you if you don’t get baptized, and if you don’t do God’s will? The earth is going to swallow you up, or one of these huge hailstones is going to hit you on the head, knock you out, and you will not exist ever again. I’ll have to make another child.”
I wasn’t going to take a chance of being hit by one of those big hailstones. So I got baptized. And of course Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in the sprinkling of the water. They submerge you completely, hold you there for a second, and then bring you back up.
I did that at the age of thirteen, Sept. 7, 1963, in Pasadena, California, at the Rose Bowl. It was a big international assembly. We had 100,000 people. We drove all the way from Lubbock, Texas.
Eventually I started giving bigger talks — ten minutes in front of the congregation.
At the age of 16, I started giving hour lectures in front of whole congregations. At age twenty, I had become what they call a pioneer minister.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have a very sophisticated training program, and they also have kind of a quota system. You have to devote ten to twelve hours a month to door-to-door preaching.
So when I became a pioneer minister, I devoted most of my full time to doing the door-to-door ministry. I had to do like 100 hours a month, and I had to have seven Bible studies. I started lecturing other congregations.
I began to get a lot of responsibility and I was accepted at a school in Brooklyn, New York, a very elite school that Jehovah’s Witnesses have for the crème de la crème, the top one percent. But I didn’t go.
A few things no longer made sense to me. For example, the quota system. It seemed like every time I wanted to turn a corner and get into another position of responsibility, I had to do these secular material things to prove my godliness. It’s like if you meet your quotas this month, God loves you. If you don’t meet your quotas next month, God doesn’t love you. That didn’t make very much sense.
We criticized the Catholic Church because they had a man, a priest, to whom they had to confess. And we’d say, “You shouldn’t have to go to a man to confess your sins!” And yet we went to a Body of Elders to confess our sins and seek forgiveness.
I would think… If the sin is against God, shouldn’t I directly go to God and beg for mercy?
Probably the nail that hit the coffin was that I noticed that they started reading their Bible less. Jehovah’s Witnesses have books for everything that is put out by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. The only people on the entire planet who know how to interpret Bible Scripture correctly are that group of men, that committee in Brooklyn, who tell Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide how to dress, how to talk, what to say, what not to say, how to apply Scripture and what the future is going to be like.
I appreciated the books. But if the Bible is the book of knowledge, and if it’s God’s instructions, well, shouldn’t we get our answers out of the Bible?
I started saying, “Don’t worry so much about what the Watchtower says — read the Bible for yourself.” Ears started to prick up.
Old Southerner’s drawl: “I think we got us an apostate here, Judge. Yup. I think this old boy’s one taco short of something.”
Even my father said, “You better watch it, young man, that’s the demons talking right there. That’s the demons trying to get in and cause division.”
I said, “Dad, it’s not the demons. People don’t need to read so much of these other publications. They can find their answers with prayer and in the Bible.”
Spiritually I no longer felt at ease. So in 1979, knowing that I could not make headway, I left, disgruntled and with a bad taste in my mouth, because all my life I had put my soul, my heart, my mind into the church. That was the problem. I didn’t put it in God. I put it in a man-made organization.
I can’t go to other religions. As a Jehovah’s Witness, I had been trained, through the Scriptures, to show that they are all wrong. That idolatry is bad. The Trinity doesn’t exist.
I’m like a man without a religion. I was not a man without a God. But where could I go?
In 1985, I decided to come to Los Angeles and get on the Johnny Carson show and make my mark as a great comedian and actor. I have always felt like I was born for something. I didn’t know whether it was going to be finding the cure to cancer or becoming an actor. I kept praying and it got frustrating after a while.
But it never passed through my mind that there is not a Creator.
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To be continued next week
Courtesy: islamreligion.com