A kid

As I kid I LOVED Jehovah, I mean I was taught that you were supposed to love him more than yourself, more than your family. I was taught to read using the bible and I was taught to pray before I could read. When I went to school I was probably one of the first kids in my grade who could read. Since before I can remember I was engaging in the door to door ministry with my family, when I was 9 or 10 years old I was raising my hand during meetings at the Kingdom Hall to give comments on what I learned in my bible studies, and not soon after than I was taking part in the theocratic ministry school demonstrating my vast biblical knowledge and love for God.
When I became a teenager I started to question if my devotion to God was actual love or if it was fear. I remember always being warned that we would be repaid for our sins even the ones only committed in the mind. I remember jumping in bed with my mom or my grandparents to wait out a thunderstorm that I would have sworn was Armageddon, hoping and praying that hopefully I hadn't done anything that day wrong enough to warrant death.

All of this seems so far away to me now, I am 28 years old and have not set foot in a Kingdom Hall in almost ten years. I went to college in 1998 and grad school in 2004 and moved over 400 miles away from everyone and everything that I had know growing up. I am not one of those ex-Jehovah's Witnesses that feels guilty about leaving or fights little urges to go back. I am completely happy with the way I chose to live my life now. I know that being raised as a Jehovah's Witness had a huge impact to the adult I have become, in some ways I know it has made me a good person, but in other ways I know that it left me naive to what I would encounter as I became an adult.