She says she hopes to visit China again to visit Jean, a former student in her Bible study who never became a Jehovah's Witness but did become a friend. "I have so much gratitude to China because I know, for a fact, if I had not been in China, I would have still been a Jehovah's Witness who was thinking the world was going to end every day, and basically using my life for something that was effectually a myth," Scorah says. And she says she has "gratitude" for the experience she went through. She and her partner have a 3-year-old daughter now. That's what's brought meaning to life again for me." And I think mostly, I think it has to do with other people, and with love. "There's a way through these kinds of things without religion. if you have answers to all of life's questions, yes, it feels very meaningful, but if those answers aren't true, then that's also meaningless. But as far as just finding meaning - it's interesting, because when I was a Jehovah's Witness, we had the answers to all life's disturbing questions, including: What happens when someone dies? Why would an innocent child die? Why would God allow that to happen? But the reality is. "The devastation was complete on every level.
#The witness ending how to#
"I don't know how to describe the anguish," Scorah says. On the very first day of sending her son to day care, he dies suddenly, hours after she had left him there. Then she suffers a different kind of trauma. Scorah moves to New York, falls in love, has a son. You can't have one without the other."Īt the end of her memoir, the narrative takes a sharp turn. You know, people always say they want their life to change, but they don't change their life because they're afraid of loss. "And also, I was just reading something where someone was talking about: You can never have change without loss.
"There was no other way for it to end than to have a new beginning," she says. People aren't going to be, like, 'Oh, what happened to Amber?' "ĭeclared an apostate, Scorah was shunned by her husband, friends, family and the majority of her community. If I just tried to walk away, it doesn't work like that.
I was a pioneer missionary I was married to an elder I was in this foreign land, there for preaching. And my religion is not one that you can just slink out of, especially given the position I was in. "However, it's a very strange thing: When you're in a religion and your whole worldview is this apocalyptic worldview, the only ending you know is apocalypse. "It's funny - I didn't go see Jonathan with the intent of ending my marriage," Scorah says. She says there was something that "propelled" her to this "point of no return." And on a trip back to North America, she finally met Jonathan, and they became physically intimate. And here I was with my 100-or-so-year-old religion telling them to just throw that all away for this."īut it was Jonathan who made her directly confront her beliefs. And also, I started to feel a little arrogant, because these people had thousands of years of cultural history and wisdom. "And I realized that some of the things sounded kind of crazy. "For example, being in this foreign culture and sitting down, speaking Chinese, another language - a language that basically causes you to have to revamp your entire way of thinking in order to speak it - had started to make me hear the things that I was teaching for the first time with new ears," Scorah says.
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