What I was raised to believe... 

I was raised in the Jehovah's Witness religion. When I turned 16, I was disfellowshipped from the religion because I was not living by the religion's rules or standards. For you that don't know what disfellowshipping means, I was shunned by almost all of my family and all the people that I knew that were in the religion. I kept believing though, that it was still the only true religion and that all other religions were pagan, only because that is what I knew to believe and was told from a child. In my late twenties, I  started to reflect on my younger years. The way I had lived my life, my struggles and challenges that I had encountered, my mistakes, the religion that I was raised in, my family that I did not see and missed, and I decided I needed more than just me to take care of my life. So, I turned to God for help and  decided to open the Jehovah's Witnesses' Bible again along with four other translations. Also, the Hebrew and Greek translations. The reason for this is that over the years that I was not in the religion, I had been exposed to different beliefs, and I wanted to make sure for myself what I would believe to be true would be by me examining and searching for myself not taking someone else's word for what I believe. Well, long story short, after searching I found that the only true religion was not "the truth".  After finding this out, the example that I can give you would be, if everyone around you told you from day one that a banana is orange in color and round, then later you find out that a banana is yellow and not round. I will not lie to you there was definitely some confusion and a little bit of anger that transpired for a while. Everything I believed  to be true was now being questioned by myself. The other issue I had to deal with was I could not look at other religions or enter another church because I still had the belief in the back of my mind that they were all evil and pagan. Who could be trusted?

What was I to believe now? What could I believe?

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