Journey to God's House: An inside story of life at the World Headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1980s by Talon Brock

Author:Talon, Brock [Talon, Brock]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brock Talon Enterprises
Published: 2013-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

God loves a good double chocolate chip

As a young man in God's House, I used to skip out on the Bethel meals from time to time when I got tired of the same old same old they slung our way. For example, sometimes the Bethel Farms would get an extra good crop of apples by which they made good use of them in our meals. (Yes, The Society owned actual farms where they grew all their own food.) I used to like apples back then, until I had to eat them for every meal for a couple of months. By the time the Bethel kitchen was done with them, I hated apples.

Here's an example of a daily menu during apple season:

Breakfast: Eggs and an apple crusted ham, with baked apples, apple pastries, hot apple cider and fresh apples for a snack break.

Dinner: Baked chicken and apple flambé, apple salad with apple sauce and apple juice along with an apple crisp for dessert.

Supper: Left over apple flambé and baked apples, an apple slaw salad along with more apple cider and apple cobbler for dessert. They threw in dried apple strips for a take-home snack.

I finally knew how the Israelites felt eating manna every day.

Now, given the above, when the meal was particularly good, it went the other way. All Bethelites would come out of the woodwork to eat at the tables, sometimes fighting over the food. It seemed utterly ridiculous to me some Bethelites, usually older sisters, would use the Bible principle of "gleaning" to greedily take any and all of your food away from you. They did this if you didn't eat up fast enough and it was food they wanted. You see, gleaning was the practice ancient Jews used as a way to have mercy on the poor. Those who owned fields or orchards would be instructed by Mosaic Law to leave some of the crops and otherwise dropped or bruised fruits and lesser wanted grains in their fields or orchards, so the less fortunate who were hungry could come and collect (glean) what was left. This made sense in those days and was a fine provision that I am not making light of.

My complaint was with the big, plump 250+ pound Bethel sisters (who ate three square meals a day including dessert, as well as daytime and midnight snacks, who had obviously not missed a meal in years) would use "gleaning" to get even more food. You see, they would run over to your table right after the dismissal prayer, and snatch your chicken or pizza off your table's plate if you didn't finish it by prayers end. They did this in the name of "gleaning" to somehow try to give this selfish move a measure of nobility. If you dared say something to them, well, then you were the jerk, not them. I found the best defense for this was to go on the offense and to carry my own plastic container with me for the "better meals".

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