STARS & CROSSES by Curtis Urness - Review Part 2

This has been another difficult book to review because of its subject matter - see my previous blog.  Dr. Goska, whose book I reviewed in that blog, deals with a whole spectrum of vilification, while Curtis Urness has concentrated on the way Poland is now being held responsible for the crimes of its Nazi occupiers.  Which may of course have been the purpose of all the vilification... but who knows, politics is a devious business.

The levels of prejudice and hatred he has to deal with are distressing, but thankfully the author knows how to tell a story, and he structures it well.  For example he sketches in the marital disaster that has befallen his hero with a light hand, so we can understand just enough to place him emotionally.

And I, for one, feel there might be a novel to be written about that marriage and its ending, as I think it would be a story that many would relate to.

"Stars & Crosses" however is a book about a different relationship, a relationship between two peoples, Jews and Poles.  The author has chosen to tackle the way the history of Poland in WW2 is being revised through the relationship between two protagonists, Ruth and Chic, one Jewish and one Polish.   And he tackles it head on, by having them meet on a visit to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in German occupied Poland where his grandfather was murdered. 

At the airport Chic meets Ruth, an attractive Jewish lady, also on her way to visit the camp. But where Chic is alone, she is with a group, the Rally of Holocaust Survivors.   As Chic begins to meet the members of this group, he is shocked to find out that he and his people who were also  targeted and murdered by Hitler, and whose army fought on the Allied Side, have been re-defined as Nazis.

He finds out that there is no common cause.  He is told that "the Poles are just as responsible as the Germans for the mass murder of the Jews".   Interestingly, the countries that actually were in the Axis with Hitler are never mentioned in this context these days. They were sent down the Memory Hole years ago.

The author makes us feel this shock - and he also weaves a lot of history into his narrative without being too didactic.  It is important history as it stands as a testimony against this revised version of World War Two.

And he does make us care about the growing relationship between his two protagonists, both of whom are believable and likeable.

The book echoes my own shock at what was happening as for many years I had naively supposed that the two peoples, Jews and Poles, had gone through a horror together that others could not be expected to understand.

However I must have grown up, as, sadly, these days I am no longer surprised to find that us Poles/Polonians are the villains of the piece.  I have come to expect it.  In fact I try to take a doubleplusgood from it, in that it does help me in my struggle to be "no part" of the world - to take no sides in its devious politics and its cruel wars.  For example, I am continually forced to notice that the countries that did manage to stay out of WW2 and stay neutral did not suffer as Poland did, are not blamed for anything, and are treated with much more respect. 

I have to admire Curtis Urness for not only tackling this, but for the way he has done so, being fair and balanced.  

The title - Stars & Crosses - is important here - in other words, it is a good title. Two peoples whose symbols those are - Jews and Catholic Poles - were among those targeted for destruction under Hitler's race laws and they suffered and died in his camps because of it.

Yet the suffering of those whose religious symbol was the cross of Christendom is denied, in that the cross that had been erected in Auschwitz as a memorial to the many Catholic Poles who were murdered there had to be taken down.  While I do not believe it to be a Christian symbol (a point I hope to discuss in another blogpost) it was the symbol of so many of the victims.

It makes me feel that they do not count - which I guess in political terms, they don't. And I could accept that given that most victims of most atrocities in the ongoing tragedy that has been human history since the loss of Eden don't count much to "the world".  And us Poles/Polonians are of no more, or less, importance than anyone else. But to be blamed for the crimes of those who murdered us by the million is almost beyond belief.

But, while Nazi racial ideology is the exact opposite of Christian teaching, which teaches us that the human race is one family, all brothers and sisters, wasn't the cross also the symbol of the people who murdered both Jews and Poles, and so many others, in the name of that ideology, with its "superior" and its "inferior"?  Wasn't Germany - together with the other (nameless) countries in the Axis - part of Christendom? And isn't the cross the symbol of Christendom?  Therefore in fairness, I can understand the objection to it... just as I can see how much hurt its removal must have caused.

We do not live in a kind world system.  There are many lovely people within it, but the system itself is not kind.

Nor do we live in a truthful one.  For example, isn't the truth about WW2 that both sides did some terrible ungodly things - Hitler on one side, Stalin on the other, both killing millions in the service of their mad "isms"?

And if the millions killed by Stalin should ever come to have any political weight, am I being too cynical in supposing that Poland will find itself catapulted back to the Allied Side at the speed of light so it can take the blame?   If - or maybe when - that happens, I think Curtis Urness may be just the writer to tackle it.

So please Curtis, wherever you are, stay well, and be on standby!

STARS AND CROSSES By Curtis Urness - Review Part 1

The writer Curtis Urness wrote a lovely review of my book “Waiting for Gordo”.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2723920998?book_show_action=true

 

I appreciate it so much, and of course, I wondered what he was writing and so I have read and am going to review his book “Stars and Crosses”, which is published by Kasva Press, 2022.

 

Because I feel I need to explain the context in which this book is written - the context which made the author feel he must write it - I thought I would begin by blogging a review I have done of another book (one of very few reviews I have ever done) in which Dr. Goska tackles the same subject.

 

She has done it in a scholarly way, and Curtis Urness has tackled it in fiction.  And they are brave to do so. The angle they take on this subject is not one that enhances a career - to put it mildly.

 

Both books have been very difficult for me to read and review because they are both, in their different ways, about the constant vilification of all things Polish by the most powerful media and academe in the world, and about the way that Poland is being moved to the Axis Side in the current version of WW2.

 

Dr.Goska’s title speaks for itself.  Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture.

 

Her book goes out of its way to be fair, but clearly it has done her academic career no good at all.   Anyway, I did review it, though my review no longer appears on the Amazon site. I hope that this review will set the scene for my review of the Curtis Urness book to follow.

 

 

ADVENTURES IN THE AMAZON REVIEW FOREST - My review of BIEGANSKI by Danusha Goska

 

This is not an easy book to review for three reasons.  Firstly, to write it, the writer has had to sail her book through murky waters filled with the crocodiles of political correctness.  So, to review it, I too have to wade gingerly through those waters, and I am not as brave as Dr.Goska. This cannot have been an easy book to write or to get published, so congratulations to the author for managing both.

Secondly, it gives an uncomfortably close look at what the Bible calls “the deep things of Satan” – a look into the mechanisms that operate to divide the children of Adam, and get us to despise, fear, hate and then kill each other.  

 

And, thirdly, it is so troubling that I have only been able to read it in small and disconnected chunks.  So this will be a rather disconnected review.   

 

And I strongly recommend that anyone reading “Bieganski” will also read Psalm 37 – and study the whole Bible.  We, all of us in the worldwide congregations, receive regular reminders that “a fundamental teaching of Christianity is not to retaliate under provocation”. – Matthew 5:39, 44,45. 

 

But not everyone is getting such regular reminders.   It is even possible that one purpose of the current stereotyping is to goad us into retaliating, although Dr.Goska convincingly explains many of the other reasons for it.

 

She has some trenchant things to say about Academe, and she demonstrates the political agendas behind the vilification of all things Polish.

 

For example, she includes this quote from Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany (1871-1890), who said:  "Personally, I can sympathise with (the Poles') position, but if we want to exist, we cannot do other than extirpate them.  A wolf is not to blame that God made him as he is; which does not mean we shouldn't shoot him to death whenever possible."  

 

Those words bore terrible fruitage in the next century, when, by 1939, any vestiges of sympathy or fellow feeling were to be banished.   "On August 22, 1939, on the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to kill "without pity or mercy, men, women, and children of Polish descent or language"".  (Wikipedia)

 

I am forced to wonder what on earth the churches have been teaching their people down the centuries - bearing in mind that Jesus taught his followers to love one another and to do good even to their enemies.

 

Dr. Goska brings us up to date with the politics behind the current vilification of Poles in America.  And I especially appreciated her chapter on Hollywood. “Bieganski in American Cinema” contains, among other things, an interesting review of “The Deeerhunter” and “Spiderman II”.   

I try to avoid the product of Hollywood, because our Creator has told us:  “Anyone loving violence his soul certainly hates.”   And isn’t Hollywood training us to be entertained by more and more violence – to be entertained by what God hates?  “Bieganski” does give me extra incentive to keep away from it.   

This book is a valuable resource, but a difficult read - and not because Dr.Goska has cloaked it in obscure academic jargon.  She doesn’t need to, as she has something very real, but very bleak to say.

 

So I can only hope that all who do read it know that a rescue is close at hand – that what we pray for when we say The Lord’s Prayer is soon to come about. 

 

As I want to end on a positive note, I will return to the Bismarckian wolf comparison, which is haunting me.

 

What a compliment!  Me - a sleek, beautiful, intelligent forest creature - a lithe huntress.   And what is more, as twilight falls in the Amazonian Review Forest, I find I am starving hungry - and I am on the prowl.   I am gliding gracefully through the forest, light and lithe as a feather – (quite a heavy feather these days, sadly) – in search of prey.  As I zimmer through the twilight, herds of startled Bambi books flee in terror.  How am I going to eat tonight?  Will my wolfish hunger be satisfied?  Will I catch anything?

 

Aha!  Rustling through the undergrowth comes “Ethel, the Elderly Tortoise”, limping rather badly. With an eerie HOWL and a rattling of zimmers, I am upon her. 

 

GOTCHA!!  The woods echo to my HOWL of triumph.  The local villagers cower in their hovels – especially Chancellor Bismarck, I find myself spitefully hoping.    At last I can eat. 

 

And so as night falls on this review, it finds me and Ethel sitting side by side on a handy forest log, sharing a nice cup of tea from my flask, eating a cheese sandwich, and having a cosy chat about our arthritis medications…

 

And also wondering again what the world’s religions have been teaching their people.

 

Bismarck said that God made the wolf predatory.  Yet don’t the Hebrew Scriptures assure us that He did not?

 

To summarise, in writing about the Bieganski stereotype, which, on the face of it, might seem a narrow subject, Dr.Goska has shown us a lot about how “the world” – the current system of things - works.  May it serve as a valuable warning to be “no part” of it.

By the way, no-one yet has written "Ethel, the Elderly Tortoise", but it will make more sense of my review once they do.

Knock Knock

I was typing away early on Friday morning - still in my jim jams - when there was a knock at the balcony door. The builders had re-appeared, and clearly had finished as they were asking if we wanted them to put the panels back. I accepted gratefully.

I am sure there is a joke there if I could only think of one.

We now await the removal of the scaffolding. And the return of our sea of plants to the outdoors.

I was a householder in the Ministry School on Thursday night, and Pen came along too - via Zoom. I hope she enjoyed the whole meeting, as she stayed nearly to the end. We are in the books of Kings at the moment - and some of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament, can be quite frightening and hard to understand out of context.

Yet there are wonderful lessons to be learnt. This was the commentary on just one verse we studied at that meeting,  The context was that King Jeroboam was misruling Israel, turning the people to idol worship, and behaving very badly.  One of his sons had become so sick he was about to die, and Jehovah sent this message to the King, by one of his prophets.

The verse was “All Israel will mourn him (Abijah, the son of the king) and bury him, for he alone of Jer·o·boʹam’s family will be laid in a grave, because he is the only one of the house of Jer·o·boʹam in whom Jehovah the God of Israel has found something good. “ 1 Kings 14:13

So the question is : What does this one verse teach us about Jehovah?

“Most important, the words of 1 Kings 14:13 teach us something beautiful about Jehovah and what he looks for in us. Recall that something good was “found in” Abijah. Jehovah evidently searched through Abijah’s heart until He found a trace of goodness. Compared to his family, Abijah was, as one scholar put it, the lone pearl “in a heap of pebbles.” Jehovah cherished this goodness and rewarded it, granting a measure of mercy to this one member of a wicked family.”
https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2010492#h=8:0-9:0

Jehovah is looking for the good in us, he treasures every bit of it. That is so reassuring. And also isn’t it a lesson about how we should treat each other?  We live in a world that is training us to look for every fault, to take offence at everything, but we can make a choice to follow our Creator's example and look for and appreciate the good in everyone.  We are all in "the valley of the decision" - so which way will we choose?

We shopped Friday afternoon, bumped into Jen and had a chat, and I made an apple crumble for Captain B.  And I am now exhausted, I am so feeble these days.

Our lift is out of action again!  We had a power cut for about 3 hours on Friday afternoon, and while everything else has come back on, the lift has not.  If this is going to take another 3 months to fix, I will just have to walk down the stairs VERY carefully and slowly. I can usually walk up - but down is scary as I am petrified of another fall.  Plus walking up and down the stairs takes its toll on my feet.  If I do it more than occasionally, they swell up so painfully that I can hardly bear to touch them to the ground.

So far only one foot goes at a time. I do not like to think of the pickle I will be in if they both flare up.

I am keeping my Zimmer on standby, fuelled and ready to go, as if the lift is not repaired asap, I will be needing it just to hobble to the loo and back. 

The Crown from Coronation to Funeral

On Monday morning we watched the funeral of Queen Elizabeth the Second.  We had both watched her coronation in black and white newsreel back in 1953.  The gun carriage that processed the coffin to the cathedral had the crown on it, plus orb and sceptre - the same crown, orb and sceptre that we saw on the black and white newsreel so long ago I assume. It also carried an arrangement of September flowers, and it began its journey with pipers heading it. It was an impressive and lovely spectacle, that filled me full of an Autumnal sadness.

The ceremony in the Abbey was so well arranged, but was also frustrating. One clergyman said that death is "the path to glory". Where in the Bible does it say that?!  Death is our enemy, and Jesus himself wept when he saw it.  There were some lovely Scriptural readings though, all done flawlessly, in the face of an audience of millions.

And now if I can cling on to life for long enough, I will be seeing my second coronation, as our new King, Charles the Third, ascends to throne.  And I will be meeting that Crown, Orb and Sceptre for a third time - and surely for the last, as even if the present system of things on the earth continues until after we have a King William, I surely won't.'

And if I am here after that, after Armageddon, there will be no more human kings and queens, no need for crowns and sceptres and orbs. No more need for funerals either, as "death will be no more".  Jesus will reign as King for the Thousand Years, and then he will hand everything back to his Father, in a complete and perfect state.

In the meantime, I want to note the flowers, as we will always have flowers.  There was a charming informal arrangement of Autumn garden flowers, roses, hydrangea and such like on the Queen's coffin, all apparently picked from the royal gardens.  And there were splendid and more formal arrangements of lilies and roses, all white, in Cathedral and Chapel.

Why is it we want flowers at funerals?  And is it a custom across all cultures?  At any rate, it was beautifully done at this one.  And I thought the photo of Hawthorne blossom (by Capt.Butterfly) which heads this blog had a heraldic note about it.

And maybe Spring blossom can remind us of the re-birth, the resurrection, the re-awakening that is the Biblical hope for the dead.

I managed an hour on the field service yesterday, meeting with a sibling in Zoom. It was a valuable hour for me as I am wrestling with this promised book review, which must do justice to the book but also include a witness, because of the serious subject matter - and the title.

It is at the stage where it seems impossible, so I need to be made to get down to it and not find other things to do.

M.A.B.L.E FANTASTIC BOOK'S MASSIVE AUTUMN BOOK LAUNCH

M.A.B.L.E   Fantastic Book's Massive Autumn Book Launch Event began on Saturday.   The Schedule is here:

https://www.fantasticbooksstore.com/m-a-b-l-e/mable-schedule

The Intro is here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR9bs0BDI64

Dan, my young publisher, does a great job of introducing it.

I must check when I am on, as a small part of the Fantastic author team.  There are some great book offers, and a chance to talk to authors, and ask questions, and learn about how to get published, which is not easy.  

My swollen foot has gradually eased off, but I did not go to the Field Service group on Friday, or Saturday, though I did get to the Hall on Thursday night. I am hoping to get to the Kingdom Hall this morning, but it is touch and go.  Well, its a question of whether I can bear to put my swollen foot to the ground and go...

I could, and I went. And am very glad I did.  I even walked back up the stairs afterwards, so I have the Zimmer on standby.

The talk was about how applying Bible principles can help us to keep our marriages strong in the middle of a world full of failing marriages.  And our Watchtower study was titled:  "Support our Overseer Jesus", as Jesus is the head of the Christian congregation.  You can find the article here, if you would like to read it: 

 https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2022481

For some reason I can't link it, nor the Youtube video above.  One of the many many mysteries of Cyberspace. Think Marie-Celeste - or not - as you choose.

The Irony of Health Food

My old driving licence went in the post with my application for the new one Tuesday morning. Which makes me even more nervous about driving. I am covered as long as it is in the post, until I get the new one, or until they advise me that I am now too old and am not going to get my renewal.  Hopefully they won't do that yet. 

But still, I would rather not be asked for it at the moment. In fact, I hope I will never be in a situation when I am asked for it.  If it happens, I must remember to say to the Policeman in question: "It's a fair cop guv, you've got me bang to rights."

If the whole thing comes to court and they have to read that out of their notebook, surely the jury will acquit?

Anyway, I did spend Tuesday morning out on the work. Wednesday was letter witnessing via Zoom with two sisters - in my case it was tackling an email I needed to answer, about the meaning of Jesus teaching his followers to be "no part" of the world.   

There is so much to say about that that it was surprisingly difficult being selective and sticking to a few points and a couple of questions. And that was probably one point and one question too many.

We talked to Jacks and to Bea, and to Linda via Zoom. She was asking if were going to go the next Expat reunion and showed us a pic of the new house she and Jon are in the process of buying.  Col and I shopped for our fruit and veg.  And in that shopping trip lies the irony of the title.  I popped into a new (to me) shop selling healthy foods in the hopes i might be able to find some black mustard seeds.  I did! I also bought a bag of lentil crisps for a treat, and some Quinoa, a grain good for diabetics that I am training myself to like.

Anyway, for the sake of my exercises I walked back up the stairs - carrying the small bag of "healthy" foods I had bought.  This morning my right foot is so painful and swollen I can hardly hobble round the flat...

I shall be at the field service this morning in Zoom - and maybe the meeting tonight too - depending on how the foot progresses. 

I have been working slowly away at reading, commenting and preparing a couple of blogs on Curtis Urness' book.  As I said, my batteries are running low.

September Sands

We often used to go to Cornwall in September when we were young marrieds, and we had two holidays down there in our retirement years, when Col took these photos of the beach at Praa Sands.  It is the iconic beach of my 1950s childhood.  We pronounced it Pray Sands back then by the way, pronunciation seems to vary now,  It remains the ideal beach to me - no hotels, no funfair, no cafe, no shops of any kind, just a vast swathe of empty sand with a wilderness of fascinating rock pools at one end. They were full of red anemones. Still are, I noted on our last visit.  Which will be my last visit, this side of Armageddon.

Of course these days, I do need teashops - and loos - disabled toilets in gloomy fact.  And yet, just yesterday, I was a young married.  

This poem seems to capture the glory, and the sadness, of that childhood beach.

The Waves

John Betjeman (1906-1984), "Beside the Seaside," ad fin.:

And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves
Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand
As they have done for centuries, as they will
For centuries to come, when not a soul
Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks,
When England is not England, when mankind
Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea,
Consolingly disastrous, will return
While the strange starfish, hugely magnified,
Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool.

https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-waves.html 

That I guess is the Evolutionary/Darwin/Dawkins view of life.  That all this beauty is really for nothing, all futile.  Or as one poet, Wilfred Owen I think, put it: "Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all". 

The Bible view is so different. It tells us that, far from evolving, we are in a continuing fall from a perfect state. And it promises us that the whole earth will become what it was always means to be, a paradise of peace and beauty on which we can live forever.

John Betjeman saw the beauty and did it justice in his poems, even if he did not know of the paradise earth to come.  And I hope when the time comes God will wake both poets from the dreamless sleep of death and they will see this lovely lovely earth again. And then, to kind of paraphrase Dickens ending to Great Expectations, there will be no prospect of a further parting from it. Death will be "no more".

I am slowly getting back into my routines - back to the field service, and back to the Kingdom Hall for all meetings.  Driving and parking are still "terrors in the way" though. I even have an invite to two coffee morning later in the month with some of my congregation siblings. I wonder if we can persuade Jacks to come round for coffee...

The End of the Elizabethan Era

Queen Elizabeth II died yesterday, after her long reign. And so an era ended. As I am a child of the post World War 2 baby boom, she has been a constant in my life.  I remember her coronation - a beautiful young princess in a golden coach who was to become Queen.  It was the stuff of fairytales to a little girl.

And she handled a difficult job - through what the Bible calls "critical times, hard to deal with" - calmly and well and with quiet dignity.  

I hope she sleeps safe in "the everlasting arms", and that she has a wonderful awakening ahead of her when the time comes for the dead to wake from their dreamless sleep.

Will it be a great relief not to have to be the Queen anymore?

Appropriately enough we were considering another Queen at the Kingdom Hall last night - the Queen of Sheba and her visit to King Solomon.  Hopefully the two Queens will get to meet up in the restored earthly paradise, during the Thousand Years, and beyond of course - as all who are there can hope to live joyfully forever on this lovely planet.

We know the Queen of Sheba will be there, as Jesus himself said so.

A Poem for September (and October)

Postscript

by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

https://poems.com/poem/postscript/

The beauty and the glory of the world caught my heart off guard many years ago - in Autumn, in Sheffield - and I began to search for the Creator of it so that I could say Thanks.   

After nearly two years of looking, two Jehovah's Witnesses called at my door. I asked them in and they showed me what the Bible on my shelf had been telling me all along. 

Which is why I know I must now do my best  to tell others, all those who want to hear.  And in any case isn't this the work that Jesus left for all his followers to do?

Sunday morning early there were cars parked all over the Green, as we had some kind of a fun run on.  The road is blocked off so I attended the congregation in Zoom.  I used to find walking fun - and a few years ago I would just have walked to the Hall. Its a beautiful walk, with the English Channel accompanying me for half the way.

I had a lovely surprise on Saturday afternoon when Col rang to say he was coming back early from his dig!  He had gone away for the weekend, booked into a B&B,so I wasn't expecting him until Sunday evening.  And he never comes back early from anything.  He is usually there when they open The Field and is there when they close it.

He took the photo of the mute swan - somewhere - and some time ago.

Here is a sign of the economic times. On Monday I suggested to Col that we get a chicken and I would roast it - its time I ate some meat I think - and he could happily live off cold chicken for a couple of days.  The butcher was closed so he went to Waitrose and got a Duchy free range organic - we try to go organic/free range/line caught for the sake of both ourselves and the creature.  It cost £18.00!!

the last time I bought a chicken I was shocked to find myself spending £9.00.  They have literally doubled in price.

The Monday News was full of the fact that Liz Truss is to be our next Prime Minister.  All the best to her, in a difficult time, and thanks to our outgoing PM, Boris Johnson for steering us through difficult times too.  It is a thankless and impossible job, whoever does it.

A Regal Angelfish

 

Our September calendar opened with this lovely Angelfish taken by Col in the Indian Ocean many years ago.  I hope its life was/is a happy one.   

September 1st marked the end of Lockdown for me as we were back out on the door to door work.  With much trepidation I got myself ready and managed just 20 minutes with a brother and sister, who kindly ran me back to my car at the end.  It was a lovely day, but quite close. 

The sister I was out with wanted to tell me how much she enjoyed my book!  That was so encouraging.  What I aim for is for the book to make people want to turn the page, to create the world of the book such that it draws the reader in. 

I know of course that the Covid crisis is not over and am still taking reasonable precautions. We all wear masks at the Kingdom Hall for example.  I guess this winter will show us whether it is basically another kind of flu we will have to live with, or if it is something more sinister.  

I did 20 minutes only on the doors and my back... well, least said soonest mended. But I was glad to have been there when the work re-started after over 2 years.   I spent 2 hours on the work on Friday morning - 2 return visits. - so sitting down.  Hopefully we have a Bible study started, using the brochure "Enjoy Life Forever" - which is available to all as an on-line course to take in your own home, at a time that suits you.  I can still remember the day I began to find out what the Bible on my shelf actually said, as opposed to what I had thought it said.  It was a day that changed my life, infinitely for the better.

https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/jw-bible-study-course/