Before becoming Witnesses, Andrew and his wife thought the ideal marriage required putting your mate first. They learned that was not the right approach. “Talking about believing, that is what I mean. It’s important that Jehovah is ahead of everything in our lives. Once you do that it grows exponentially. I consider without a shadow of a doubt that I love my wife more now than I ever did before. Hopefully, it is only the beginning, it has only been 30 years, and I expect and hope we will go through all eternity, and I think about the time that God gives us to finally know and understand each other.”
Andrew believes his marriage is made of making mistakes, “helping each other to the best of our ability, and that entails primarily working with each other in getting to the meetings. She helps me to go out in the door-to-door ministry. We study together every week.”
When you remove Jehovah from the conversation, fibromyalgia has the next greatest impact on Andrew, his family, and the lives of the people who care about him. “It is just so pervasive. How many people do you know who have fibro, full blown, and are dominated by it? I would have to say our lives are not dominated by it. Our live are dominated by service to Jehovah, but the impact that fibro has on our lives is so extensive. It’s kind of like I look at what Satan does to the world around us, there’s a lot of similarities between that and what fibromyalgia does to people. It’s just evil, plain and simple. My family has paid as great a price for fibro as I have.”
Of Andrew’s three children, the oldest was diagnosed at age thirteen with fibromyalgia. Although the other two have not been diagnosed with it, he is strongly convinced that they both have fibromyalgia. “But after seeing me, they don’t want to have anything to do with it. In quiet moments they have acknowledged that they have many of the symptoms.”
Flare-ups of his fibromyalgia could put Andrew into a vegetative state that lasted two to three months. During these flares, his life consisted of getting up to eat and to use the bathroom. The rest of the time he was in bed. When he started to lose contact with the congregation and with serving Jehovah, he realized he was dying physically, mentally, and most importantly spiritually. “So I determined that no matter what it took, I needed to get to the meetings. I started sleeping, a whole day or maybe two or three whole days to get to a one hour meeting.”
Although the congregation provides him with a great deal of warmth, compassion, and understanding, it is difficult not to feel guilt. It comes with the territory. “No matter how bad you feel, don’t you find it difficult at times to justify that you just can’t do it? And you think to yourself that I probably could if I just put a little more effort in to it. That’s a very common reaction. And it’s not one that just dissipates over time.”
When Andrew doesn’t feel like going door-to-door, he has to wonder, “Is it because of my fibro? Is it because I am feeling lazy? It doesn’t go away. Jehovah asks of us not one bit more than we can give, but we are the ones who determine what we can give.”
His greatest fear is the fear of failing to serve Jehovah, because of the disease and his human frailties. Andrew does not want to disappoint God. “That I might disappoint him in not being able to do the relatively simple things he requires of us. It’s not like he ever asks us to do more than we are able to do, but we can come to a point where we feel that we cannot do what he has asked us to do, and that is my real fear.”
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