(Originally posted on the old RSQUBF discussion forum.)
I remember when I was first love-bombed in UBF. People always wanted to feed me, encourage me, tell me how handsome I looked, and how SPIRITUAL I was. The love bombing stage is the best time to be in UBF because there is the least responsibility and it is the most fun time. After the love-bombing stage, there is the stage of assimilation. This is where you are homogenized by common life or continual fellowship with other UBFers. You learn to write testimony by script, attend all the meetings, how to dress right, talk right, (learn to call people "missionary," "shepherd," and "shepherdess." This stage is still tolerable because God's word is still fresh and new and of course you do still receive some love bombing. The last stage, is the stage of "burnout." After 7 to 10 years, after you are married, and have a wife, a family, and a job to be concerned with, you realize that you are nothing more than an automaton, a cog in the UBF machinery that must keep turning with its never ending cycle of meetings, conferences, and drills. It is the period where you feel like you are a hamster on one of those spinning wheels that just keeps running around, trapped with no where else to go but can only just sit there spinning around. By this time your own shepherds and shepherdess are either more burnt out or have long since gone, so there is no one left to give you an occassional love bomb. I guess when you realize that the only thing you can do is to keep running on your wheel or leave, then you make the decision at this point to do it. I found an online journal of a young UBF member. You can read it yourself and gradually trace the stages of his "growth." Wish I could highlight the love bombing contained in all the passages. Here it is: http://www.livingtorah.org/~pchan/journal.phtml
UBF Hamster
USA - Tuesday, February 19, 2002 at 06:04:17 (EST)
