God Doesn't Work the Way I Thought

Months passed.

Life moved.

I stopped thinking about Sarah every day, which might have been the biggest achievement of the whole relationship.

Then I was on LinkedIn looking for jobs.

Not stalking anybody. Not conducting another investigation. Just doing the painfully middle-aged thing of looking at employment histories and wondering whether "exciting opportunity" means good money or free fruit on Wednesdays.

Somehow I landed on David's profile.

And something looked different.

He appeared to be gone from his company.

That stopped me.

This was a bloke who'd been there for more than twenty years. As far as I could tell from LinkedIn, that chapter ended sometime around the beginning of the year. Maybe January.

I stared at the screen because another detail immediately came back.

The AVO.

Police had served it at his workplace.

Now, let me be careful here.

I don't know why David left.

Maybe he resigned. Maybe there was a restructure. Maybe he'd had enough after twenty-plus years and wanted to grow tomatoes in the suburbs. I have no evidence that the AVO had anything to do with his departure.

But fuck me, the timing made me look twice.

Because by then I knew something else I hadn't known when all this started.

October

The harassment happened in September.

The late-night calls. The messages. The voicemails. The racial shit. The sexual humiliation. The pack behaviour.

I went to police.

AVOs followed.

David got served.

Then, in October, Sarah went to a police station and made allegations against me.

I didn't find out about that until much later.

According to what police eventually put to me, she alleged I'd threatened David and the kids, along with allegations about things supposedly going back years.

I denied them.

And I told the police what immediately stood out to me.

"Look at the dates."

September, AVOs.

October, complaint against me.

That doesn't prove retaliation. That's my interpretation of the sequence. But you'd have to surgically remove my brain before I didn't notice it.

And suddenly the whole thing looked different.

For years I'd thought Sarah and I were fighting about a relationship.

We weren't anymore.

The relationship was dead.

Now we were fighting over who got to write the history.

That was the Blue Cube and Orange Sphere all over again.

Something happens.

One person sees an orange sphere.

Someone else needs it to be a blue cube.

Then everybody starts collecting witnesses.

The Old Me Would Have Gone to War

There was a version of me who would have loved this.

The old me would've opened LinkedIn, seen the employment change and immediately started building a courtroom in his head.

See.

Karma.

Got you.

Maybe even fired off a message just to let everybody know I'd noticed.

That's Performance mode.

It needs the other side to know it won.

Presence doesn't.

And that's probably the strangest thing Sarah gave me.

Not closure.

Restraint.

I documented what happened. I went through the proper channels. I kept the messages. I spoke to police. I let the process move at the speed processes move, which is somewhere between a wounded turtle and a government website loading on Internet Explorer.

Then I went back to my life.

That sounds ordinary.

For me, it wasn't.

The kid who grew up believing every threat had to be confronted was learning that sometimes the strongest response is making a record, drawing the boundary and going home.

This isn't a story where I get to be the hero. The harder standard is this: responsibility isn't the same thing as harmlessness, and I'm still responsible for the things I did badly.

I don't get to erase my history because somebody else behaved badly.

Neither do they.

That's the deal.

And Then There Was God

This whole episode also changed something else in me.

God.

I've spent different parts of my life trying to understand what that word means.

When I was younger, God was almost transactional.

Be good and good things happen.

Do wrong and punishment arrives.

Pray correctly.

Behave correctly.

Earn protection.

When you think about it, even my relationship with God had Performance written all over it.

I was trying to negotiate with the universe.

But life doesn't work that neatly.

Good people get smashed.

Bad people prosper.

Innocent people get blamed.

Guilty people sometimes walk away smiling.

Sometimes nothing happens at all.

So I don't look at David's profile and say:

God got him.

I don't know that.

I don't even know whether there was anything to "get."

What I can say is that the sequence made me stop.

Because there have been enough moments in my life where chaos eventually exposed something I couldn't see while I was standing inside it.

Sarah was one of those moments.

What felt like destruction eventually became information.

What felt like betrayal became separation.

What felt like being abandoned became silence.

And the silence became peace.

That's where my understanding of God changed.

Maybe God isn't some bloke upstairs handing out penalties and bonuses like Centrelink for morality.

Maybe God is what keeps confronting you with reality until you finally stop negotiating with it.

Not:

I was right, therefore David gets punished.

Something quieter.

Look.

Look at what happened.

Look at what you did.

Look at what they did.

Now choose what kind of man you're going to be.

That version of God makes more sense to me now.

Because He doesn't always remove the fire.

Sometimes He just keeps putting mirrors inside it.

And Sarah was one hell of a mirror.

For years I thought the lesson was that I needed to understand her.

By the end, I realised I needed to understand myself.

I didn't need David to lose his job.

I didn't need Sarah charged.

I didn't need her kids to apologise.

I didn't even need them to agree with my version of events.

The old me would've needed all of that.

The man writing this doesn't.

I know what happened to me.

I know what I did with it.

And whatever happened in everybody else's life after that belongs to them.

Maybe that's coincidence.

Maybe that's consequence.

Maybe that's God.

I'm finally comfortable not knowing.

And strangely, that's the closest I've ever felt to faith.