Nonverts by Stephen Bullivant

Author:Stephen Bullivant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

What’s more, working in HR she was party to the inside story on a lot of things. “There was a lot of stuff going on around women specifically, sinning in various ways—usually, in sexual ways—losing their jobs, or being punished and reprimanded. But there was never a man. I’m like, ‘What the . . . ?’ ” When asked to fire a colleague whom it’d been discovered was sleeping with her fiancé, Melissa pleaded with the church management to let the woman stay: “I was like, ‘I understand if you want her to sit down for a meeting or whatever, that makes sense. But I don’t think she should lose her job.’ But they fired her anyway.” At this point, Rhett chimes in to correct the record. “They didn’t just fire her. They fucking humiliated her.” Melissa continues: “They made her go before the entire staff, and confess her sin. Most of these people she didn’t even know. Some of them had just started like two weeks before. It was awful, horrific.”

Finally, after being blackmailed by her assigned “accountability partner”—that is, “one random person from work, who you need to divulge your innermost thoughts, fears, concerns, et cetera to”—to whom Melissa had confessed that she and Rhett had slept together before getting married, she was forced to confess her own sin in front of a panel of (all male) colleagues. They didn’t fire her: an act of clemency due to her honesty, and the fact that all this was now several years in the past, and with the man who was now her husband. Instead, they put her “on a Restoration Plan, to make me whole with Christ” and “dictated that I see a therapist who was affiliated with the church, and that I had to allow her to disclose my sessions to them. And I would say that was my breaking point. That was when I was like, This is a load of shit. You are going to decide when I am restored to Christ? I’m sorry, can we just take a step back and just take in the hubris here?” Now “broken and losing my faith,” she was desperate to get out. But since “this is 2009 and the economy is tanking, so we’re going to take the work we can get,” she had no choice but to go along with it. Then completely out of the blue, “literally the week after I got this Restoration Plan from them,” a recruiter she’d interviewed with the previous year got back in touch. A new company was opening up in town, and she’d be perfect for a certain role. “This is one of those things that make it hard for me to believe that there isn’t some kind of Higher Power directing things. I ended up getting the job and it was my salvation. And so it was like, ‘I don’t fucking believe that there is a God who would put me through this. But how can’t I? This just feels like divine intervention here.

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