Inevitability vs. Coincidence

[Counselor]

A woman shared a horrifying story of coincidences with me. As a Russian Orthodox she had a new apartment blessed by a priest when she moved in that was to protect her from evil (includes that famous Psalms about the "valley of death," too) and left an icon of St. Michael to protect her. Almost right after a man selling magazines stopped by and asked for a glass of water. As it was a hot day and thinking of the woman who gave Jesus a drink at the well she did. That night someone took out her window AC and climbed in while she prayed her prayers, paralyzed with terror, and though she thought she might want to stop him before he got in or run she felt it was showing a "lack of faith" and "good girls don't fight." It was the guy she gave a glass of water to and he raped her so savagely (and knocked teeth out) that she required multiple surgeries. Most of it happened under the watchful gaze of her icon St. Michael that she kept pleading to. Ironically, when she changed her prayers to the grace to die well he left her alone, though to mock her he put a phone by her.

He was caught just a few blocks away trying to hide but because it was dark among other technicalities he was pretty much off. As the cops said he was a serial rapist (and she met victims before and after her as well) who knew how to game the system and pretending to be a magazine salesman was one of his tricks to find future victims. And his real name was...Michael. And he got off the charges against her as he had with other women before & after as if mystically protected.

She lost her friends when she needed them the most because she was proof that God didn't protect those supposedly protected by prayer, and that the rapist who overcame God's supposed protection being named after the angel called upon and icon left in her room where it happened only added spooky insult to injury...as if maybe the serial rapist had somehow been evoked by the priest, and that was too disturbing to think about. And she shared this with someone collecting stories about angelic coincidences, but of course it wasn't published with all the feel good stories (ever wonder how many stories like hers exist, perhaps even victim of the same serial rapist?).

Years later after she renounced Christianity and embraced Wicca she burned that St. Michael icon in a magic rite designed to rid her of the demons by her past trauma, and at first it refused to burn, and then suddenly, after chanting spells over it, it burned rapidly to dust, and she felt much better.

As for being raped by a guy who seems mystically protected after she was supposedly mystically protected by an angel of the same name with the angel's blessing said shortly before it happened: coincidence or inevitability?

Doesn't it seem that most people would find out, sooner or later, that a piece of plaster and the word of a priest are just that, and nothing more? I truck with the idea that an object has no power unless you give it over, money and blessings have little to do with it. While the circumstances surrounding the woman's renunciation are strange, I can't agree that it was a coincidence, based on the rapist's decisions to attack her specifically, to remove her A/C unit, and climb through the window. It was also only a matter of time before he attacked another woman, if he had done it repeatedly before. And maybe that piece of plaster WAS cursed, and had drawn the whole event to itself.

[Counselor]

^^

It doesn't sound inevitable at all, just lucky.

I'll agree the outcome was fortunate, but it still seems like nothing would have stopped my mother from speaking to the caretaker.