The Kingfisher
A twenty-year atheist, a bird on a heli-deck, and a Bible at a traffic light.
MS-1. Last hitch. November 2025.
22:15. I’m walking laps on the heli deck in the dark, earbuds in, music up, not thinking about anything in particular. Just getting steps in. The Darwin heat breaks a little at night but the humidity stays. Thick, warm air with salt in it and, depending on which way the wind’s blowing, a thread of diesel underneath. The ocean is black and flat. Behind me, the rig does what it always does. The hum of the top drive, the groan of the draw works cycling up and down, that constant hiss of air leaking from somewhere in the derrick. A rig is never quiet. You just learn to hear through it.
I come around the corner by the handrails and there it is.
An Australian kingfisher. Tiny thing. Electric blue and orange. Sitting on the handrail, maybe two meters from me.
Now you need to understand something. These birds don’t do this. You might see one once a hitch if you’re lucky, darting past the gantry crane, gone before you can point. They don’t land near people. They don’t sit still. And they sure as hell don’t perch on a handrail two meters from a 95-kilo driller at ten o’clock at night and just — look at you.
But this one did.
It sat there, and it stared right at me. Not nervous. Not about to bolt. Just still. Present. Like it had been waiting.
I pulled my earbuds out. Turned off the music. Threw my hands up in the air like a lunatic standing alone on a heli deck in the middle of the ocean at night.
I’m listening.
That’s all I had. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what to say to a bird that wasn’t supposed to be there, answering a question I’d written in a journal three days earlier, a question I hadn’t told a single person about.
The kingfisher flew off to the gantry crane. Sat there for a minute. Came back. Flew around my head three or four times, close enough that I could hear the air through its wings. And then it was gone.
I never saw it again.
I should back up.
I grew up in Adelaide in the nineties. Same as most kids in that era. Church on Sundays, Sunday school, the whole thing. My adopted parents were Christian. Everyone we knew was Christian. It wasn’t a decision. It was just the water you swam in.
For high school, I went to CBC — Christian Brothers College. Not because of the Christian part. Because the public school in our catchment was shithouse, and CBC was going to be better. That was the whole calculation. But there was always that thread running underneath. Church. Scripture. The general assumption that God was part of the furniture.
And then I hit my twenties, and I flipped the whole thing on its head.
It wasn’t gradual. It was a door slamming shut. You can’t prove it. Invisible man in the sky. Look at the horrible shit that happens on a daily basis. How do you justify any of it? I had all the arguments. I’d trot them out at barbecues, on the back deck, wherever someone brought it up. I wasn’t aggressive about it. I just thought anyone who believed was, at best, not thinking hard enough.
But here’s what I didn’t say at barbecues.
The real reason I locked that door wasn’t intellectual. It was personal. Because if there was a God — if someone was actually signing off on what happened to me as a kid — then who the fuck was that person? My mother died with a needle in her arm. My father bled out on a table in India. I was bounced through the system before I was old enough to understand why. And somewhere up there, someone approved the purchase order?
No. Easier to call it nothing. Easier to say there’s no one driving.
I wasn’t an atheist. Atheism felt like its own kind of religion. People who were just as certain about nothing as believers were about something. I was agnostic at best. No real opinion. Just a shrug that occasionally tipped toward hostility when someone pushed.
That lasted twenty years.
I don’t know exactly when the door started cracking open again. There wasn’t a single moment. It was more like a season.
Sometime in 2025, I hit a ceiling. Full. That’s the only word for it. My cup wasn’t just full. It was overflowing, and there was nowhere for it to go. Work was uncertain. Family was strained in the ways it’s always strained when you’re gone half the year. I was in my forties, and I had this feeling that I’d been running the same code for two decades, and the program was crashing.
I’ve written before about being lost. About how sometimes the version of you that got you here can’t get you where you need to go. This was that. Except this time, the thing I was missing wasn’t a job or a direction or a therapist. It was something underneath all of that. Something I didn’t have a word for.
And then Charlie Kirk got shot.
September 10, 2025. Conservative commentator. Founder of Turning Point USA. Thirty-one years old. Father of two. Shot in the neck at a college campus event in Utah while his wife and kids were in the crowd. Dead before the flags came down.
Now. I need to be clear. I’m not a political person. This isn’t about left or right. This isn’t about Kirk’s views or what he stood for or whether you agreed with him. What I want to talk about is what I saw afterwards.
The reaction online. The celebration. People laughing at a man bleeding out in front of his family. Cackling. Not disagreeing with him — celebrating that he was dead. A thirty-one-year-old father, shot through the neck, and people were cheering like it was a football result.
I felt it in the pit of my stomach first. That sick, heavy feeling you get when something is deeply wrong, and your body knows it before your brain catches up. Then sadness. Overwhelming sadness for his wife, his kids, the people who were standing right there. And then I just kept scrolling. I don’t know why. Through comment after comment of people celebrating, grinning, and making jokes. I couldn’t stop looking. Every face was worse than the last. Deeply disturbed and disgusting people cheering the murder of a man for having a different opinion.
Something about that reaction hit different. It wasn’t just cruelty. It was something deeper. Something I could only describe one way.
Evil.
Not metaphorical evil. Not “bad people being shitty online” evil. Actual evil. The kind you can feel in your chest.
And that opened a door I didn’t expect.
Because if evil is real — if what I saw in those people’s faces was a real force operating in the world — then the opposite has to be real too. If there’s a devil, or whatever you want to call the thing that makes people celebrate a young father’s murder, then there has to be a God. Or a good. Or something on the other side of the ledger.
Simple logic. Not theology. Just math. If bad exists, good has to exist. And I’d spent twenty years arguing against the good because I couldn’t explain the bad.
I brought this to my psychologist on our next call.
I didn’t know how she’d take it. I half expected her to redirect me to something clinical. But I told her. Look, something’s happening. I saw this thing with Kirk, and it shook something loose. I’m feeling lost. I might be having some kind of spiritual... I don’t know. Awakening? Search? Midlife crisis with a religious flavour?
And then I asked the question that felt like swallowing glass.
“Do I need to pray?”
I hated how that sounded coming out of my mouth. It felt childish. Silly. Like I was admitting to something embarrassing. Twenty years of being the guy who didn’t believe in any of it, and now I’m asking my psychologist if I should talk to God.
Do I need to go to church? Do I need to repent? What the fuck do I actually do here?
She surprised me. She said she was quite a spiritual person herself. And she didn’t tell me to pray or go to church or find a Bible. She just said:
“Why don’t you write a letter? You like writing. You’re always writing. Just write a letter to God. Whatever comes out, comes out.”
That I could do.
I sat on it for a few days. Went back to the rig. MS-1. Last hitch, though we didn’t know it yet. The company was going through redundancies. Nobody knew who was staying, who was going, where anyone would end up. The kind of uncertainty that sits on a rig like weather. Everyone pretends it’s not there, but it changes the pressure in every room.
So I opened my Remarkable. And I started writing.
Not praying. Writing. A letter. To whoever or whatever was on the other end, if anything was.
I kept it simple. I asked for clarity. I said — look, I don’t know what’s coming. I’m open to whatever it is. But the not knowing is killing me. Can you give me a sign? Just something.
Within a week, my phone buzzed. Old colleague. “Hey mate, I’m seeing your resume come across my desk for the DS-12. You interested?” A drillship. Good contract. The kind of gig you don’t turn down. And then another message. And then the redundancy confirmed — but with a transfer already waiting. Better rig. Better job. Everything landing like someone had read the letter and gone right then, here you go.
I’m the biggest sceptic you’ll ever meet. I chalked it up to coincidence. The industry is small, resumes circulate, these things happen. I folded the letter away and moved on.
But something stayed.
So I decided to be more specific.
My psychologist had mentioned something about asking for a sign. A specific one. Hers was a particular bird — a species that was possible in her area but rare enough that seeing it would feel deliberate. She’d ask for it, and it would show up.
I thought about what mine would be.
On the MS-1, there was sometimes a little Australian kingfisher that would appear near the rig. Maybe once a hitch you’d spot it, a flash of colour against all that grey steel and blue water. Tiny. Fast. Beautiful. I’m a bird man. My wife gives me shit about it, but I’ve gotten into bird watching as I’ve gotten older, and I’m not even slightly sorry about it.
So I wrote another letter. Every night, I’d get up, grab my water, and go walk the heli deck in the dark. Just me and the humidity and whatever was playing in my earbuds. And I’d ask. Specific. Clear.
If you’re there — show me. Land this bird on the heli deck while I’m walking. Not flying past. Not a glimpse. Land it near me. Let me see it. If you’re real, give me this.
I did this for days. Nothing happened. After a while, I sort of forgot about it. The walks became routine. The letter sat in my journal. I stopped thinking about kingfishers.
Four days later. The handrail. Two meters. Staring.
You already know what happened.
What you don’t know is what it felt like. Standing on a heli deck in the middle of the ocean at ten at night with your hands in the air like a man who’s just been shown something he can’t explain. Music off. Earbuds out. Saying I’m listening to a bird that shouldn’t be there, that came because you asked, that flew around your head three times before disappearing into the dark.
I walked back to my cabin and sat on my bunk for a long time.
Now I had more questions than answers.
I told my wife. She has her own language for this stuff. She’d say universe where I’m starting to say God. She’s into Joe Dispenza, meditation, manifestation. She wouldn’t call herself a God person but she believes something’s operating. We’re just using different words to get to the same place.
She listened to the kingfisher story and she was moved by it. But she didn’t know what I did next.
Because after the kingfisher, I kept writing. Kept praying through the pen, which was the only way I knew how.
And the questions got more practical. Okay. So you’re there. Or something is. What do I do now? Do I need to go to church? Should I get a Bible? Am I supposed to read scripture? What’s the next step here?
I wrote all of this privately. In my journal. Didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t mention it to my wife.
Three days later, she called me on the rig.
“I was going to wait until you got home, but some weird shit happened today.”
She’d gone to lunch in Fremantle with a friend, a woman who happens to be quite religious. They were walking from our place into Freo, and as girls do, they started talking about faith. God. Spirituality. Just conversation. They hit the pedestrian lights, pushed the button, waited for the beep, crossed the road. Nothing there.
Two hours later, they walked back the same way. Same lights. Same crossing.
And sitting right there — on the ground, at the base of the traffic light pole, exactly where they’d stood two hours earlier — was a Bible.
A green one. New Revised Standard Version. Just sitting there. At the lights. In Fremantle. Like someone had placed it and walked away.
My wife picked it up. She’s telling me this on the phone and I’m sitting in my cabin on the MS-1, 4,000 nautical miles away, and my skin is crawling.
But she wasn’t finished.
As they crossed the road, the same road, the same lights, my youngest son found a feather on the ground. Small. Black and yellow. Beautiful little thing. He doesn’t know what bird it’s from. Neither do I. But he knows his old man loves birds and feathers, so he picked it up, ran to his mum, and said:
“Mum. Look. I found this for Dad. We should put it in the Bible.”
So they did. My son took that feather and placed it in the Bible as a bookmark. Random page. Wherever it fell.
And then my wife called me.
And then I told her what I’d been writing in my journal. The questions I hadn’t shared. Should I get a Bible? Should I start reading? Written privately, days before, on a rig in the middle of the ocean. Told to no one.
And my wife is standing in our kitchen in Fremantle holding a green Bible with a bird feather in it that our son put there, and neither of us know what to say.
That’s three.
The letter about the redundancy, and everything falling into place within days.
The kingfisher on the heli deck. The specific ask, the specific answer, two meters away.
The Bible at the traffic lights. The private question answered publicly, through my wife and my son, without them knowing the question existed.
Each one more specific. Each one harder to wave away.
I’ve been the guy who waves things away my whole adult life. Coincidence. Luck. Right place, right time. My auntie used to call me “a creator.” She’d say I manifest things, that I put something out there and it comes back. Maybe that’s just another word for it. Maybe manifestation and prayer and whatever my wife means when she says “the universe” are all just different dialects of the same language. I don’t know.
What I know is I’m not satisfied with “coincidence” anymore.
I understand this has nothing to do with drilling. Maybe you came here to read about how a top drive works or what a bad cement job costs or what happens when someone takes a kick at two in the morning. I get it. Maybe that’s more interesting.
But this is what’s happening with me. Right now. In real time. I’m a forty-something driller on a rig in the middle of the ocean who’s spent twenty years with the door shut, and the door is opening, and I didn’t open it.
Part of me still feels silly. There’s a version of me, the old version, the version my mates know, the version that would have torn this essay apart five years ago, that’s reading this and thinking Justin’s lost his fucking mind. And I get it. That’s the voice I’ve been listening to since I was twenty-two.
But you know what? You owe it to no one to be the same person you were yesterday. I’ve written about that before. About addiction, about change, about killing old versions of yourself so the new one can breathe. This is that. This is another version dying. The one who had all the answers about the sky being empty.
Maybe it’s my parents. Maybe they’re doing from wherever they are what they couldn’t do when they were here. Looking after me, pointing me in a direction, being the guardian angels they never got to be in life. I don’t know if I believe that. But I don’t not believe it anymore. And that’s new.
I’ve started reading the Bible. The green one. The one from the traffic lights with the feather still in it, sitting on my bedside table. I’ll be honest. I opened it, started reading, and couldn’t make much sense of it. So I found Jordan Peterson’s biblical lecture series on YouTube, free, twelve parts, and I’m knee-deep in that. Letting him break down the archetypes and the meaning behind these stories that people have been carrying for thousands of years.
Why we kept them. Where morality lives. What any of it means.
I don’t have answers. I’m not preaching. I’m not converting. I’m just a guy who asked a question in a journal and got an answer he can’t explain, three times, each one louder than the last.
And I’m still here. My parents aren’t. And maybe — maybe — that means someone’s been watching the whole time.
The Bible is still on my bedside table. Green cover. The feather is still in it. Small, black and yellow, from a bird nobody can name.
My son put it there. For his dad.
I haven’t moved it.
You invited him and he came. You questioned, maybe a bit of a challenge, and got answers. Your journey has started. Mine started in 1988 and I have never looked back. Nor will you.