It’s Ordination time again in the Church of England.

A time when memories of that splendid day come flooding back for us old-timers, plus some perhaps more realistic reflections on the way we thought ministry would be, and the way it actually was – this strange ordained life that’s full of surprises.

So, in no particular order, here goes with ‘surprises I have known’…

Once, as I came out of church after a Christingle service, I noticed a goat tied up outside. I know there’s been a C of E Twitter conversation recently about whether dogs should be allowed in church, but I don’t think we’ve considered goats yet. I hope he/she felt part of the worship, anyway.

On the subject of noticing and being noticed, another time I went shopping in a nearby town on my day off. I was wearing normal clothes and therefore assuming I was fairly safe from anything pertaining to ministry. So I was surprised to hear a small child, on spotting me, say to their mother in a loud voice, “look, there’s the church!”

A less pleasant surprise took place after I had led some music at a community event. A few days later I received an anonymous gift of some fabric covered elasticated hair ties. Initially puzzled, I later recalled that on the evening of the supper, I’d hurriedly tied my hair back with a rubber band that had come off a Royal Mail parcel.

I suppose I should’ve been glad for the free gift, but I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, so I’m under that sort of level of scrutiny, then.’

Summing up some other surprises, I guess you could say they fall into roughly the following categories: surprises that are humbling because you thought God wasn’t at work and he was; and surprises that remind you that whilst you were heads down beavering away trying to get all the work done, sometimes you needed to step back and just marvel at stuff.

I once visited an elderly lady whose grown up son had just died. I’d been told he was a Buddhist, so I wasn’t expecting to be involved much. But the elderly mother informed me that he’d ‘met Christ’ just before he died and that in several places around the house, this moment had coincided with various clocks ceasing to tick.

I’m not sure my theological training had prepared me in any way for that.

At another funeral visit, the sister of a man who never went to church told me the duty doctor had called near to her brother’s death, and that the dying man had asked the Dr to turn the lights off, which were blinding him, he said. There were no lights on anywhere in the house, and shortly afterwards the man died.

A much sadder incident took me by surprise when I stopped to talk to an elderly gentleman who’d just returned home in his car from what looked like a substantial food shop. Commenting on all the bags he was hauling out of the boot, he chatted away, saying that his wife was always hungry – she ate like a horse, he said.

At that moment a concerned neighbour came out of her house and gently took me aside as the shopping man disappeared through his front door with the last of the bags. ‘His wife’s been dead for two years’, the neighbour told me.

Sometimes it’s lovely to let another clergy person take the strain. At a funeral I attended taken by a nearby colleague, we gathered by the graveside, along with other friends of the lady who had died (leaving, very sadly, a young child behind).

It could have been bleak, but towards the end of the Prayer Book liturgy a large butterfly landed on the hand of the person standing next to me. At the moment the priest began to throw earth on top of the coffin, intoning the phrase, ‘in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life’, the butterfly took off and flew merrily into the spring-blue sky.

One of those ‘spiritual but not religious’ things…

Finally, a heads-up about things that, after a very short while, will cease to surprise you:

1. In ministry (especially if you’re in charge) there will be a lot of keys. You will eventually find out what most of them are for, but you won’t find out what all of them are for. There are some keys whose origins are so opaque, so lost in the mists of ecclesiastical time, that not even the Church Warden from 37 years ago will be able to help you.
2. There will be a cupboard or small room somewhere in the church where you will come across some surprising objects. These might include (and have included, for me): a moth-eaten sou’wester; the PCC minutes from 1954; a floppy disk from 1987; a tap that doesn’t really work; a dubious DVD that needs to be binned immediately and 100 metres of purple chiffon. Plus, obviously, some more keys that no one knows the provenance of.
3. Although liturgical seasons come round annually without fail (Lent, Harvest, Advent, Remembrance, Christmas) every year without exception, no one, not even you, will be able to remember where the service orders/special resources for these special seasons are kept – even though at the end of said season last year, they were undoubtedly put somewhere really safe and you thought: ‘now we’ll definitely be able to find the palm branches/old pumpkin/Advent wreath/oversize felt poppies/crib figures next year’.

So much for three years or so theological education.

Three surprising things I’ve observed, then: the most interesting stuff will happen when, for whatever reason, you’re not there; the fruitfulness of the project you undertake will be in inverse proportion to the amount of effort you put in, and occasionally, the very thing you prayed endlessly for will come to pass some years after you gave up praying for it.

Such are the (mostly) welcome surprises in store for us after our Ordination.

Praise be to the God of surprises!