I used to come alive in response to crises announced by phone calls in the middle of the night. For a couple of decades I was on call as a suicide first responder, alerted to my duty by the voice of the 911 dispatcher. And even before that - for my entire career, really, I have been on call to respond to illnesses and deaths and family crises and tragedies in the lives of the people I served in congregations. I used to have a small sign I kept near my desk that said, “The interruption is my job.” I learned to go with the day that did not turn out the way I had planned and to respond with care and compassion and empathy to disruptions in the lives of the ones I loved and served.

These days I am retired and I am not on call for anything, really, except perhaps as a dad consultant when my daughter who is working so hard to keep everything going while her husband is deployed overseas and who has never been a fan of insects, arachnids, or rodents and needs to seek a solution to a dead mouse in the back yard where her son plays or my son and daughter in law who are incredibly competent and involved and amazing in their abilities to keep all of their demands in balance, but who can be, occasionally in need of just a little help to raise four children while practicing demanding professions and so might ask for grandpa to give a girl a ride to school or pick up a teen from his robotics club meeting.

And yet the events of my life frequently present me with surprises. Weeks do not end the way I expect and days do not go the way I expect and the direction of my thoughts and emotions catches me by surprise. I do not mind this, though I might occasionally experience mood swings that temporarily raise my stress level. It is Friday and I look back at the past week with a sense of deep gratitude, no small amount of pleasure, and amazement at the turn of events that has given me a bit of a taste of everything.

On Wednesday I commented to Susan that my plans were interrupted, though I really didn’t have many plans other than to facilitate an hour or so’s work from our grandson on a fence project that seems to be stretching out weeks longer that I thought it would take and continue to work on preparation for a presentation still more than a week away that has a few complex dynamics that include picking up two new colonies of bees and getting them settled in the first half of the morning then switching gears (and clothes) to staff a display and lead a children’s workshop at an Earth Day event at our church that we have been planning for nearly a year.

My day was upended, however, with a change in plans from working with our grandson in the morning to meeting him right after lunch for our project and worrying as I accompanied Susan to a hastily arranged doctor’s appointment in search of an explanation for a sudden and intense pain that resulted in orders for lab work and a follow up scan set for a later date and more than a bit of worry over an unusual phenomenon for which we had no ready explanation.

We didn’t have to wait for that explanation when, despite a definite improvement in her symptoms, the lab results prompted a trip to the emergency room yesterday after I had spent the morning working in the church library. The trip resulted in repeat lab work and the completion of the previously recommended scan to reveal a much less threatening diagnosis than we might have expected. It is all good news with a fairly simple follow-up and a consultation with another doctor sometime in the future but the elimination of the thousand possible frightening things it might have been and a clear, simple, understandable solution that is within our range of experience and should not cause disruptions or further surprises on the way to recovery.

Today promises to return to a bit of normalcy with our son having a day off from work and I wanting to pursue final preparations for new bees to move to the farm and join our apiary while putting some finishing touches on my preparations for the church Earth Fair.

And yet, surprises continue. Last night I was working on my response to the prompt for next Monday’s gathering and found myself with tears in my eyes as I attempted to read aloud a poem that had become surprisingly personal as I sought to write in a style that I have never before attempted, weaving rhymes in patterns that I didn’t expect to flow but that pour off of my tongue in a rhythm unlike any language that I ever used in preaching. What I thought would be a simple reading of a hastily-written and incomplete poem seems to be turning into a kind of performance with which I am a bit uncomfortable and which draws forth emotions that I do not expect. I think I am likely to need to spend quite a bit more time with that project over the next few days than I anticipated.

And there are likely more surprises coming in my life. I am so happy that our son and grandson are taking a brief trip next week to visit and support our daughter and her son in South Carolina and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to support his wife and other children so that their trip is good not only for them and for our daughter but for all of our grandchildren and their hard working and remarkably competent parents. Grandpa duty nearly always surprises me. The two year-old comes up with new words at almost every visit, the six-year old is amazingly observant, the nine-year-old is brilliantly artistic and whatever else happens I know that I will not be bored anytime soon.

Thank goodness my retirement is more exciting than I expected.