A Spiral of Destiny: A Minister’s Unexpected Revelation

Two or three weeks before my ordination as a church minister at age 33, I lay in bed one morning reflecting on the winding, chaotic nature of my life since leaving school. A bit of this, a bit of that—wrong turns, dead ends, all over the place. I wondered if, despite the seeming mess, a divine hand had been guiding me all along. I thought about all the places I had lived, scattered across England, and imagined them as points on a map. Then, a sudden realization struck: when connected chronologically, they formed a perfect clockwise spiral, progressing inward. The signature of God?

At the time, I shared this revelation only with my wife. Later that month, as friends and family gathered for my ordination, my sister handed me a small envelope containing a card she had designed. When I opened it, I was stunned—she had drawn a spiral, encircling the words ‘Happy Ordination’ and the date. Even more astonishing, her spiral moved in the same direction as my life’s journey and contained the same number of sections as my residential moves. She had no way of knowing any of this.

After a moment of silence, I asked, ‘Why a spiral?’ She shrugged, ‘I couldn’t think of anything else, so I just did it.’

That simple card now sits framed on my wall—one of my most treasured possessions. It is a quiet yet powerful reminder of something beyond coincidence, something profoundly mysterious and deeply comforting.