Last night I was trimming my eyebrow hair.

This is something I get crazy and brave enough to do every few months, usually when there's a straggler hair driving me crazy. At one point while shaving across my left eyebrow, the rotating dial on my hair clippers - the one that selects the length - fell off. The guard slipped all the way to the shortest position.

The result: part of my left eyebrow is now significantly - and comically - shorter than the rest.

Suzanne laughed. The boys laughed. I laughed too, eventually.

But here's the thing: sometimes we have to trim. That's not the problem. The problem is when we don't look carefully at what we're trimming - and we over-trim.

This Friday marks five years since my ordination to the diaconate.

Five years of homilies and baptisms and funerals. Five years of hospital visits and marriage preparation and late-night calls. Five years of standing at the altar, holding the chalice, proclaiming the Gospel. Five years of learning what it means to be configured to Christ the Servant.

It has been the deepest privilege of my life.

And now, on the suggestion of our Director of the Diaconate and with the permission and encouragement of my pastor, I'm going to take a few weeks of sabbatical from active ministry in the parish - starting after we finish hosting Totus Tuus this week. I'll be taking some time away until mid-August.

This is not a crisis. This is not burnout. This is wisdom.

From time to time, we need to step away and create more intentional space to pray and discern what the future looks like. I'll be spending these weeks in thanksgiving for the past five years - and in prayer about what God is calling my diaconate to look like for the next five.

Trim carefully. Look at what you're trimming. Don't over-trim.

Part of what I'll be discerning is the shape of my writing.

Two Lamps is publishing weekly now - short fiction braiding the lives of saints across centuries. Lux Perpetua continues, the serial novel about Joshua and his grandfather's house in Alton and the light that was never put out. 

And I've begun work on a new novel - a fable about a parish, a burned-out pastor, and a half-asleep father who wake each other up.

The working logline: A burned-out pastor and a half-asleep father - one drifting toward retirement and managed decline, the other quietly preparing to leave - wake each other up, and a dying parish takes its first breath.

It's a book about liturgy and reverence and what actually draws the young back to the Church. It's about spiritual fatherhood in two keys - priestly and natural. It's about what happens when good people sincerely carry out an inherited formation that isn't working, and what it costs to change.

I don't know yet how long it will take or when it will be finished. But I know it's time to write it.

This morning, Pope Leo XIV addressed a gathering of writers in Rome, marking the centennial of the Vatican Publishing House. His words landed on me like a commission:

"We need you. We need your imagination, your narrative creativity and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity, within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound."

Spaces of freedom and authenticity. Within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound.

That's what I want to build with these stories. Not arguments dressed as fiction. Not propaganda. Spaces where grace can move. Where a burned-out priest might see himself and take heart. Where a lukewarm father might recognize his own drift and wake up. Where the truth is shown, not told - and the reader feels it before they can name it.

Pope Leo also said this:

"Writing is an act of truth, of revelation, for it reveals who we are, what we believe and hope for, the world we strive toward and the future of which we dream."

That's the vocation. That's what the sabbatical is partly for - to make room for this work, to discern how it fits with everything else, to trim carefully so the right things can grow.

The eyebrow will grow back. It always does.

And in a few weeks, I'll return to active ministry - hopefully with clearer vision for the next five years. Clearer about the parish work. Clearer about the writing. Clearer about how it all fits together.

For now: Totus Tuus this week. Sabbatical after. Prayer throughout.

And somewhere in the middle of it, this Friday, five years since I knelt before the bishop and received the stole and the Book of the Gospels.

Five years. Thank you, Lord.

Now show me what's next.