The sabbatical is ending.

For nearly two months, I've stepped back from active parish ministry - no preaching, no meetings, no pastoral presence at Sunday Masses. Just prayer, discernment, and the slow work of asking what the next five years of diaconal service should look like.

I wrote about what the sabbatical was teaching me. About seeking first the Kingdom. About how liturgy forms us before we ever try to form it. About the difference between a solid self and a pseudo-self - and whether I could become the kind of person who stays in a place even when it doesn't completely fit.

I read a few extra books too.

Now I'm coming back.

Not because I figured everything out. But because the discernment led me here - back to St. Elizabeth, back to the parish, back to the people I've been serving for years. And this time, with more clarity about what I'm returning to.

The Question I Was Sitting With

Luke Burgis's book The One and the Ninety-Nine gave me language for the question I'd been circling all summer.

A solid self can stay in a difficult place. Not because staying is always right, but because a solid self has the capacity to hold tension, to affect change from the inside, to belong without fusing and challenge without rupturing.

A pseudo-self either conforms or flees. Those are the only options when you don't have a center of your own.

The question I carried into the sabbatical was simple: Do I run from what I don't like or agree with? Or do I do something to try to affect it from the inside?

The answer - after weeks of prayer, spiritual direction, and honest conversation with my pastor - is that I stay. And I lean in.

What I'm Coming Back To

I'm back at the Sunday Holy Hours. I'll be back preaching at all the Masses the weekend of August 22-23.

But more than the schedule, here's what I'm returning to with renewed intention:

Youth ministry and OCIA. Our high school youth group and our Order of Christian Initiation for Adults. These are where formation happens most directly - where people are asking real questions about faith and life. I want to help build bigger teams and support structures around both of these ministries over the coming year.

Liturgical leadership. This is where the sabbatical clarified something important. I spent fourteen years as a music director before entering deacon formation. I know what good liturgy does to people - how it forms them, shapes their belief, opens them to encounter. I'm re-engaging more deeply with Father Alfred and Father Godwin in leading our liturgical ministries, continuing to deepen our reverence and approach to worship, rooted in my particular knowledge of and experience in the liturgy.

Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. How we pray shapes what we believe shapes how we live. If I believe that - and I do - then I can't treat liturgy as someone else's problem. I have to lean in.

The parish itself. St. Elizabeth, Granite City. The people who've been here for generations and the people who just arrived. The ones who agree with me about liturgy and the ones who don't. The community God has placed me in, not the one I would have chosen for myself.

Burgis's reframe of the parable keeps coming back to me: the shepherd doesn't just rescue the one and make them fit into the ninety-nine. He protects the one's unique vocation within the whole. I can be myself - my solid self, with my convictions and my particular gifts - and still belong. Still serve. Still stay.

Not Finished, But Clearer

The sabbatical didn't answer every question. I'm still discerning what my writing and Domus work looks like alongside parish ministry. I'm still learning how to hold the tension between what I desire for the liturgy and what's pastorally possible. I'm still figuring out how to be present to all of it without burning out.

But I'm clearer than I was in June. Clearer about my center. Clearer about what I'm for, not just what I'm against. Clearer about staying - not as compromise, but as conviction.

The solid self doesn't stay because there's nowhere else to go. The solid self stays because staying is the work. Because the parish you're given is the parish where God is forming you. Because leaning in from the inside is how change actually happens.

I'm grateful for the sabbatical. I'm grateful for Father Alfred's support and my spiritual director's guidance. I'm grateful for all of you who prayed.

And I'm grateful to be back.