There are times when I think about everything I want to say and think, damn, there is so much here. Then there are moments when I sit down to write or speak and feel like I have absolutely nothing to say. I am learning not to rush that tension. Sometimes silence is not emptiness. Sometimes things are moving underneath the surface before we know how to name them, and sometimes we do not realize how much we have changed until we return to something that used to feel familiar.
I think about this whenever I go back home. You can return to the city where you grew up, drive some of the same streets, pass the same buildings, maybe see some of the same people, and still experience the place differently. Of course, sometimes the place itself has changed. Buildings are gone. New things have been built. People have moved away. But sometimes the most significant change is that you are not the same person who left.
We return to all kinds of things this way. We return to work after being away. We return to school or to studies we put down for a while. We return to relationships and communities. We return to prayer, to spiritual practices, to traditions, to books we once loved, or to questions we thought we had already answered. Sometimes we return to parts of ourselves we thought we had outgrown. Returning does not necessarily mean going backward. It does not mean pretending nothing happened while we were gone, and it certainly does not require squeezing ourselves back into who we used to be. Sometimes we return differently.
That has been one of the things I have been paying attention to in my own life. Over the last year, I completed my first year as the senior minister of a congregation in a city that was still new to me. A year is interesting because you are not quite new anymore, but you are also still learning people and people are still learning you. The honeymoon might not be completely over, but you have been together through enough seasons that some of the deeper stuff begins to show up. First impressions become relationships. Relationships become more complicated. You begin to understand the context differently, and the context begins to understand you differently too.
My spiritual life has also been expanding. I have been learning more about Ifá, listening to people who practice it, paying closer attention to dreams and ancestors, and noticing the ways the sacred moves within traditions, across traditions, and sometimes beyond the boundaries we have constructed around them. That has made me more curious and, I think, less interested in automatically demonizing things I do not understand.
That does not mean accepting everything. I want to be clear about that. Discernment still matters. Everything called spiritual is not necessarily healthy, and everything called religious is not necessarily liberating. People misuse traditions, institutions, scripture, ritual, authority, and spiritual language all the time. But discernment and fear are not the same thing. Discernment and demonization are not the same thing either. Sometimes curiosity allows us to stay present long enough to ask better questions.
Liberation has become one of those questions for me. How do we understand the sacred in ways that move people toward freedom, dignity, wholeness, and deeper relationship? None of our traditions are perfect. They have histories. They have cultures. They have power dynamics. Some of us are trying to protect traditions. Some of us are trying to reclaim traditions that were taken from us. Some of us are reconstructing practices our ancestors knew differently than we do. Some of us are just trying to figure some shit out. I think there can be something sacred in admitting that too.
One of the words I keep coming back to in this season is rootedness. Not certainty. Rootedness. Certainty can become brittle because it sometimes needs everything to stay exactly where we put it. Rootedness feels different. Roots can hold while things move. A rooted tree is not a tree that never bends, never loses leaves, or never changes. It responds to weather. It responds to seasons. It grows. It sheds. It survives things. Rootedness does not require refusing change.
Maybe that is also why I have been thinking so much about what I am no longer willing to force. Timing is one of those things. Relationships are another. I have had to accept that relationships and friendships, including long-standing ones, can change. Sometimes our instinct when a relationship changes is to make somebody wrong. Maybe somebody is wrong. Sometimes harm really has happened. But sometimes the relationship has simply changed. I can notice what another person is investing, honor what is actually there, and move accordingly without needing to demonize them or myself. I can still love people. I can still value what we have shared. I do not have to force a relationship to remain what it used to be.
I am also learning not to force things I believe Spirit has shown me. That one is harder. Sometimes you dream something, discern something, or hear something through another person that resonates so deeply you feel certain you need to pay attention. Then nothing happens. Or at least nothing happens when you expected it to. It is tempting to start rearranging everything to make the thing happen. I have done enough living now to know that sometimes something I sensed was coming really does come, just not on my timeline and not because I manipulated it into existence.
I am learning to let time participate.
That does not mean becoming passive. Trust and passivity are not the same thing. I still have responsibilities. I still have decisions to make. I still have to show up. But participating in my life is different from trying to control every outcome. I can prepare without manipulating. I can discern without demanding certainty. I can trust without pretending that I know exactly how everything is going to unfold.
This has changed the way I think about limits too. We live in a culture that loves the language of limitlessness. Anything is possible. Dream bigger. Work harder. Push through. Do more. Become more. And listen, I believe in possibility. I believe people and communities are capable of doing things that once seemed impossible. But I also believe human beings have limits. Bodies have limits. Time has limits. Institutions have limits. Money has limits. Attention has limits. Capacity has limits. I do not think that acknowledging those things is a lack of faith.
Sometimes limits are a gift because they remind us that we were never supposed to carry everything alone. Sometimes the impossible thing does not require one limitless person. It requires many people, many gifts, many communities, many institutions, many ways of knowing. Trust does not require pretending that I am limitless.
I have had to wrestle with that in ministry, in school, in relationships, in spiritual work, and in my own body. I had to ask some serious questions about whether finishing my PhD still felt meaningful and purposeful, especially when there were real questions about whether I would even be able to continue. But underneath the institutional questions was another one: if I finish this, can I do it without sacrificing myself to it? The academy can have a strange mythology around suffering, as though destroying your health, abandoning your relationships, or disappearing from your own life proves that you deserve whatever comes at the end. I do not want that anymore. I do not want to achieve something by disappearing from my own life.
Even my relationship with technology has been part of this. I have had to admit that loneliness has been part of this season too. Moving to a new city, doing work that requires a lot of relational and emotional energy, being short-staffed, being an introvert and highly sensitive, and then trying to build a life outside of work has not always been easy. Sometimes I simply have not had much left.
And sometimes the phone fills that space. Pick it up. Scroll. Check something. Put it down. Pick it back up five minutes later. Scroll some more. I am learning the difference between connection and stimulation. They are not the same thing. I am not writing this as somebody who has mastered that distinction. I have not. Some things do not need to be wrapped up neatly before we tell the truth about them.
Maybe that is part of returning differently too. We do not have to return after we have solved ourselves.
There is a saying I have heard in different forms that says we are not starting from scratch; we are starting from experience. I have been sitting with that because experience does not mean we return with all the answers. It means we do not return empty-handed. We return carrying what life has taught us. We return carrying mistakes and grief and wisdom and questions. We return knowing some things no longer fit. We return knowing where we abandoned ourselves. We return remembering what sustained us. Sometimes we return knowing enough to do something differently this time.
I think this is true spiritually as well. You can return to prayer as a different person. You can return to scripture as a different person. You can return to church or Christianity as a different person. You can return to an ancestral tradition as a different person. You can return to an old question and discover that it is not actually the same question anymore because you are not the same person asking it.
And sometimes the thing you return to begins speaking differently because you have learned how to hear differently.
That matters because we are not all attuned to listen in the same ways. Some of us are very good at listening culturally. We can read institutions, power, race, politics, and what is happening around us. Some of us know our inner worlds well. We can notice what is happening in our bodies and emotions. Some people trust dreams. Some people trust study. Some encounter the sacred through ritual, scripture, music, justice work, silence, nature, service, or community. Most of us have ways of listening that come naturally and other ways that need more practice.
The way the sacred communes with me does not mean the sacred will commune with my neighbor in exactly the same way. Even if we arrive at similar commitments, even if we both care about liberation, our paths toward it may not look identical. That has always been true. Liberation movements themselves have held different strategies, different philosophies, and different understandings of resistance alongside one another. There has never been only one faithful way to move toward freedom.
So I find myself less interested in performing certainty and more interested in attunement. What am I hearing? What am I missing? Where am I listening well? Where am I so accustomed to one way of knowing that I cannot recognize another?
Those are not questions I have finished answering. I hope I never do.
Maybe that is the point.
Returning is not always about resuming what we were doing before. Sometimes it is an opportunity to notice who has returned. What have I learned? What have I survived? What am I no longer willing to force? Where have my limits become teachers instead of enemies? What sounds different now because I have changed?
What are you hearing now that you could not hear before the silence?
You do not have to return as the person who left. Maybe you could not even if you tried. Perhaps the invitation is not simply to begin again. Perhaps it is to notice who is beginning now.
This reflection grew out of “The Return: Where I’ve Been, What I’m Listening for Now,” an episode of The Sacred Resonance Podcast. Listen to the episode and explore more of the Sacred Resonance work at sacredresonance.co.