DAY OF HOPE AND EXPECTATION.............

Even as my immediately forthcoming return to full time priestly ministry in and for the Diocese of Sacramento is being discussed and determined by Bishop Soto and the Priests Personnel Board, after spending a frustratingly and unnecessary year and a half on the sidelines in a setting that fails to define me and my presently or for the foreseeable future, today causes to look back over the last three decades and to  this date thirty one years ago.  That date,  September 13, 1982; was a day of boundless hope and brimming expectation for me and those I met then, as a first day,  first year, seminarian for the Sacramento Diocese, beginning my studies in Kilkenny, Ireland.  The high octane hopes and expectations  experienced that day fueled and followed me through the next five years at St. Kieran's Seminary and St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park as well as my Transitional Diaconate Year in St. Joseph's Parish in Auburn, California.  That positive energy and the power of ordination propelled me into priestly pastoral ministry over the following decade and a half.  The hopes, expectations, and optimism that led me into Holy Orders and  shaped my priestly. pastoral, ministry has been tempered by my health challenges and especially the conditional responses and uncertain support from the powers that be whom I vowed to work with and for as a Priest of Jesus Christ in the Catholic-Christian communities of the Church of Sacramento.  Through all this, despite much of it, I remain as a native Sacramentan, locally grown, internationally and domestically formed, Catholic Priest dedicated to carrying out my commitments to God and the Church, as an active ministry Priest for many more years to come.  Please God. enlightenment, inclusion, and empowerment, in assigning me and affirming  my ordained ministry will break through anew, beginning today in ending the warehousing and marginalizing I have been caused to endure and persevere through since March of last year.  In and For the Greater Glory of God and the Common Good.............Fr.  Troy David