I am happily reintroducing the Outpatient Monk blog after a long period of consideration. We have redesigned a few things, and even more importantly, I have taken some time to cultivate a heart and voice capable of speaking clearly in a time of awful and intentional muddiness. We can do better.
I am thrilled if you are willing to read any of the upcoming posts, but I am honestly much more drawn than ever to developing a conversation with you. I am convinced that listening and thinking matters and is one of the acts of rebellion of our day. So if you have a thought or topic you would like to see the Outpatient Monk think about, address, or just sit with, please send me a direct message or email. I will respond as soon and as best as I can, but only once there is something Good to be said. You can help the conversation along by sharing posts and engaging people who read them. Ask your friends questions about their reactions and let’s reconnect with people over the hard stuff and allow ourselves to be earnest, gentle, …and uncertain
… as certainty is so easily a precursor to violence.
See if you and your community can collectively forge a more Truthful, Beautiful, and Good response that I can. I will work for you. Also, I am committed to being prayerful for you, so let me know what that needs to look like for you. So in short, it seems I am literally offering you my “thoughts and prayers…
So in short, it seems I am literally offering you my “thoughts and prayers,” but hopefully in a way that actually has some teeth, and not in a way meant to placate you. May God make it so.
My commitment is that here, however challenging it may be and however imperfectly I execute this, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness will always matter most in what I share with you.
I am very excited to let the first new post be about how I got involved in working in an AIDS hospice when I was just 18, and the 30 years of World AIDS Day that have followed. That essay has me wondering what providential moments of your life have pushed you beyond your comfort zone and helped shape the best of who you are. Tell me in a message, send me an email. This simply has to be the kind of things we are willing to think about, instead of living by clickbait alone … May God make it so.
Sincerely,
Doug,
The Outpatient Monk
