Quote du Jour (Health, Wellness, and Healthcare Department): "This is about listening..."

Last week was a wild one for having my worlds of engagement collide, overlap, and collide. Which worlds? Digital ministry. Healthcare social media. Patient advocacy. Happy to report that the transition from one environment to another is feeling more seamless than it has in years, thanks be to God. And social media. Also coffee, carefully titrated into my bloodstream.

Within the past 10 days I've attended a Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media planning meeting Rochester, MN and then delivered a workshop and keynote during eFormation at Virginia Theological Seminary. Got home in time to attend Tuesday night's #ChSocM (church social media chat). Two days later, my new role with the Mayo's Social Media Health Network was announced.

Such uber-hubbub explains the more-than-slight lag in posting this Quote du Jour from a June 5th post titled, She's Not Here Right Now. It appeared on the afternoon nap society, a wonderful blog written by Twitter friend and Stanford MedX mentor Sarah Kucharski [aka,  +Afternoon Napper (@AfternoonNapper)].

Her post explains why and how she's redistributing her time and refocusing on writing. (She's an extraordinarily fine narrative nonfiction writer.) Since I'd followed some of her process via Twitter and Facebook, I was doing more skimming than deep reading until I got to, "This is about the Kingdom of the Unwell and the Kingdom of Healers laying down arms to unite as the Kingdom of People." Yes, yes, yes. Here's the context:


Advocacy is a word that I am using broadly to characterize this work for which I did not go to school, this proclivity for all things health care related, for fostering the patient voice in medicine. This isn't about waving around a colored flag and issuing a list of complaints. This is about getting elbow-deep in the quagmire of policies and prejudices to search for answers that can help change the system. This is about listening, analyzing and doing. This is about the Kingdom of the Unwell and the Kingdom of Healers laying down arms to unite as the Kingdom of People.

─  @AfternoonNapper