It’s tough enough being a leader in the church, given the high expectations folks have for you, but it’s twice as hard if you try to do it without solid outside care and support. Guidance is a wonderful and gracious word, full of empathy and unselfish attention, and we all need some of it! A mentor, coach, or seeing-eye friend can transform a difficult experience into an exhilarating and positive adventure. Conversely, going it alone can spell unintended disaster!
Here are three reasons why acquiring a strong mentor might be the best decision you ever make. Only extreme narcissism (not pretty!) would cause someone to go it alone.
Objectivity
We all believe at some level that we know ourselves pretty well–that we are aware of all our little quirks and mannerisms. It just ain’t so! Borrowing from 1 Corinthians 13, we tend to know ourselves as “through a glass, darkly” at best. If we believe we are objective about our own stuff, we may be ignorantly defeating the potential for real change and purposeful modification of our weaknesses.
From the beginning of my career in church worship ministry, I always had a go-to person for wise counsel. Sometimes that person was a pastor, sometimes my wife, but always it was someone who cared about me and wanted me to prosper and succeed. One of my mentors is a friend of some 30 years who for some of that time was a colleague at a church where I served. Ralph is exactly 20 years my senior and I love him like a brother, father, and friend.
He once gave me a day old doughnut and cold coffee as I sat across from him at his desk. He said, “You need some ‘communion peace’ and so we are going to have that right now.” As he served the “elements” to me I began to cloud up, mostly because I had never felt so known or loved. I’ll never forget it.
When I moved some distance from him, I said that I didn’t know what I was going to do without him. “Well,” he said, “If I mean so much to you, I guess you’re just going to have to be me wherever God takes you.”
It was in that one moment that I understood the importance of having a mentor and being a mentor. In a techno world we all need the touch of another.
Street Smarts
The best kind of mentors have wounds, and some of them are whoppers! A mentor who is perfect (or who pretends to be perfect) is almost of no use to you. After all, it’s not what people know that’s important–it’s what they’ve learned. When selecting an objective mentor or coach, what you need is not knowledge but his or her experience. Knowledge you can acquire from a book, but experience can only be gained from those who have grieved their own failures and shortcomings. We all need to hear from these people. They save us from steep learning curves and “stinkin’ thinkin,” as AA folks would say. Deep trench experience is always better than head smarts when moving forward with your own life. For one thing, it will give you the gift of forgiving yourself when you fall short of your own expectations!
Confirmation
Will Rogers use to say that he had never met a man he didn’t like. I think we can be reasonably sure that Mr. Rogers was a serious affirmer! Affirmation is the single greatest gift to others we can give in life. Affirmation and confirmation are closely tied. Confirmation, from its Latin root, means to make firm. When we come across broken people, our primary duty is to stabilize them–to do emotional triage, if you will–in order to bring them back to life. I’m not talking about trying to solve their problem or save them, because that rarely works and is not necessarily appropriate. No, I’m referring to the ability to affirm the thing that seems to be strongest in that person, helping them to get centered and retrieve a more confident outlook. Good mentors know how to do this! They don’t save–they encourage!
