Mentor

Bill Webb recently saw his 80 years of life flash before his eyes. It was through his seven grandchildren, who'd found old photos and, heartwarmingly, dressed up as him during different eras of his life—celebrating his birthday, his life, and their love for him.

His 21-year-old granddaughter, Kenzie Greene shared an Instagram post about the event. She said, “He definitely knows how to make all of us feel special and remembers things about each of us.” Kenzie recalls that their grandparents always showed up to their sports and other events to express their love and support.

After retiring, Bill has made the most of his life as a grandfather, spending countless nights playing games, sharing meals, and spending priceless time with them at the family house.

Kenzie and the family wanted to do something special for Pawpaw to show him how much he means to them. They decided to highlight eras from his life. Kenzie noted that “80 years is a long time,” and they had to fit all those years into 7 eras that each grandchild could personify.

For each era of their Pawpaw’s life, each grandchild chose an era that represented a connection they shared with him. For example, Kenzie’s cousin Hutton was really into football in high school, so he represented the “football era” of Bill’s life. Kenzie is currently studying at the University of Tennessee, where Bill also studied, so she naturally chose his “frat boy” era. As each grandchild came out, they announced what part of his life they represented, and then showed him an actual scrapbook picture of what he looked like at that stage of his life.

One commenter on her video wrote, “This speaks volumes about love, legacy, and the strength of family bonds. What a reminder of the beauty in honoring those who paved the road before us. This is the kind of legacy that inspires us all. What a family!”

Michael Hoffen is a new author, and like him, the central character of his book is a teenager. But there’s quite an age gap between them—about 4,000 years. That’s because Hoffen translated an ancient papyrus from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom and brought to life the true story of a young Egyptian from ancient times named Pepi. In the papyrus, Pepi’s father, Khety, is intent on getting his son a job in the royal court.

Young Pepi wonders what career path he should choose, an important matter still contemplated today by millions of teenagers forty centuries later. His father Khety takes him on a long journey up the Nile to enroll him in a school far away from home. Along the way, Khety explains 18 other terrible jobs Pepi could end up having to work at if he is not hired as a scribe.

Hoffen, who has been translating ancient texts since middle school, became fascinated by a 4,000-year-old or so piece of literature from ancient Egypt’s Middle Kingdom known as The Instruction of Khety.

Under the guidance and collaboration of his two co-authors, Egyptologists Christian Casey and Jen Thum, Hoffen spent three-and-a-half years translating hieroglyphics into modern-day prose and gathering images to tell the story of Kheti and Pepi.

He then published a book called “Be A Scribe! Working for a Better Life in Ancient Egypt.” In the book he describes just how little the human condition has changed in thousands of years and shows readers that working for a living has never been easy!

Possible Preaching Angle:

Parents still want the best for their children, and teenagers face important decisions as they set out on their career paths. This story shows how little parenting has changed across thousands of years. The record of an Egyptian father giving life advice to his son mirrors the same instructions that Solomon gave to his sons in Proverbs, “Listen, my sons, to a father’s instruction; pay attention and gain understanding. For I give you sound teaching…” (Prov. 4:1)

When the No. 1 seed Alabama men’s basketball team suffered an upset loss in the Sweet 16 in 2023, coach Nate Oats sought out advice from one of the greatest coaches of all time—Alabama’s football coach, Nick Saban.

It will come as no surprise to learn that Nick Saban, the seven-time title-winning football coach, had some wisdom to offer his colleague. Saban emphasized the importance of not dwelling on the opportunity the team had just lost, but focusing on the next opportunity to come.

Saban’s approach paid off. Despite losing more games and earning a lower March Madness seed than it did the year before, the 2024 Alabama basketball team reached the first Final Four in the program’s 111-year history.

“It’s a great philosophy in life,” Oats said this week. “There’s a lot of adversity you hit … You live in the past; you’re not going to be very good in the present.”

That’s where Saban came in. One of the greatest winners in the history of college sports, Saban also happens to know plenty about losing. As Oats pointed out, most of Saban’s championships came during seasons marred by at least one crushing regular-season defeat.

It may be surprising that Saban was so willing to let Oats pick his brain. But as it turns out, it’s something the pair have been doing for years. After he was hired from Buffalo, Oats asked Saban if he could embed himself into Bama’s practice facilities to see how the best college football coach of all-time ran his program.

Oats said, “I went and watched practices. I sat in on staff meetings. I shadowed him for a day. I went on road trips with him to see how they operated. I tried to learn as much as I could.”

Six-time Super Bowl winner Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots parted ways in January 2024. This sparked a lot of commentary on the coach’s legacy. Offensive lineman Damien Woody played for the Patriots from 1999 to 2003 and was integral in helping the team win two Super Bowls. Speaking on ESPN's morning talk show First Take, Woody explains how Belichick went the extra mile to help him reach his full potential, on the field and in life:

I tell people this all the time. Every moment I stepped in that building in New England it was like game day every day. You had to be mentally and physically prepared to be in a grinder. That's the type of environment that Bill had in New England. He always made sure that everyone was uncomfortable. Because we know that when you're uncomfortable that's when the greatest growth comes about within you as a person. So, it should surprise no one the level of success that Bill and the New England Patriots had because of the environment that was there.

But I remember Bill back in my early days. "I think it was like 2001, Bill Belichick put an anchor in our locker room. That anchor signified how much overweight we were as a football team and how much dead weight we were carrying around that was keeping us as a team from getting to where we want to go. During my playing career I always had problems with my weight. So instead of reaming me, Bill went out of his way to set me up at a program at Duke University. Paid for it himself. I was down there for two months. This man came down to North Carolina multiple times to check on me to see how I was doing.

That to me speaks volumes about the man. And so, like I sit here today just processing and I'm thankful for every lesson that I learned there because I've been able to carry that not only through my playing career but just through my life in general.

A father’s influence on their sons is profound. As young men, we look first to our fathers to help lay the foundation for our own future growth. They help us distinguish between right and wrong. They encourage our strengths and nurture our struggles to prepare us for the future.

But fathers aren’t perfect. Sometimes opportunities to teach life lessons or impart simple skills get lost in the chaos of life. And it’s easy to look back with longing and regret at those moments.

The point is to not dwell on mistakes. Rather, it is to learn about what you might want to prioritize as a father. So, what do their kids wish their dads taught them when they were still young. Here are five things they said:

1. How To Be Present

“I wish I had learned from my father the importance of experiencing life, moments, and relationships over working for the dollar. Make your living but be present. Cherish family because time is the one thing you can't get back.”

2. How To Know My Worth

“My father never taught me to be confident in myself. He was abusive and manipulative and I would doubt whether any actions or decisions were the right ones. One thing stands out in my mind is that I must cherish my own children and never make them feel inferior.”

3. How To Fix Things

“My dad was one of those guys who was very mechanically inclined. If I could go back in time to being a kid again, I would have asked my dad to take time to bring me in on some of his repair jobs. It would have given me much needed confidence when working with my hands, which happens a lot as a dad.”

4. How To Care

“My dad wasn't very present during my childhood. He was a traveling businessman and was gone 2-3 weeks of every month. The biggest thing he never showed me was how to care for the people I love.”

5. How To Problem Solve

“My dad was very much a ‘Let me do it’ kind of guy. He wanted to fix the problem rather than help us learn about it. I appreciate what he was trying to do, but I think it hindered my ability to think for myself while I was growing up.”

In his newsletter, blogger Aaron Renn reflects on the crucial role of mentors:

One of the core functions of mentors is to [tell you the things] people are already thinking and saying about you behind your back - and helping you overcome them. A Financial Times profile of American Express CEO Steve Squeri shows how a mentor did this for him.

Squeri is the grandson of Italian and Irish immigrants and the son of an accountant who worked nights and weekends at Bloomingdale’s department store to make ends meet. During his studies at Manhattan College, Squeri lived at home. He had never been on an aircraft until he joined a training program at what is now the consulting group Accenture.

Four years later he moved to Amex. There, his Queens accent and cheap suits stuck out so badly that an executive took him aside. He said, “You have a really sharp mind, but the rest of you needs a lot of work. [Senior managers] tend to use all the letters of the alphabet when they talk.”

The mentor took Squeri shopping, arranged for [speaking] lessons and even organized sessions with a cultural anthropologist so the younger manager would feel comfortable when he was sent to the group’s overseas offices. Squeri says, “I’m an example of how anybody can get to the top with a lot of hard work and having people that run the company that … are looking at individuals broadly and not judging books by their cover.”

Renn comments: “This mentor saw a diamond in the rough guy and made it his business to polish him up. This sort of thing is worth its weight in gold. [But notice how] good mentorship gets uncomfortable.”

Author Nijay Gupta recounts the 1965-1966 story of a group of six boys who ran away from their homeland of Tonga.

The young boys stole a boat and headed out hastily in search of Fiji (some five hundred miles away). They took a sack of food and a small gas burner stove, but no map or compass. Due to their amateur sailing skills and the unfriendly seas, they were lost, adrift for eight days, until they finally spotted land. They ended up on the deserted island of Ata. These Tongan boys were stranded there for fifteen months.

Their rescue finally came through Australian Captain Peter Warner, who happened upon them as during a return sail from the capital of Tonga. Casually focusing his binoculars at a nearby Ata Island, which was thought to be uninhabited, he noticed a burned patch of ground. He said during a later interview, “I thought, that’s strange that a fire should start in the tropics on an uninhabited island. So, we decided to investigate further.”

As they approached, they saw a teenage boy rushing into the water toward them; five more quickly followed. When the boy reached the boat, he told Mr. Warner that he and his friends had been stranded for more than a year, living off the land and trying to signal for help from passing ships.

Most stories of dramatic rescues tend to stop there, and the reader is left wondering, “What happened to these boys? Were they okay? Did they live happy, and fulfilled lives? Did they stay friends?”

The rest of the story is that immediately after Wallace delivered them back home, they were arrested for stealing the boat they had “borrowed.” Warner took pity on them and paid the boat owner $200 to get the kids off the hook. Furthermore, Warner decided to quit his job in Sydney and stay in Tonga long-term. He started a fishing business there and hired the shipwrecked boys as his crew. Warmer mentored and stayed friends with some of them for the rest of his life. One of the boys said, after several decades of friendship, “He [Warner] was like a father to me.”

Gupta adds, “This captures poignantly the difference between a plastic, ‘get-out-of-hell-free’ type of salvation message of Christianity, and a deeper, more relational, dynamic vision of ‘rescue’ that is characteristic of the New Testament.”

Editor’s Note: Captain Peter Warner passed away in April of 2012 at the age of 90.

Most people have never heard of Coach Miller Bugliari, but the legendary American boys’ high school soccer coach is still at it—coaching his 63rd consecutive season, at age 87. The accumulated numbers are absurd. Bugliari possesses a lifetime coaching record that looks like an international telephone number: 916 wins, 130 losses, 82 ties. The list of titles includes 21 state championships. There is so much hardware and memorabilia piled into Bugliari’s office it can be difficult to locate the Hall of Fame coach behind his desk.

People around him note that humility is one of the keys to his success. In a recent interview he quietly told a reporter, “I take a little pride [in all those victories], but I try to ignore it.” Later in the same interview he said, “I think everyone is blessed with something they like to do. I just enjoy it. I’ve always enjoyed working—and the kids keep you young.” One of this year’s (2022) team captains described Coach Bugliari this way: “I think people would be surprised at how humble he is.”

For Bugliari it isn’t about the championships. Talk to a Pingry graduate about Bugliari, and you’ll get an earful about their former coach’s intellectual curiosity, his patience, the way he shaped young men into parents, leaders, and coaches themselves.

A Glamour magazinevideo asked a number of girls and women on advice they would want from an older person in their life. Here are some of the questions these young women asked:

How do you become who you are today?

What should I not stress about at 14-years-old?

What is the best way to make a decision?

Looking back on your life what did you find most valuable?

What do you do when you realize that your dreams are not actually going to happen?

How do you manage having kids, being married, and having a career?

What is the secret to living a happy life?

Is having children really worth it?

(What are the) secrets to a long and happy marriage?

You can watch the entire 2:30 minute video here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is important for mature women to be accessible to answer questions and serve as role models to the young women in our churches. “Older women, likewise, are to be …. teachers of good. In this way they can train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, managers of their households, kind, and submissive to their own husbands …” (Titus 2:3-5).

New York Times columnist Kashana Cauley knows a little something about regrets. She wrote, “My friends and I got tattoos so we could feel dangerous. Not very dangerous, because very dangerous people went to jail, but slightly dangerous, like a thrilling drop of botulism in a jar of jelly.”

She explains in the piece that when it came time to select her first tattoo, she picked a design of Chinese characters that she was told meant “fame and fortune.” But then she had chat with an older Chinese-speaking woman in a university locker room when they were changing clothes.

“She asked me what I thought the Chinese characters on my shoulder meant, and I told her. Then she asked me what I was at school to study, and I said law. She frowned and told me the tattoo was better suited for someone in the arts — that I should hurry up and get into the arts. We both laughed.”

But Cauley thought it would be different when she got a tattoo of her own name. As an African American descended from slavery, her knowledge of family history doesn’t extend very far. But a friend told her once that her name meant something beautiful and significant in Arabic. As a result, she looked up an online Arabic translation of her name, and got that design as another tattoo.

And she was satisfied with her choice … until she wasn’t. “For a few years I walked around confident that I had finally restored some meaning to my name, until an Arabic-speaking friend spotted my tattoo at lunch. ‘What do you think it means?’ she asked.”

Her friend’s response surprised her. “Instead of complimenting me on the beautiful, permanent version of my name needled onto my arm, my Arabic-speaking friend paused. Apparently, tattoo No. 2 was actually one of those 404 error messages, when an online search comes up blank. So my arm said, more or less: ‘Result not found.’”

“As a reluctant pioneer in the field of bad tattooing, I spent years afterward stubbornly telling people it meant ‘the eternal search.’ It sounded more elegant than ‘I didn’t find a correct translation of my name on the internet.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

We can avoid embarrassing mishaps by asking for the counsel of others to help guide us through the major decisions we make.

On Tuesday, May 10, 2022, a passenger with no flight experience called Air Traffic Control in Fort Pierce, Florida airport and said, “I’ve got a serious situation here. My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.”

Around noon an air traffic controller named Robert Morgan was outside the tower reading a book on a break when his co-worker yelled, “There’s a passenger flying a plane that’s not a pilot and the pilot is incapacitated so they said you need to help them try and land the plane.”

Morgan was the man for the job. In addition to his 20 years in tower control, he is also a flight instructor with around 1,200 hours under his belt.

Morgan told reporters, “I knew the plane was flying, I just knew I had to keep him calm, point him to the runway and tell him how to reduce the power so he could descend to land.” Then Morgan proceeded to walk the first-time pilot step-by-step through the landing procedure for the Cessna Grand Caravan. Morgan even ran out to the tarmac and joyfully embraced his student.

Morgan said, “It felt really good to help somebody and he told me that he couldn’t wait to get home and hug his pregnant wife.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Guidance; Mentoring - When disaster or crises arise, we need a wise mentor or guide to walk us through it. 2) Holy Spirit - The Holy Spirit is our flight controller who can guide us through the worst that life can throw at us (John 16:13; Rom. 8:14).

Scott Bozearth coaches two youth basketball teams in New Jersey. And it was a good year, both teams made a championship run this season. If you coach multiple teams, having a single team advance into a league tournament is no small accomplishment.

He and the parents of the youth on his team credit his "can do attitude" with his success. 12-year-old Abraxus Hannah had only stepped on the court for the first time this year. “Anytime I say I can't do something, Coach Scott always tells me I can," said Hannah. "I feel like he's made a really big difference in my life.” Parents agree that Coach Scott's can-do attitude has sparked a positive change in their children.

And Bozearth knows a thing or two about working through challenges. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth, hindering the muscles on the left side of his body. That includes his left hand, which does not function as well as the right. In spite of this, Bozearth grew up playing basketball. He carried that passion into his adult life, where he coaches two teams in the Herb Henry Youth Basketball League. He believes his role is to do more than simply teach technical skills. He summarized his role in a recent interview with this phrase: "I love challenges. So, what I thought is, if God gave me a hand to play, I'm going to play like that."

Possible Preaching Point:

God is sovereign. The hand you have is the hand God intended for you to have. Now play like that!

According to many industry analysts and insiders, the rising dominance of streaming platforms over the traditional broadcast networks is causing an unintended consequence: a lack of leadership development. As NBC’s Sierra Ornelas puts it: “Structurally, we'll have to figure out a better way to do this, because the structure we have now is not working.”

The pipeline from writer to showrunner has become strained by the explosive growth of the streaming series. The pace at which new streaming series are being greenlit and produced, combined with the shorter runs of episodes, are creating a situation where inexperienced writers don’t have enough opportunities to gain valuable mentorship experience.

When there were only a few networks and a few cable channels, there was a path to becoming a showrunner that made up for the lack of training a writer would have in logistics. Basically, the training came through mentoring and experience. When television consisted of 20-22 episodes a year, even junior writers could watch their script go from their hands to the screen. Writers moved up the writer ranks, and by the time they were pitching their own shows, they would have seen at least 50 episodes of television being made.

Something systemic needs to be done to ensure that new writers are trained as much as some were in the old system. Because as sink-or-swim as television has always been, the lack of experience and support in the new one will simply leave many to fail.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Successful ministry never happens in a vacuum. Rather, mentorship is an essential element of Christian community, and without it our people tend to drift aimlessly.

Anfernee Simons, fourth year guard for the Portland Trail Blazers, has been carrying the burden of high expectations. After spending two years mostly riding the bench and a third up-and-down year in a backup point guard role, this has been his breakout year. With two stars players out on extended injury leave, Simons has been called upon for a massive uptick in playing time and scoring.

The pressure sometime results in Simons being down on himself, especially if he isn’t playing particularly well. He doesn’t want to let down his teammates, the coaching staff, his mentors, or the fans that cheer for him.

Despite a recent slump in production from Simons, none of that burden seemed evident during a recent game against the Atlanta Hawks. That night, Simons played free and easy, recording a career-high 43 points on 13-21 shooting. Asked what changed, his answer was simple: “I really can’t take credit for how I played tonight. Sadly, my grandpa died last night from cancer. This is all him, honestly. I give credit to him, dedicated this whole game to him.”

Simons had just returned from visiting his grandfather, Jake Carter, with whom he had a close relationship during his developmental years. Several days prior, Simons had been required to enter the COVID-19 health protocols, which required him to be away from the team. So, he chartered a private plane and made a trip back to Florida to visit Carter. It was a refreshing time of family connection.

Simons said, “It was a bittersweet moment cause, obviously, I didn’t know it was the last time I would actually see him. I’m kind of optimistic in those kinds of scenarios. But it kind of worked out how it was supposed to.”

Though Carter later passed away after Simons returned, he obviously had no regrets. “I knew kind of in the back of my mind that it was going to be a great night because he’s there. My Papa was there to help me along the way.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even in our latter years, we can still impact generations to come with love, faithfulness, and wisdom that will help them along in their success.

Upon his arrival to Hahnville High School, Daverius Peters was rightfully excited. His excitement, however, quickly turned to shame and embarrassment when he was turned away at the door for wearing the wrong footwear.

According to the school’s dress code, male students were required to wear dark-colored dress shoes. “I thought I could wear them because they’re black,” said Peters, who said that his outfit abided by the rest of the code, which included a white shirt and tie and dress pants.

Nevertheless, a school representative at the door disagreed, and turned Peters away. Peters recalled, “I was in shock. I felt humiliated. I just wanted to walk across the stage and get my diploma.”

Fortunately, John Butler was on the scene. Butler, a paraeducator at the school, was in attendance to see his own daughter graduate. But Peters spotted Butler, and explained the situation. Butler said, “Of course, that sounded crazy to me. There was nothing eccentric about his shoes.”

After a brief back-and-forth with the woman at the door, Butler decided the quickest way to resolve the situation was to give Peters the shoes off his own feet, so that’s exactly what he did. Peters eventually walked—actually “slid” is the more accurate term—across the stage with Butler’s size 11’s on his size-9 feet. And Butler attended the graduation in his stocking feet with no regrets.

Butler said, “This was the most important moment in his life up to that point, and I wasn’t going to let him miss it for anything. I was just happy to see him receive his diploma.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus chose time after time to honor children and those who sacrifice to serve them. If we are to be followers of Jesus, we must do likewise.

The May 2021 issue of GQ has Justin Bieber on its cover and the article focuses primarily on his faith. The mega-pop star had been living a life of despair and emptiness. If you ask Bieber what he would’ve been doing five years ago, should the world have shut down and locked him in his home, he will say that … “things were pretty dark in general.”

He went on to say, “I was surrounded by a lot of people, and we were all kind of just escaping our real life. I think we just weren’t living in reality. I think it would have probably resulted in just a lot of doing drugs and being posted up, to be honest.”

At age 15 Bieber had met and was influenced by Pastor Judah Smith. As Bieber became successful, they kept in touch but only sporadically. But when Bieber finally began to emerge from his bad years and to seek guidance, Smith was still there. And Bieber noticed that, in retrospect, Smith had never asked him for anything. Bieber says, “He put our relationship first.”

And then he started to notice other things, too, like the way Smith’s family seemed to care for one another. Bieber says, “It was something I always dreamed of because my family was broken. My whole life, I had a broken family. And so, I was just attracted to a family that eats dinners together, laughs together, talks together.”

Bieber talks about God, “He is grace. Every time we mess up, He’s picking us back up every single time. That’s how I view it.” Bieber suddenly had a certainty: “If God forgives me and He loves me and He set these things in motion, if He put these desires in my heart, then I’m going to trust Him.”

Joshua Haldeman grew up on the prairies of Saskatchewan. When the domino effect of the Great Depression hit Canada, Haldeman lost his five-thousand-acre farm and had to start from scratch. He tried his hand at chiropractic medicine and politics. Then Haldeman discovered his passion—flying airplanes.

In 1950, Haldeman uprooted his family and moved halfway around the world to South Africa, a place he had never even been to before! With the help of his wife, Winnifred, and their children, he disassem­bled his 1948 single-engine airplane. The airplane was packed into crates, shipped to South Africa, and reassembled by the family once it got there.

A few years later, Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman embarked on a thirty-thousand-mile round-trip flight from Africa to Australia and back. They are believed to be the only private pilots to have ever made that flight in a single-engine airplane. As a comparison point, Charles Lindbergh's legendary transatlantic flight in 1927 was only 3,600 miles. Twenty-seven years later, the Haldemans flew more than eight times as far!

Few people have heard of Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman, but I bet you've heard of their grandson Elon Musk. Musk's entrepreneurial exploits are well documented. He has turned the automotive and aero­space industries upside down. At SpaceX headquarters, there are two giant posters of Mars. One shows a cold, barren planet. The other looks a lot like Earth. The second poster represents Musk's life purpose—colonizing Mars.

How does someone even conceptualize colonizing a planet, in the non-science-fiction sense? Dreams are not conceived in a vacuum. One of Musk's biographers noted, "Throughout his child­hood. Elon heard many stories about his grandfather's exploits and sat through countless slide shows that documented his travels.” Those stories were the seedbed of Musk's imagination. Those stories were the shoulders he stood on.