by Jordan McDonald
I don’t know if I’m young or old anymore. I turn 30 today and in one sense feel as though life has passed me by, in another sense I feel like I’m just starting. I have been in formal leadership roles since I graduated from college. Even so, last year while sitting with a college student, drinking coffee, I found myself taken aback when this student asked me to be their mentor. Was I mature, established, wise enough to serve as a mentor? This student’s request led me to reflect on my own life. I don’t know that I have ever called someone my mentor but did that mean I hadn’t been mentored? Quite the opposite. I had been mentored since I was young. I was ten years old when I met my first mentor. She guided me through a summer of growth and learning, of having my first crush, and my first falling out with a friend. She showed me what it felt like to be hear and to be held accountable. Mentorship has since followed me through every stage of life.
Mentoring is more than aligning one’s goals with another’s accomplishments. Mentoring has to be about more than sharing a similar lifestyle or career path. Mentoring is about journeying together. Its about sharing in life’s joys and hardships, finding a warm place to take life’s big questions. Its about wondering with a trusted confidant at what God might be up to in our lives and our hearts. Mentoring means sharing values and creating fertile soil for those values to manifest in our everyday lives.
I did not become who my mentors were, but because of my mentors I am becoming who God made me to be. My mentors have been able to celebrate God’s beautiful, unique, and diverse work in my life throughout all its forms, in all of its stages. These mentors have fostered that fertile soil for who I am to grow. Isn’t that the call to mentorship? Who are the people in your life who have pointed you toward who God made you to be? Who have you pointed in their own direction? May we find those along the way who are willing to journey with us, willing to sit with life’s big questions, and wonder together at what God is up to. May we be people who are willing to do the same.
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