On a recent podcast, I heard the speaker say, “We have less capacity to listen in our culture today than we did in the past.” I disagree. I say, “No, our capacity is not the issue, our intentionality is.” Jesus said it: “He or she who has ears to hear, listen”
I’ve been musing on this and found myself coming to a new thought: What happens to the mentor when they have ears to hear? Does something change in you as a mentor because you engage in deep listening? I think the answer is yes. Read More
When she first sat at her mentor’s table, she couldn’t precisely tell you why she was there. Her life wasn’t falling apart, her prayers didn’t feel hollow, her faith hadn’t been shaken, but she was looking for something more. “I think I have settled for shallow waters along the shore, and I know deep waters are calling to me, I know that deep calls to deep.” She didn’t expect answers, but maybe good questions, presence, and trusted words to help in reading the stories she knew. God was still writing with her. In the weeks that followed, she experienced a slow, steady uncovering of grace in the deeply personal, ordinary, sacred steps of her journey.
Spiritual mentoring, or simply call it spiritual friendship, is an intentional and deliberate process of sacred conversations for the purpose of soul formation. From my own experience with the mentors of my own life, I know it to engage at least three common experiences… Read More
It was thirty-two years ago, and the memory is still strong. I was in my second year as campus pastor at my alma mater in St. Paul. A beloved faculty member was fired just days before the start of the school year. We became a community in pain, crisis, and conflict. Emotions were running high, and feelings were deep, and we needed to be ready for the students to watch us as we taught by our actions, words, and reactions. I wrote a pastoral letter to the community asking for calm and redemptive love as we muddled our way forward. The stakes are even higher for us in our divisions across our nation. I’ll share some of what I wrote then, never thinking it might apply so intensely today. Read More
In the familiar gospel story, Mary, newly pregnant, makes haste to see her cousin Elizabeth, who is surprisingly pregnant in her advanced years. We all need an Elizabeth.
You know their sons: Jesus and John, cousins, due to miraculous births. Mary knows that she has been given a mission, a future, and a sacred purpose beyond anything her own life drama could write or imagine. Why? Because she had experienced a “Theo drama,” in which God invited her to a task too large for a young Jewish girl to imagine on her own. Her response? “Let it be to me as you have said, I will set aside my own ego drama for something you intend for my life and through my life to the entire world.” Theos, of course, is the Greek word for God.[1]
Mary reaches out to someone else who has found her role in step with God at the opposite season of life to the teenage girl. Elizabeth has also seen her purpose in the larger drama of God’s explosive plan for the universe: “For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Before John the Baptist and Jesus knew their sacred purpose, two women, mothers both, young and old, were overcome by the drama of God’s call and purpose for their lives. Two women, neither highly educated nor socially prominent, set aside their own plans and accepted a larger plan for them and through them. Read More
"Practical. Insightful. In my 50 years as a pastor, I’ve read many of these. This is THE best. I ordered 12 to give as gifts.”
