Mentoring like Jesus reminds us that he not only preached, taught, and explained—he sometimes resisted the instinct to explain. I know the feeling too well.
My urge is to speak, to fill the silence, to provide my answer to their “problem,” to tell them how it worked for me. As a rabbi, Jesus’ goal was seldom informational. More often, it was formative and especially transformational.
Mentoring is a risk. Being mentored can be costly. Being a mentor can require paying a price.
These are probably not words you want to hear if you are:
Mentoring requires one essential posture: hospitality. We create an open and free space for another person. As mentors, we open ourselves to the work of the Spirit in another. As mentees, we open our inner soul space. There is an emerging and (hopefully) growing transparency. Read More
Mentors ask great questions. We don’t always know the impact our questions will have until they are heard by the mentee. Often, these great questions emerge from a pool of mentors, perhaps as starters or simply as something to introduce at the right moment.
These questions can also serve you well as you journal—simply writing thoughts, prayers, experiences, questions, memories, in a carefully kept notebook for you to read again. Journaling is a spiritual practice that takes you deep into your inner landscape. Many find it a valuable way to explore fears, dreams, aspirations, and convictions through regular writing.
We’d love for you to keep these questions for spiritual friendship close at hand. That’s why we’ve created a printable PDF of spiritual mentoring questions—a free resource that includes all 25 questions and the first practice prompt. Print it, tuck it into your journal, or bring it to your next mentoring conversation. Read More
Jesus was a carpenter, but as an artisan, not simply a builder. My “office” table was built by the Boos company and was intended to be a cutting board in a kitchen. It sits in the corner of what I sentimentally call my “cabin,” a room with knotty pine walls and ceilings, a space of intimacy, warmth, and windows. Twelve windows in all that let me see the sun coming from the east in the morning and the shadows as they move to the west in the evening. It’s sturdy, as cutting boards should be. It’s the perfect height to give me a view of the horizon—with its sunlight, trees, clouds, and the morning marine layer of fog. After all, I live on an island in the Pacific Northwest.
This table has become, for me, my altar in the world; it is more than just furniture.
Whether you read novels or prefer Netflix movies, the story is the center of both genres. We could call them the curriculum for those writers. As a good novel unfolds with unexpected twists and surprising turns of a plot, so the biography of one’s life unfolds. Where it will lead is not always clear until more of the story develops.
The deepest truth of spirituality is always autobiographical. It is incarnational, lived in the grit of life on Monday and Tuesday, and all the days of the week. “My drifting is consecrated in pilgrimage.”[1] The gentle and probing questions of a mentor draw us to the central action of spirituality: to pay attention for the presence of God in everything.
“I want to hear Jesus’ voice.” Many years ago, Richard Foster, founder of Renovare’ told us three things prevent us from hearing that voice we long for: noise, hurry, and crowds. In Luke 10, we find a case study of both sides of that dilemma. Martha is a busy host who opens her home to Jesus and never sits down because of her compulsion to be busy. She must have felt obligated to provide a high level of care for her Lord. Mary, on the other hand, remains seated as an attentive student, opening her mind and heart to Jesus’ teaching. “Martha, you are distracted by many things…only one thing is needed.” Read More
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.”
