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Tables, altars, and presence

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.

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The biography of one’s life

Tell me your story

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.

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The voice we long for

“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

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Ears to hear

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

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A steady uncovering of grace

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

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Who are your students?

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

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We all need an Elizabeth

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

CategoriesA Mentoring Guide, Mentoring Matters by

A Letter to a Would-Be Mentor

You have been asked to become a mentor to another. There are few honors in life more precious than to walk alongside a brother or sister on a journey of spiritual formation. If you feel overwhelmed and doubt your worthiness for the task, this is a good sign that you are ready and may be qualified, for the ministry of a mentor begins with humility. You may feel something akin to great unworthiness and are likely to exclaim, “Who am I that anyone should emulate me? I know my own flaws and failures, my contradictions, far too well, and the passions within that rise up in unholiness, as well as moments of holiness. And yet I feel the joyfulness of opportunity—maybe I could help this friend listen to life. I know that I can ask some pertinent questions and can help this friend think through these questions.” 

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Uncle Tom’s Walks

Keith’s “Little Explorer on Board” blog last week caused me to think more about the connection between spiritual mentoring, leaving a legacy, and committing to our growth. This led me to recall one such person in my family whose influence has spread across several generations. My Uncle Tom was my dad’s uncle, one of my grandmother’s four brothers.

In my family, the Uncle Tom stories abound

Uncle Tom was quite a humorous character. In our family, the stories abound. He was the sort of person who, when told not to touch the chocolate fudge cooling in the kitchen, was known not just to brush aside such cautions by taking a finger full, but he was known to take the whole tray with him to work. As a butcher, he was known to cause a couple of unsuspecting women to all but pass out by his sharp chop of the cleaver, followed by yelling and writhing as if he had just chopped off a finger or two.

My dad tells a story of Uncle Tom taking him and his sister fishing when they were still young at a creek a short walk from their house. Now, this creek was lucky to have a couple of frogs, some worms, and a stray snake or two. It majored mostly on mosquitoes. There were no fish to be found in that creek. But my dad and Aunt Harriet were very young, and they didn’t know better. So off they went with Uncle Tom and two fishing rods. He generated the enthusiasm of a serious fisherman at a raging Montana stream. Once they got to the creek, he set them up, and they started fishing. He didn’t place them right next to each other but spread them out a bit “so that we can find out where the fish are really biting.” As Dad tells it, Uncle Tom moved back and forth between the two of them for a bit. Read More

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Little Explorer on Board

The silver-gray VW SUV stopped at the light on Highway 20 just in front of me. On the back of the car was a sticker with the words “Little explorer on board ” in cursive letters. As the father-in-law and grandfather of two firefighters, I know the sticker intends to alert first responders that a child is more than likely in the vehicle.

 

I mused about that idea for the rest of my drive home. What if we had a sticker like that on our Bibles? 

 

Spiritual mentoring is too often understood as only something between one person and an older, wise mentor—end of sentence. 

 

The driver of this SUV wants others to know they have a little explorer on board. Would they consider that their spiritual maturity, discipline, and growth have similar implications for their children or grandchildren? Read More