6 Seasons of Callingعينة

Called To Be a Mentor

In his stern but vulnerable letter to the Corinthian church, Paul offers a series of challenges responding to immature decisions he has heard they have been making. Yet in it, the heart of a true mentor is unveiled. In this particularly vivid line, he defines his own role and responsibility to them: “I am writing this not to shame you but to warn you as my dear children. Even if you had ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. Therefore I urge you to imitate me” (1 Cor. 4:14–16).

We need spiritual mothers and fathers, which means we all need to also become one.

The wise painters, who have pioneered a new style of painting, will not spend their Day 5 selling their paintings; they will spend it teaching that style to a new generation of young painters. In turn, the world will not just have a few more paintings with that strange new style; it will be filled with painters filling the world with paintings inspired by it. This is the economy of scale, and is at the heart of the impact that will most move us in Day 5.

One of the perils of a culture that glorifies perpetual youth is that we resist gifts of growing older. To give away the spoils of Day 4 should be an occasion for celebration. To take the role of mentor is a psychosocial, even a spiritual, promotion. But because of our fetish for youth, we can resist this new identity. We might be tempted to hold on too long to what we worked so hard to gain in Day 4. Our money, position, title, influence, networks, even the intellectual property of experiential learning, can become stagnant in Day 5 if we refuse to give them away. We hang on too long to our rainmaker identities because we have wrongly believed that those years of creative productivity are simply better.

We still have 10,000 guardians who might have an opinion on our behavior, but we do not have enough spiritual parents. This is the role of the mentor, and it is best embodied on Day 5. If we have been blessed to have men and women in our lives who have filled this role, then we will know just how important it is. If, on the other hand, we have looked in vain for such a person, only now to find ourselves on the precipice of fifty, it is time to lay that down and be for others what we did not have ourselves. In Day 5, we find that who we are called to be is in short supply and just what a world of spiritual orphans most needs.