The Skilful Mentor is an Invisible Hero

I've come to see mentoring as a framework that helps facilitate a certain kind of relationship.  A relationship between two people that are at different places on a very long journey.  It isn't that the Mentors journey is a map for the Mentee but the mentor has the maturity to recognise the terrain that the mentee is walking through and has the wisdom to ask the questions that guides them through the dangers, helps them embrace the opportunities, provokes courage in the face of adversity and in so doing begins to tap into potential that may have otherwise never been realised.  The mentor's distance from the mentee provides a safe and reflective place to process the events of the journey and to lift their heads to survey the horizon.  Something easily forgotten

when our eyes are glued to the uncertain ground beneath our feet. 

As a young man who met God at an early age I've have looked for mentors at every stage of my journey and I can sadly say that only a few have embraced this role. Perhaps many think that their trophy cabinet is too bare to guide those that follow but this is a mistake that has deceived both mentee and mentors alike.  Choosing a mentor isn't about finding a hero to emulate, or a man that has succeed down the road that you dare to tred, it isn't about finding a sage that has the secrets to your enlightenment or is an example that leaves you in awe.  Quite often those types of people are the least equipped to prepare you for the realities of your journey, they may succeed at reproducing themselves in you but they won't necessarily help you find the life that Christ has prepared for you.  Those that are qualified may have fallen short in many a race but they are the ones that have most likely discovered a new criteria to live by.  They won't be afraid of their failings and their vulnerability will be the oil that you need to begin a process to discover a life hidden in Christ.  

So many men miss their opportunity to mentor because they feel they have not done enough with their own lives.  The battles they have fought have not been ferocious enough, the mountains climbed not high enough and the victories won not sweet enough.  There is a nagging self doubt that reveals that they have missed the beauty of what mentorship is.  It isn't a relationship where old men tell young men tales of valiant conquests and recite the steps of how, if they listen hard enough, they too could rise to such heights of heroism.  I must add that I love those stories and there is a place for their telling.  Mentorship, however, is not that place.  The skilful mentor has learnt the beauty of stillness, he doesn't rush to fill silences, he isn't afraid to be lost for words, he isn't searching his archives for the solutions hidden within his own story.  This mentor seems to have the gift of almost stepping aside completely.   To become so completely focused on another, with such sincerity, in a simple art that just crashes into all the values of our culture.  It is this ability to begin a line of enquiry into the life of another, with no agenda to recite your own story or impose your own ideology, that liberates that person to process their own situation in a safe and spacious place.  This is why we must stop using the excuse that we are not qualified for mentorship, the more simple your story the more easily you will find it to enter the spirit of true mentorship. 

I sense that our world needs a mentorship revolution.  The principles of mentorship are missing in so many relationships that might flourish if they were embraced.  Relationships between parents and children, teachers and pupils, vicars and parishioners, brothers and sisters, employers and employees, members of parliament and their electorate.  It is rare to meet people that take a genuine interest in you and have the ability to ask questions that probe you and provoke you to process the events that are unfolding in your life.  When you do meet those kind of people you walk away feeling alive until it suddenly dawns on that you have been so self reflective you have learnt nothing of them.  I find however many times I meet that kind of person I always seem to come away with the same feeling, having received more than I have given.  They just seem to have that natural, other centeredness that makes it clear that they were born to nurture and mentor those around them.  I'm sure there are many like this whose names will never be etched into memorials or whose memoirs may never be published but in the simplicity and selflessness of their enquiring lives they have fathered a thousand heroes and left a mark that lives in eternity.