Looking for a Good Mentor?

Does your kid need a mentor? Chances are they do. Especially as kids grow up, the presence of caring adults in their lives who share your vision and values becomes really important. The world is a big place, and you can't be everywhere at once. Fortunately, the church can help.

I'm asked from time to time if the church can provide mentoring. Frankly, I'd love to see it happen. I think it's a biblical ideal - if not a mandate. Logistically, it's really difficult. There are non-profit organizations that exist solely to match up boys and girls with older mentors. For them, it's time-consuming and labor-intensive, and even with the best of preparation, they can't guarantee a perfect fit.

Still, I understand and sympathize with the desire. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone walking alongside my child who could fill in the gaps, who could steer them in the right direction, who my kid could talk to about the things they don't feel they can talk to me about? I get it.

Having been on the non-parent side of things, I also understand mentoring's limitations. As it turns out, those who serve as mentors are ultimately limited just as parents are. It hurts to see kids who you've invested in turn and make poor decisions. Those missteps can cause you, as a mentor, to become better at what you do - more judicious in what you say and wiser in how you use your time with them. But they can also be healthy reality checks. Being too successful as a mentor can blind you to the reality of the human condition: namely, that we don't always make the best decisions for ourselves, and that freedom is essential for us to grow to maturity.

That's why as great as having flesh-and-blood mentors is, in the end the best thing we can do for kids is lead them into a mentoring-like relationship with God.

If you think about it, he is the perfect mentor. Wise? Check. Available at all times? Check. Able to speak truth to them amidst a swirl of contradictory advice from the world? Check. Able to let go and allow them to fail? Check. The thing is that God's mentorship of us is completely devoid of ego or the need to feel good by "giving back" or "making a difference". Those are benefits someone derives from serving in a mentoring capacity, but they can easily become the motivation. Instead, God's care for us - marked by his unfailing availability to us and presence in our lives - is driven entirely by his self-giving love. It will never get entangled in his need for self-affirmation; it will never become conditional on our acceptance of what he gives.

I don't know any mentor who has an unlimited supply of energy. I don't know any mentor who wouldn't get discouraged to see kids turn their back on the mentor's advice. I don't know any mentor who wouldn't be slightly annoyed to be ignored during good times, and then desperately called upon when they're needed to get someone out of a jam.

God is the one influence your kid will be able to carry with them always, who will appropriately give them freedom and space to grow yet also sustain them with grace. We do kids a disservice, then, when we only teach them about him but never lead them to encounter him. We sell kids short when we teach Christian values but don't lead them to discover the Christ who authored it all. We mislead kids when all we give them from the Bible is the Law, without shining a light on the character of the Lawgiver and his subsequent roles: Judge, Defense Attorney, Scapegoat, Savior.

If you're looking for a good mentor, teach your kids to really know God personally. As you do, allow them the freedom to discover him, recognizing that where there's freedom, there's often mistakes. Being a godly parent doesn't mean you'll have perfect kids. It means you imitate God in the way you balance mercy & consequences, grace & truth, all within an atmosphere of freedom.

Likewise, God makes no guarantees to you or I about the sequence or fruit of his work in your kid's life. When kids connect to God, he begins a work in them that results in transformation. Because it's accomplished through freedom and not coercion, it's a bumpy, winding road. But he will lead them there. Do we trust God to complete the work?

That trust entails letting go of our own expectations, and embracing radical trust that whatever God wills is what is good. It is relinquishing kids' development, not controlling it. It's letting the mentor - God - step to the fore, which seems backwards. In churches we are fond of saying that "parents are the primary disciplers of their kids" and everything else exists to support the parents' will. I think God has another plan, and it's for parents to subsume even their own influence to that of God. He is the discipler; everyone and everything else is a surrogate.

It would be audacious for any human mentor to suggest this: "I know you're the parent, but let me take over here." But that's exactly the exchange God proposes