Trusting in God

By now most of us have met with our M & M relationship at least a couple of times. We’ve started the process of getting to know one another and listened as they’ve shared some of their life, hopes, and needs. For some of you the relationship may be going smoothly and as you expected. For others, you may be thinking, “what have I gotten myself into?”

The inclination to feel ill-equipped, inadequate, and unworthy is something we all know only too well. Whether the relationship is going well, poorly or somewhere in between, we may wonder about what our role as a mentor entails and whether or not we have the ability to be a Godly mentor.

For me the first question was, “what exactly is a mentor supposed to be?”
Although I’ve had many informal mentor-type relationships, I’ve never had a formal mentor role. I found myself wondering what I was supposed to do and say; what’s appropriate and what’s not? Will I royally mess this up? So I looked up mentoring in the dictionary. It says that a mentor is “a wise and trusted counselor or teacher.” Great, that helped a lot. There was no example, no mention of a how-to anywhere. (where’s a good mentor when you need one, right?) So I decided to search the internet. It came up with roughly 43,000,000,000,000 entries (okay, that’s a slight exaggeration-it was really only 130,000,000). I looked at a few of those hoping for an epiphany; no such luck!

All joking aside, the dictionary, the internet, and even the world’s model for a mentor will not help us to fulfill a role that was given to us by God Himself. (Titus 2) In order to be that which He has called us to be, we must always look to Him for our understanding. Each mentor/mentee relationship is so unique that we could never come up with a manual to cover all the possibilities. There is no 1, 2, 3 checklist somewhere. So where does that leave us?

It leaves us right where we need to be—totally and completely dependent upon God for every aspect of the mentoring relationship. God defines our role and God grants the ability to be that for which He has called us. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will direct your paths.” Prov. 3: 5&6 (NLT)

(written by Kim Collins)