Church & Community
I would love an older Christian to walk alongside me and show me how this is done, but asking feels awkward. How do I go about it?
“So he departed thence, and found Elisha the son of Shaphat, who was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen before him, and he with the twelfth: and Elijah passed by him, and cast his mantle upon him.”
Elijah, exhausted and just off the hardest stretch of his ministry, is sent to find Elisha ploughing a field with oxen. He walks past and throws his cloak over him. There is almost no conversation in the scene at all. What follows is years of Elisha simply being near him, carrying things, watching. Mentoring in scripture usually looks like proximity over time rather than a scheduled curriculum.
“And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.”
Paul writes to a younger man he had trained and tells him to hand on what he heard to others who will hand it on again. Four generations of passing something over are compressed into one sentence. It is the ordinary mechanism by which faith has travelled, which means the older Christian you are nervous about approaching has very likely been hoping somebody would ask.
A path forward
Pick someone whose life you would actually want rather than whose teaching you merely admire, and ask them for one coffee. Do not use the word mentor in the first ask; it makes people nervous.
Come with two real questions rather than a general request for their time. Specific questions are easy to say yes to, and open ended commitments are not.
Ask if you can pray together at the end of that first conversation. It sets the relationship on the right footing immediately, and it tells you whether this is someone you can be honest with.
Closing verse
“Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel.”
- Proverbs 27:9
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