Mentoring: Relevance vs. Reverence

Last weekend I attended the Revive our Hearts conference in Indianapolis. Not only was it a time of sweet fellowship, encouragement, and transparency with my Mom, Aunt and Sisters, It was a powerful time of worship and learning (SO MUCH to take in!) with other Christ minded women.

“Living out the beauty of the gospel is not just a clever byline- It’s a spiritual imperitive”-Susan Hunt

I’m really still processing the sessions and looking back through my notes daily. The Lord used some of these teachings to convict me in beautifully hard ways in my personal walk with the Lord. I left the conference wanting to be the kind of woman who has the “grace that’s strong enough to carry truth but gentle enough to profess your love” –Dannah Gresh.

I’ll save more thoughts on that for maybe another time. For now, I want to focus on the broader theme of the conference: Women Mentoring Women the Titus 2 way.  They had an awesome group of speakers who split up 14 mini teaching sessions, loosely based off of the 14 chapters in “Adorned” by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

We picked our way through Titus 2 and one of the sessions that really spoke to me was the one sort of introducing the topic of mentoring.

Oh, mentoring.

Why do we shudder at the thought of entering in to mentoring relationships? Is it because we are too busy to commit to something as “serious” as that? Is it because we fear walking too closely with another Sister in Christ out of fear of them seeing just how little we have it together?

Perhaps a little bit of both. I’m sure you can come up with some other reasons why mentoring seems so daunting.  I, for one, have been guilty of this sort of thinking. I’ve also been in my fair share of mentoring relationships. To be honest, yeah, they do take work. It’s an investment.

Probably the sweetest and most fruitful of these were the relationships that weren’t born from programs. They were the ones that came about and blossomed organically. From there it was mostly just making the decision to intentionally do life together.

So back to this session, Susan hunt had so many good thoughts that I’m really just going to paraphrase part of her session and quote her a bunch (hope that’s OK, Susan!):

“You are not the story, He is the story. You are not called to point to your goodness, you are called to point to Christ’s glory and goodness.” Think of Exodus 34:29-35. Moses came down from Mount Sinai after meeting with God. His face was literally glowing from talking with God. He was oblivious, and at first the people were afraid. But after Moses talked with them, “all of Israel came near”. Paul, later in 2 Corinthians 3 reminds the Church in Corinth of this story. “And we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…”  (2 Cor. 3:18)’ What Susan was getting at was, “When we gaze upon His redemption story, we are unaware of the glory shining on our faces because we become increasingly unaware of self”

And in that soul gazing towards Christ, people will be drawn in and they’ll want to know more. Somehow, suddenly mentoring relationship simply look like someone focused solely on Christ and teaching another to do this same in all of the highs and lows that life’s seasons bring.

‘It doesn’t really matter how relevant you are in a person’s life-what matters is your reverence for God.’

So then the pressure is really off of me to have this perfect, put together life before I begin mentoring. I really just need to put those focus on Christ and how to serve Him in the context of your life.

What do you think? Is it time to just make a call or start a conversation with that woman at church you so deeply look up to? Or do you need to spend a little more time with that woman that reminds you so much of yourself in your younger days?

Read Titus 2. Catch a little more of God’s heart for mentoring. Pray about it.  If you’re interested in seeing any of the sessions, head over to the Revive17 website- for a limited amount of time you can watch them for free!