Spoken and written words have power - no doubt about it. The scary part is that we give our permission, or let so many voices into our lives, without even realizing it. Before you know it they have influenced or “mentored you unawares.” Let’s get down to some nitty-gritties of what this could possibly look like. I am a user of WhatsApp, but as I shared in my blog posts at the beginning of this year, I don’t want to be an abuser of it, nor let it use me. Having made a conscious decision for it not to be the first “words” I read in the morning, I can now see the influence those words were having on my life. Since getting my priorities right and spending more time in “The Word” I can now compare what I was communicating and reading over the WhatsApp forum and generalize it as ambiguous, godless, fruitless and potentially hurtful chatter. Have you even thought about the name you use, your status or profile picture and what truths or lies you are communicating through them? Or the “mentoring unawares” you are doing?
For me the answer is not to obliterate the forum and revert to phone calls and face to face encounters, because those are not always possible in this highly transient world. Rather, it is to harness this potentially wild animal and bring it under the control of the rider – or more aptly, the writer.
Last week I shared in brief the story of Oswald Chambers, the author of my favourite devotional, “My Utmost for His Highest.” Perhaps because I’ve written a book and have started these blogs (neither of which I aspired to do) I am more aware of the mentoring I’m doing in written form. Too many times I’ve wanted to stop speaking or writing, especially when I didn’t see noted changes in the lives of those I was sharing truths with. As far as I was concerned my words weren’t taking root and were being blown away like the wind, so why bother. I remember saying this to God on one occasion asking Him what I was meant to do. He spoke very clearly the verse from Ecclesiastes 11:1, “Cast your bread upon the waters. For you will find it after many days.” In this case my bread were the words, the time, the treasures that I was casting out into the hearts and lives of these young adults.
God’s encouragement and mandate was for me to continue casting my bread out into the open waters, never knowing who in the end would grab and eat it and benefit from its nutrients. What is so interesting is that just after I received this verse from God I was reading the foreword to my version of “My Utmost for His Highest.” Here it describes how Oswald’s wife, Biddy, wrote a letter about a friend whose life was radically changed after reading Oswald’s sermon notes. Biddy goes onto write, “It confirms me so much in the assurance I have that I am to go on getting everything I can printed. It will be like casting bread upon the waters and we’ll know someday all it meant in people’s lives.”
Little did Biddy know that over 50 years after the devotional’s first publication a 23 year old woman would begin to eat the bread that she cast, and over 20 years later that same woman would be casting out the revelations received to those following her. Long after Oswald’s death, his life is still speaking. There is something to be said in that.
All of us are mentoring someone unawares – by our words, our actions, our lack of words, our lack of actions. Are we even considering what kind of message we are sending? Will it be a message that will reverberate long after we are dead? Remember, nothing should stop with us!
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