MESSY MENTORS

   She, like me, was more gray than the black and white of follower or sinner.  Life and legacy  is much more messy than that. If earthly mentors are people who follow, sin, conquer, overcome and then struggle again to overcome , then my mom was all of that.  Her past was full of rebellion, poverty, hardship and mischief.  Her conversion was sudden and emotional and life changing.  Her strongholds, like mine, disappeared and reappeared with each new year.  She loved her children and grandchildren sacrificially, even permissively.  I can hardly remember  her  without an apron strapped around her waist as she cooked and cleaned and kept her family's bellies filled with good food.  .  And somehow we always had  hearts anchored in the assurance of her secure love.  She cared for grandchildren and rocked babies at all hours of day or night, when many would have said she was getting  too old for that. She did not see herself as a mentor and would have been horrified at the thought, but like all of us, it happened while she lived her life and we watched. 

    I learned to work and to sacrifice for family by watching her can vegetables, fruits and meat for days on end and into many evenings when her feet were tired from bearing her weight.  She helped in the hayfield in the day and then somehow,  (was it  supernatural?), she prepared us a meal to eat when we came in hot, and sweaty and tired.  Her meals always included potatoes because that was the steadfast food  when the depression challenged her resources many years ago .  So I gathered that  she, like everyone, was shaped by her past.  I learned to screen my words, though never enough,  from listening to her say things that seemed too frank and raw, because she felt that family didn't mince words.  I learned to gossip too.  I heard her phone conversations with her sisters, listened as her friends gathered at the B&C lunch counter to have coffee and share the small town news.  And I grew up not sure how to talk to family or friends without including the same, for I thought that was what friends did.  I learned to cry alone in my room when husband and wife cannot find a resolution to their differences.  Mentors model failure too, if they are truly human.  I learned to read something of God's word every day.  And I noticed that sometimes it changes part of you.  Many times we ignore.  At her funeral, her grandson pointed out that grandma always had a Bible and the National Enquirer by her chair.  I learned that we run to lots of empty things for comfort and distraction when life gets hard and marriages crumble. 

       When I grew to be an adult with my own mentorees watching my fall and climb, I found out that she had not talked  about the hurts and failures of her past that had left the biggest scars.    So I understood that we don't know even those who have raised us, unless we ask and they are willing to answer.  And in her time of ultimate betrayal and hurt, I witnessed these past hurts and fears threaten to consume her.  And I understood a little better where strongholds come from.  But I saw a heart of grief and anger still ready to forgive and receive if he wished it so.  But he did not. 

      Many days when her memory and her health were fading, she would ask why she was still here on this Earth. She was still mentoring when her mind was too weak to understand her world anymore.   I wish I had sorted these thoughts then so my answer had not been so practical and weak.  And so my mortal mentor called Mom, left all this engraved on my mind and in my heart, when she breathed her last.  And I am richer for it, even with the strongholds I fight against, some created then, while watching and learning from her.  And I wonder what you and I will leave here and who will be sorting their thoughts to answer our why  question.   There are no  lesson plans or appointed meeting places for this call to mentor except by Him who planned it all and whose example is perfect.  And we all leave evidence of the  two sided gospel that says all are sinners but God has made a way.  I wonder which side of the gospel our mentoring legacy will demonstrate most?

   Deut 4:9  “Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children's children—

Gal 6:4   But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor.