(Click here for a video of John reading this Catch.)

Tuesday night’s BlogTalkRadio interview with Brent Garrison is required listening for everyone over 57. It’s about mentoring across generations, especially between Boomers and Millennials. Our research tells us that the Millennials are all for it, but the Boomers aren’t quite sure. Now if mentoring sounds scary, it’s not. Mentoring can seem intimidating if you think of it as the formal imparting of information. You have to train and create materials or use someone else’s. You have to be much farther along in personal development than the person you are mentoring, or so we often think, but none of this is true or necessary.

Mentoring is primarily a relationship. It is walking alongside someone. It is meeting regularly at a coffee bar, an office or over a zoom call. It’s a commitment to be available to each other. The discipleship in a healthy mentoring relationship goes both ways. It’s friendship, it’s relationship, it’s doing things together. It’s being on the same team. It’s the milkshake after the softball game. It’s imparting truth through the imparting of a life. It is not teaching, it’s living. 

The important thing is commitment and regularity. Sticking with it over time. 

Jesus said that making disciples involved teaching people to obey all that He has commanded us. Well, all that He has commanded us is summed up in loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and loving others as we love ourselves. So that’s not a lot of information to teach, it’s a lot of how we do it. You can’t really teach that; you model it and you live it and you talk about how you do it — what works, what doesn’t, what is God teaching you right now: where you’re getting it right, where you’re blowing it. It’s all in and around life.  And you know it because it’s all about what God has taught you so far. It’s not beyond you. You can only teach what you know, and you all know something.

So go to BlogTalkRadio with Brent Garrison and if you are over 57, take some real steps toward being the voice of Christ for some Millennials around you. You don’t have to be an expert; you just have to be you. 

(Note: It’s late afternoon as I finish this Catch. I have been outside most of the day to catch a little breeze instead of the heat inside and I notice the sky here is darkening, not with clouds, but with smoke and there is ash falling on my computer screen. Not unusual here in southern California. Please pray for the firefighters and those who live in the line of fire.)