Over the past five years, I have been involved in providing training sessions for new mentors at a rate of about once every month. With LAMP, we offer mentoring training to help people to be prepared and equipped for building a long term relationship with a child and cultural training to help people understand how to build cross-cultural relationships effectively. The trainings are valuable, and an integral part of the success that we have experienced in many of the matches that have been made. Still, for some reason few people who sign up for LAMP ever actually make their way to the mentor training sessions. Probably six or seven hundred people from my church have signed up to get involved in mentoring children in Homewood since the program was launched five years ago. Just over two hundred people have actually completed both mentoring and cultural training, and gone on to actually mentor a child.
There are many different reasons why so many people sign up to volunteer as a mentor, and so few people actually follow through with it. People often sign up to volunteer when they are emotionally moved by the compelling need to reach struggling children. Being "moved" is an important first step, but often people seem to forget about the desperate needs of children over time. Complacency sets in. People become disinterested, or too busy. Often in American culture, volunteerism is tacked on to the end of our busy schedules (family, work, and personal recreation usually come first). We become exhausted, and giving ourselves away to others through service is usually what gets squeezed out of our time. Another thing that gets in the way of Christians becoming mentors is spiritual warfare. As soon as people step up and want to make a difference in the life of another person, it seems that the bad things often happen to them to keep them from following through. A job is lost, or an unexpected illness sets in.
All of this creates a unique tension for me as a person who is charged with finding mentors for the kids in my neighborhood who desperately need mentors. I know mentoring is not for everybody. It requires quite a relational time commitment. It requires people to give themselves away to others. It comes with a cost, and many people feel that that cost is too high of a price to pay. We value our time, our talents, and our resources. I can't force anybody to follow through. However, I have seen how amazing mentoring can be for mentors and mentees. When volunteers press through all of the reasons that usually take them out, they discover that the mentoring experience grows them in many profound ways and also helps to lead to dramatic transformation in the lives of the young people that they mentor. And as Christians, God wants us to give ourselves away to others. And that service to others does not simply involve our family and friends. God wants to help all Christians to find a transcendent purpose in life, a way of living on the edge and doing hard things so that God's mission to mankind can be fulfilled through his Church. It is our greatest joy, our most important role in this life. And we cannot experience that joy if we are too busy, or too distracted, or too complacent, or too unfamiliar with spiritual warfare. It's not something that we do on our own. God leads the way, and we follow in humble obedience. Great meaning is found in life in those areas of reckless abandon to God while giving ourselves away to other for his sake. Mentoring is one great way to experience that.
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