Kimberlee+Poole+Connection

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//Soul Survivor// served as more of a reminder to me than as something new, but it was a reminder I needed at this stage in my life. It caused me remember how much of an impact your life can make as a mentor to someone even if you never directly meet that person. Reading “Soul Survivor” has made me even more conscious of being careful about the choices I make in my life; I may not like to think about it sometimes, but the decisions I make affect people. I may not always be aware of how I am affecting people, which is terrifying, but I know people are watching, listening, and noticing how I live my life.

It has also made me realize that my role in the contemporary Christian world is one I need to be taking very seriously. Again, others are watching me, and while I know God can use people with issues (like Yancey’s mentors), I never want to use the reasons of me being “only human” and “God will forgive me” as an excuse to do whatever I want during my life. I want to be able to make the kind of impact on people’s lives where they can reflect on their experiences with me as being something that helped them.

I love the verse in 1 Thessalonians that says, “So encourage one another and build each other up” (1 Thess. 5:11). That is part of what I think a good mentoring relationship encompasses. One article about Christian mentoring from the //Enrichment Journal// website said, "Your responsibility as a pastor/mentor is to provide guidance, support, and understanding to the protégé by sharing experience, knowledge, and wisdom so he can realize his full potential." In my own life, I tend to identify people as my formal mentors who have encouraging personalities (for more about mentoring with encouragement see this article in //Christianity Today//).

As important as I think encouraging is, I also think there are times as a mentor where you have to talk about tough topics; in those moments I think it is important to remember to speak the truth with love as we are instructed in Eph 4:15 (An article from //Christianity Today// shares ways to do this on page 5).

One of the biggest things I think is important to keep in mind when you are trying to be an affective mentor in the twenty-first century is that the person you present yourself to be online, your “cyber-identity”, perhaps reflects far more about you than you might think.

Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in, blogs, and other social networking sites are a great tool for communication, but they also allow people far more access into your personal life than was really available even ten years ago. What is especially important to remember with this is that there is a far wider audience too, and that people you may not think are watching you are paying closer attention than you think.

I came across this article recently that talks about how social networking sites are starting to be used to determine how “influential” a person is, and not just on a “popularity scoring” (though that may play a part in it). No, this scoring that is being talked about ranks your “influential” capacity for things like potential employers.

“Soul Survivor” was a book that caused me to think critically. Reading the stories of Yancey’s mentors inspired me to think about the issues of faith they faced and how they answered them. It caused me to begin to ponder who I look up to in my life as a mentor and who I act as mentor to in my life.