Ministry

mentoring lessons from Beverlee

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 2 Comments

It’s been over four years since I last met with Beverlee in her living room over a cup of steaming Lady Grey tea and chatted about life, ministry, and relationships. She invested in me, a just-one-year-into-marriage new seminary graduate beginning to counsel and serve on staff with a church plant, from her place as an older woman with decades of experience in ministry including overseas missions and full-time campus ministry. She was not strong but weak during those two years that we met weekly. We did not know it, but she might have: those were the last two years of her life and she suffered from complications of diabetes that often robbed her of sleep and forced her to be homebound. Yet she taught me more about mentoring/discipleship/gospel-centered friendship than almost anyone else in my adult life so far. Her legacy of gracious, selfless love and care for others even in the midst of her own pain lives on while she lives in Glory. And so I hope to continue that legacy by sharing with you some of what she taught me.

  1. Gospel mentoring flows out of weakness, not strength. She was physically weak for most of the two years that we met together. She easily could have complained and focused on her own pain and ailments, seeking my comfort and prayers. I certainly did pray for this dear woman and seek to comfort her, but it was not because of her complaints. The pain was written on her face, and yet she repeatedly asked me how I was doing; what she could be praying about; and entered into what seemed like my petty struggles (in comparison) of a new counselor and wife seeking to find my way in marriage and ministry.
  2. Offer what you have. She could not leave her house, but she reached out to me through phone calls; invited me weekly to come for tea to chat and pray; followed up in tracking me down in my busy, cluttered life of overcommitment. When I first began mentoring/discipling younger women, I was a college student with more free time than I realized. I met with a small group of younger women weekly for 1-2 hours of Bible study and prayer, and then sought to meet individually with each woman weekly outside of that time. After graduating from college, I volunteered with a campus ministry and discipleship/mentoring took a very similar shape then, too. Fast forward 10+ years, and my life as a pastor’s wife, mom to twin preschoolers, and part-time counselor does not allow me to devote the same kind of time to mentoring. Yet it is freeing to remember that mentoring involves offering what I have. And what I have is much less than before – but I still have something to offer. Meetings now take place in the evenings, during naptimes, or on weekends. Sometimes they include meeting somewhere where my kids can play. If I meet with a younger woman even once a month, that’s my “regular” during this season of my life.
  3. Mentoring begins with prayer. She prayed for me when I wasn’t with her, and we prayed together when we met weekly. She followed up about what she was praying for, and there was no secret to the source of the power she depended on herself. Only Jesus sustained her during her most painful days and nights.
  4. Mentoring at its simplest is being intentional to care for another. She initiated getting to know me when I first came on staff with the church plant she helped to start, and she intentionally “took me under her wings,” so to speak. She would call me if we hadn’t seen each other for awhile, and she invited me to meet regularly for the soul respite I so desperately needed.
  5. Gentle challenge embedded in love is an essential part of mentoring. When I had a petty complaint about marriage, she gently challenged me to love. She gave examples from her own life about love as thinking of your spouse often during the day, and then telling him about things that brought him to mind. She shared everything with her beloved Collier, as he did with her. And she encouraged me to do the same – speaking words of reproof into my life as needed.

Do I follow Beverlee’s example perfectly? Far from it. And she herself would be the first to remind me, if she could, that she was not perfect herself. But the call of following Jesus in the ministry of mentoring is a call to lay down your life – as it is – for another. It’s a call to find the grace and strength needed in the midst of my weakness in the cross, not my false notions of self-sufficiency. It is to offer to another the Life I have found and to encourage her to seek Life from this source with me. Until the day when instead of seeing dimly we will, like Beverlee now, see face-to-face the Glory to which we witness. [1 Corinthians 13:12 – “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”]

Rest

/ Heather Davis Nelson / 1 Comment

Rest … an elusive concept unless you’re experiencing it. I’ve been studying it a lot lately (which can, ironically, take away from the experience OF rest) in a few different places: learning about its role in the self-care of a counselor, meditating on what it means in preparation for a retreat I’m speaking at in March on “Chasing life/longing for rest,” discussing it with my best friend, Katherine, who’s blogging about it now. (see my links for her blog)

There are many different angles of rest and what is referred to as rest. There’s rest in the sense of a Sabbath rest — a deliberate ceasing of accomplishments/activities for one day out of the week. Marva Dawn writes of it in her book I’m reading now – “A Sense of the Call: a Sabbath way of life for those who serve God, the Church, and the world.”  Listen to this invitation, and feel your heart leap in hope:

“The Sabbath offers the magnificent gift of an entire day to ponder God’s truth instead of our work, to notice God’s creations of beauty, and to relish God’s goodness in our closest relationships. After a beautiful Sabbath of intellectual rest, we will know ourselves more truly and can pursue paths more closely attuned to God’s own righteousness. … this is the goal of the Sabbath: that we can cease our worrying about time and be released from its constrictions into this weekly experience of eternity.”

Of course, as much as you want this, there are likely 100 reasons that come to your mind of why you can’t possibly afford to do this. I’m challenged by the author’s own story of when she began deliberately resting for one day of the week: when she began working on her doctorate! I don’t want to become legalistic about this, but I think it’s a goal I’m aiming for in my life. I have rested more intentionally in other seasons of my life, and I think I need this reminder to do so again. Marva Dawn points out that what underlies my reluctance to rest is often an over-inflated sense of my importance:

“…our Sabbath ceasing has to begin with an honest assessment of how much we keep depending upon ourselves instead of God — so that we can give up and let everything go for a day. But we have such expectations of ourselves. Sometimes it is quite scary to imagine our disillusionment if we were thoroughly to face the genuine reality of our own lives.”

There is also the sense of rest that should be part of our daily rhythm. This requires me to live within my limits — not to rush from one activity to another — and to be content with what I can and cannot do. The old cliche rings true here that we are not human “do-ings” but human “be-ings.” What is my do-ing to be-ing ratio these days?

And of course, there is the broader sense of the term rest that applies to a way of life in Christ. We are called to come to Jesus, to take His yoke upon us, and to find rest for our weary souls (Matthew 11:28-30). This invitation speaks to souls weary because they continually strive to work for what is already given: salvation found in Christ. I can rest because Christ’s work on the cross is sufficient, and I can rest because I am already loved by my Creator God. I can rest because grace is at work, and my work is the overflow of another Life at work within me. My Redeemer’s words call out to me: “It is finished.”  And so I rest.