Building community, growing hope and supporting change. I see this happening at The Mustard Seed all the time but today I saw it happen in a different way. Recently I have been a part of conversation in regards to leadership, and it was suggested I seek out someone to mentor. We discussed how that could be a little awkward to suggest to someone “I want to be your mentor,” but the leader of the discussion pointed out that someone had done this in his life and he didn’t find it awkward but felt cared for and excited that someone wanted to spend intentional time speaking into his life.
I knew immediately who I wanted to ask and, by what I’m pretty sure was no coincidence; I was going to see her later that day. As we sat down with our iced teas, I began to explain the conversation and this idea of mentorship. I let her know that I wanted to spend time with her with this idea of mentorship as a bit of framework, and guess what? She was excited and said something along the lines of “thank you so much for thinking of me,” and we then made a plan to meet at least once a month. The more the conversation went on we talked a bit more about community and feelings of loneliness. I walked away thinking about how something like this was fulfilling The Mustard Seed’s vision of building community, but it’s probably not what immediately comes to mind when people think of what we do here. I think that’s kind of great because I think if you talk about community it’s not going to look like one group of people “helping” another group. It’s simply about people and about showing kindness.
I will leave you with a quote, by one of my favourite people, to tie this thought off.
“You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty.” -Mother Teresa
Also, as I embark on this journey to mentor my friend, I am interested to hear what advice our readers have to offer. Please leave a comment and help me get the ball rolling
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