I like Saint Paul's letters
to Timothy and Titus. I like their plain practical good advice. But where
Timothy is treated to a list of "what to do", Titus is given more "how and
why" advice. Perhaps Titus' character was better suited to such teaching.
Or perhaps in the greater isolation of Crete, he needed to discern solutions
to problems Paul could not anticipate. Certainly neither Paul nor Titus
had much experience of how to be a woman in Crete. Instead, Paul advised
Titus to rely on the experts.
When I tried to fathom
how, with a divorced athiest mother for a role model, I myself might become
a good Christian wife; Titus 2.3-4 came as a ray of light. I chose role
models from the godly elder women in the Church and was blessed by their
example. I venture to believe too, that they were blessed by the opportunity
to teach.
The relationship between
an involved role model and an inexperienced colleague is called "mentoring".
The mentor offers her protege an increased chance of success. The protege
offers her mentor assurance that her life-work will continue in another
generation. The mentoring relationship depends on three important prerequisites.
- Mentors must share their
protege's goal. An older person who tries to subvert a younger person
to carry out her own agenda is not acting as a mentor. Goals are hard to
discern, and its easy to assume that another's goals must be the same as
your own, because your own are so obviously right. Even agreeing on a goal
such as "to be good wives and mothers" may not be enough. For one person,
that may mean "to be accepted in the best social circles and keep a spotless
house", to another it might mean "to share my husbands interests and offer
my children a range of experiences." The apparently-like goals may be fundamentally
contradictory.
- Mentors must themselves
be successful. What a mentor brings to the mentoring relationship is
her experience. A protege accepts that experience because it will help her
succeed. So, a woman who is trying to be a godly wife will have no desire
to follow in the footsteps of one whose husband does not call her blessed.
A mother who is trying to raise children to the glory of the Lord will not
draw on the practices of one whose children are apostate.
Mentors must have the
trust of their proteges. The ministry of mentoring cannot function if
mentors and proteges live on different time-tables and move in different
paths, such that they rarely meet or reveal their interests to one-another.
Trust is built from pleasant recollection of time spent together.
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