How do you choose a mentor?

It’s a question I get asked often. I began purposefully gleaning wisdom from older mentors since the time I was about fifteen. Right around when I accepted Christ and recognized, “I didn’t know it all.”

Different seasons in my life brought different types of mentors. For example, when I was in College, I asked the Campus Relations Director’s wife to be my mentor.  I observed her marriage and family, through our encounters at school and believed the fruit to be that of a woman who purposefully tried to help her husband with his work on campus as often as possible. I admired her and the fruit she had in her life. So I asked her to meet with me weekly; to go through a book study together.

Another example was when I was a young mom and had only one child at the time. I think Kelsey was about fifteen months; I asked an older woman in our church whom I respected because of the strength of her marriage. We knew them personally through a young married couples group, they were our leaders. We meet for about four years, sometimes going through books together, sometimes studying the Bible more deeply, other times to just talk and develop a friendship.

Another example, would be during my sixth pregnancy, when I was on bed-rest and many of the women in the church came and cared for me and my family through meals, cleaning the house, and so forth. There were a couple of women in particular who took great efforts to care for me, one especially who comforted me in times when I felt like I wasn’t fulfilling my role as a mother well. I was struggling physically and emotionally to meet the needs of my children and she was put in my life by God to minister to me in that specific season for that specific reason. I believe all of my mentors were very purposefully placed, at the appropriate time in both of our lives. I valued each of my many mentors, and still do to this day. I have had eleven purposeful mentors over the course of the past twenty-five years, and many more virtual mentors through reading, lectures, retreats, and friendships.

So How Did I Choose a Mentor?

1)Prayer
2)Look at Who God has naturally put in your life
3)Look at the Fruit in a Persons Life

In this post, we will talk more about the power of praying for a mentor, but I would encourage you to go to the links on the other two points for more encouragement.

Praying for a Mentor:

This might seem obvious, but it is necessary because God may have someone else in store for you than who you have in mind.  We need to be willing to let Him provide. I have been abundantly blessed by mentors God brought into my life when I needed them most and didn’t even know it. In fact, I will openly admit that some of those that I learned the most from, I actually thought I could learn nothing from. Boy, did the Lord surprise me.

We need to pray for God to bring a Titus 2 woman who is going to really truly, purposefully be a Titus 2 woman teaching, training, correcting us, as iron sharpens iron.
Biblically we need godly older women to learn from, being proactive in our lives. It is God’s design for the older generation to be an encouragement and to teach us and we need to be humble enough to accept their training and correction.  So pray for humility. All of us younger women (anyone under one hundred and twenty years) need to have a heart of humility to ask someone to mentor us.

If you are of teaching authority on something, recognize you are above reproach, take it seriously, be intentional. All godly mentors have a healthy amount of humility. Everyone is older than someone. I am older than many in my thirties, and there are many women older than me. Much of what I have learned over the years, I have learned from gleaning wisdom from wise women gone before me, and from choosing to learn from them. I still see a huge gap in my life when I am not proactively meeting with someone regularly. We need to be honest and aware. Pray for God to make you aware!  

Don’t be afraid to ask God SPECIFICALLY! Be Honest with God, ask Him to provide the right woman for you to be encouraged by and learn from!

If you have not experienced the awesome benefit of having a mentor in your life, start pursuing this blessing God has waiting for you today by praying for Him to provide!