This is the paper I wrote for the Pacific Northwest Quaker Women’s Theology Conference in Seabeck, Washington. (Now in progress.) The theme is mentoring and eldering and we had to reflect on that topic for 1-2 pages.
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“This girl needs her nose pierced!” That critique is the only shortfall my friend, Leonora, could come up with on an internship evaluation form after I finished helping her with her youth group at St. Mary’s Catholic Church. At the time, I laughed at the words. Years later, I remedied the fault and blamed it on her. I can’t blame her for the purple hair but between the two, they are a lived out reminder and lesson of what she taught me: don’t take yourself too seriously and laugh at yourself often. Though definitely in a class by herself with the wash away sin soap and Jesus bobble heads on her desk, she is one of the many women I’ve known who have left a deep mark in my life as an adult, one of the beautiful women I have learned from and who have taught me how beautiful such relationships can be.
I have this idea about such relationships, that we each enter the world as a box of crayons of all one color. As we live our lives, we come into contact with other people and exchange our colors, red for blue, purple for yellow. We meet and come to know those people whose colors we most need, the ones we are missing from our huge life-size Crayola boxes. With each person, our lives can be colored with a wider variety of colors. We grow, we learn, and our artistic renditions are brighter and fuller of the spectrum of the Divine light God casts through our souls. Lee is a yellow crayon. I know of another who is purple and another who is green. My life is richer for having their colors streaked across my life, painted onto my soul’s canvas. I am grateful for them.
I would most assuredly call these women my mentors, even my guides. However, I know these relationships are never one sided as the word “mentor” seems to imply. They are definitely an exchange of colors, an exchange of Divine gifts, showing his face in a new way through each other. One cannot be in a mentoring relationship without mutuality, a common respect. The purple needs the yellow, the red needs the blue. Lee enjoyed having me there as much as I enjoyed assisting her. It can sometimes seem like taking on yet another responsibility when deciding to mentor another person, but the rewards can be far greater than the effort we put into the relationship. Just as God delights in his relationships with us, so we can delight in the relationships with those we teach and “help” for we will always be taught and helped as the Divine spark flows from one to another in this, an exchange of colors.