Incite
As you begin to think about the story God is telling in your own life, what experiences have incited wonder? What moments have stirred awe for God?

As you think about a college-aged mentee, isn’t that what you want that person to feel? Isn’t that sense of God you had, however long ago, part of the “agenda” you have for the time you spend together? If that person walked away from his or her time with you and had nothing but a sense of awe for who God is, very few of us would feel like we missed the mark.

How do you incite that? As a mentor, being honest about your pursuit of wonder for God can be the thing that incites it in someone else, even if it’s not your current reality.

Too often we present God as a problem to be solved, not a mystery to treasure. To incite wonder, we have to realize the role of the mentor isn’t to draw conclusions and answer questions, but to help mentees know there is a God who loves them, is for them, and died for them, but that much else about God is beyond our capacity to know. The moment we think we know, we realize we don’t. We can’t predict what He will do, and He isn’t a formula we can manipulate to draw the results we want.

Our job isn’t even handing off our particular picture of who God is. Our job is to incite them on the journey as they develop the picture for themselves.

Provoke
Through every part of your story, there are probably incredible lessons learned in the midst of the good and bad that have shaped who you are for good. All of those moments have been critical in helping you discover who you are and perhaps what God is like.

When we begin walking through life with someone, we have to resist the urge to direct that person out of what we perceive to be harm’s way every time. Of course there are exceptions, but we have to remember mentoring is about trusting God to tell a story in a person’s life, and as He has shaped you through moments of success and regret, He will do the same for your mentee. Your benefit to that person is that you come alongside as someone who has been through many of the same fires; and as the story of his or her life unfolds, you can provoke discussion and questions to help filter through experiences.

A win for you is when you have asked the questions that have led to conclusions, not when you have given conclusions. Effective mentors may sometimes think the decisions college-aged people make are not good ones, but they don’t try to rescue them. These mentors ask questions that help people move out of harm’s way. Often at this point in life, college-aged people have an aversion to wisdom unless it comes from within. In not giving answers, these mentors provoke discussions that lead people to their own conclusions, decisions that stick with them. Ultimately, somewhere in those discussions, college-aged people are able to figure out what they believe and think for themselves. They discover truths about themselves and who they are that, had their mentors merely given opinions, may not have happened.

In provoking discovery, we bite our tongues. We resist the urge to fill in the blanks, and we trust that God is going to use broken moments in their lives way beyond our time with them. We trust God is going to use broken moments to help them discover who they are, because after all, that’s their story.

Fuel
If you are perfectly honest, you probably don’t remember many sermons you heard in your early 20s. Sure, God used them at the time, but years later they are gone. At the same time, we remember every single mission trip, service project and person we helped find food or shelter. In hindsight, the experiences—not the sermons—fuel our passion for God and our desires to help others.

As a mentor, the most teachable moments you have are not going to be in coffeehouses and cafés; they will be when you are participating in experiences together. Perhaps you have somewhere or something you already serve; inviting your mentee into the project with you perhaps will be a lifelong memory and life-altering experience for him or her. While conversations about life are extremely important, opportunities to get outside of our problems and lives and serve the community fuel something inside of us. As a mentor, creating those types of experiences is a gift that can lead a student down a path for life.

We have a lot to give people when we know we are not responsible for their stories—only parts of them. As we release the agenda, define our roles in their lives and incite, provoke and fuel, we begin to realize God uses them in our lives as much as we are used in theirs. We have had countless conversations with mentors who continue to lead others, not because they feel they have something to offer, but because of what a college-aged individual offers them.

I hope that’s your story. As you take the risk of investing your life into someone else’s, God has a way of inciting, provoking and fueling you, too.

Adapted from Chapter 4, “Mentoring Redefined,” with permission of David C. Cook publishers.