The Art of Collecting Mentors
(Jerry Root, one of my all-time favorite mentors. We met up once a month for several years to talk about how to be a godly family-man while pursuing excellence in scholarship—also C.S. Lewis, lots of C.S. Lewis.)
“Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.” Proverbs 11:14
You should collect mentors. Find someone who’s doing something really well, something that you’d like to get better at or grow in yourself, and intentionally seek them out and learn from them.
One of my wisest moments came when I was in college. My mind was just starting to wake up from years of cognitive torpor initiated by my own foolish self-conception. God had given me an inquisitive mind but I had intentionally neglected my intellectual life in favor of a Gastonian vision of being a dumb jock. I just wanted to be identified as a division 1 wrestler and nothing else. But during my junior year, the cogwheels started turning again and I realized how stupid I had been. I started stoking my intellectual curiosity again and I discovered a love for philosophy and theology. I also rediscovered my childhood love for herpetology (the study of reptiles and amphibians).
As I started delving into these new (and rediscovered) fields of inquiry, I also discovered that I needed help getting my bearings—I needed to start collecting mentors.
(Paul Gould is one of my philosophical mentors. He helped me get into cutting edge analytic philosophy and he’s the reason I have a Master’s Degree in Philosophy. He continues to teach me how to be a good man.)
What a Mentor Is
A mentor is a trusted counselor, someone who knows more than their mentee, someone with more experience, who is further down a desired path who can help advise a mentee along.
(Aditya Nayar is my Brazilian JiuJitsu mentor who continues to school me, submit me, and teach me to love the sport. I’m sure I wouldn’t have kept up with BJJ without him.)
What a Mentor Is Not
A mentor is not a god, guru, or cult leader. A mentor is not someone who gets to direct the course of their mentee’s life without their say so.
(Kevin Vanhoozer was my theological mentor. He encouraged me to study at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and he was the first chair on my Systematic Theology Master’s Thesis which was a defense of his particular view of the God-World relation in light of the problem of evil (his Authorial Analogy). I have two theology MAs because of him.)
Collect Mentors
I always thought of a mentor as someone to model my whole life after but I never found anyone like that. There were lots of men in my life who I admired and wanted to learn from, but I’d always find areas of their lives which I definitely didn’t want to emulate. I became disillusioned with the idea of finding a mentor but the problem was with my conception of ‘mentor’ rather than with mentorship in general.
But then I learned and came to embrace a simple dictum that changed my life: eat the meat and spit the bones.
Mentors are not infallible prophets speaking on behalf of God—they are literally just people with