A Different Point of View

Whether you are the mentee or the mentor in the relationship, one of the benefits of a mentoring relationship is that it will give you the benefit of a different point of view. Most of the time, we spend out time hanging out with people who are a lot like us. We work with people having a similar educational background. In our free time, we go to places where there are other people who enjoy the same things. We worship with people who have similar beliefs to our own. We tend to read books written by people who agree with us. It is easy for us to assume that everyone is just like us.

I was in a formal mentoring relationship during a time that I was involved with making plans for celebrating our pastor having been the pastor of our church for fifty years. At dinner with my mentor one day, I mentioned this. He told me about their church and how that their pastors move from church to church. I don't remember how often he said that happens, but I seems like it was a less than ten year and maybe less than five year period. They have some kind of organization that makes the decisions about which person will pastor each church. That was strange to this Baptist's ears, since most Baptist churches view the local assembly as being the highest earthly authority and each body chooses their own pastor. But that isn't how all denominations do it.

The point is that the mentoring relationship exposed me to a concept that I wouldn't have known much about if I hadn't been in it. It didn't change my opinion on the subject, but it did help me to see that other people may not see church in quite the same way as I do. As writers, that is important to us. Things like that flavor our characters' lives. A character may respond to a situation differently if he knows his pastor is going to be leaving in a few months than what he might if the only way the pastor will leave is if the pastor feels the need to leave or the church kicks him out. Some readers may find our writing to come across oddly if we assume the understand the way things work and the reader knows they work another way. Today, it is almost comical to see the way writers used to write about computers, when they understood very little. Spending time in a mentoring relationship is one way to learn more about things we don't understand.