[Note: This is the prepared text for a speech given at the Portland UCG Spokesmen’s Club on March 8, 2015.]

When I was 18, I moved to Los Angeles. While there, I spent a lot of time around a group of adults the age of my parents who were happily married with loving families, as a way of seeing what that was like. I sought mentors who could help me from the beginning of my adulthood to be a better man than I could have been just from my own family example. I knew, from my own background, that I needed a mentor, so I found some who I remain friends with to this day. Meanwhile, I found that there were younger people who looked up to me as an example of how to behave, something that greatly surprised me. In life, we all need to both find and be a mentor.

Why do we need mentors? We all are called as believers to walk by faith and not by sight, to put into practice a way of life that we did not grow up with, to learn and apply God’s ways and not our own. We face unfamiliar challenges in unfamiliar places around people who are strangers to us, and we need to be able to cope with what we do not understand. We all want to succeed at difficult endeavors like education, work, or marriage, and we may recognize that our background and experiences are serious liabilities in the quests of our existence. In such circumstances, we need to find wisdom and guidance on how to live that we do not have within us naturally. This is especially important when it comes to seeking good examples in order to apply that which we may know in our heads.

Where do we find these mentors? We may find a variety of mentors in a variety of places and times. Sometimes we may seek a mentor in a formal position of authority, like an apprentice seeks to learn a trade from a master, or like a member of a congregation may seek guidance from a pastor. We may find people who are willing to serve as surrogate parents of a sort to a young vagabond far from home, or people who model different aspects of God’s ways successfully whose example we observe and imitate. We seek mentors at work and school to help us with skills and education, and we seek encouragement and instruction from the pages of scripture, so that we may follow the footsteps of our ultimate mentors in God our Father and Jesus Christ our savior and elder brother.

What do we do once we have found our mentors? Once we have started to succeed in life, and started to achieve our goals and ambitions, we often find that others in turn will seek our example, our encouragement, and such modest wisdom as we possess. We find ourselves becoming mentors for others, and this ought not to surprise us. After all, a child may be a mentor to a toddler, a teen to a child, a young adult to a teenager, and so on. To the extent that all of us have developed character and shown kindness and friendliness to others, we can be an example to someone else who has progressed less far than we have. So we learn from others, and turn right around and teach others what we have learned, so that we all may learn and grow.

And this is how it should be. Our knowledge is not for us to appear wise, but for us to be a conduit for teaching others. Our success and growth is to be an encouragement for others. Our walk of faith becomes a path that others can follow. None of us is so far advanced in life that we do not need to look for examples to follow, and none of us is so far behind that we cannot offer some encouragement and instruction to others along the way. Let each of us, therefore, as we are able, find mentors to help us along, so that we may in turn be a mentor to others.