Open Letter to my Mentor

Dear M.,

Remember when you gave me Mere Christianity when I was in the thick of the pimples and teenage angst? I was honored you thought me mature enough to want this type of material. I do not remember if it was the content of the book or the fact you trusted me with it that changed my life—one of those point-of-honor things—but I can trace the trajectory of my life back to pivotal moments such as this; these moments often so commonplace as to be lost to memory.

Which is why I bothered to sit down and write you, M. I can find a hundred faults in a person but giving credit to people who are changing my life seems awkward, mawkish, maybe due to some vague notion of masculine aloofness. You have not lived in vain; I am a better person for your being alive, and I mean to sit down and tell you this. Seems the old Funereal Paradox still holds: Sinners become saints by virtue of death. But I mean to skew the curve and tell you while I can.

Objective character evaluation is found in distance, and it seems we are too close to our people to really give them credit, like trying to admire a wall mural with your nose two inches from the painting. The grainy parts of our lives we tend to see, and forget to put them together into the arc of faithfulness that takes bumbling humanity and threads it together to produce a larger, more beautiful life. Queen Esther made her fame in a week’s time after a lifetime of loyalty. Moses was called to lead the Children of Israel only after he spent forty years tending sheep. You might make a significant difference in one or two peoples’ lives after eighty years of gritty faithfulness (a heroic feat in itself), and that moment be glossed over by its everydayness, like lending someone a book or helping them out of the ditch. Faithfulness and the little favors are the real life-changers. Mighty oaks from acorns grow, we like to say, but we forget that for every mature oak, thousands of acorns must be sown.

The Bible says old men will dream, and the young will see visions. I do not know the difference between a dream and a vision; perhaps it is only a semantic difference. Nevertheless, it seems there could and should be collaboration between you and me. I heard an old man say once he had to accept as he grew old the fact he became irrelevant to society, outdated; he had to grow accustomed to being the brunt of jokes about the App Store being closed on Sunday. He is spending his last days airbrushing fishing lures and using them to troll for trout and learning to accept this social Darwinism, learning to face the uneasy reality of concrete-block nursing homes where the irrelevant go to die.

I am not against trolling for trout, but I am against social Darwinism. How can you avoid irrelevancy? I’m glad you asked.

Many men become grumpy as they age. There is something about the accumulation of experience that tends toward thinking about the futility of human ambition. How could it not? I am already disillusioned with the human race, and I am young. But there is another way, and I’ve seen it. Nothing gives the young men more hope: Let men grow old enthusiastically and with joy. You really don’t have to do much else. If a man can gather sixty or seventy years of experience and still be excited about the future? That is not human—that is divine—and there is hope in it. It is a witness of resurrection power overcoming decay.

You asked me the other day where the line was between insurance and trust in God, the issue we had discussed as a brotherhood. I had not taken it upon myself to make it my problem, but when you mentioned it, I was so honored you asked my opinion that I devoted some time to it. Remind me next time we meet and I will give you my opinion, although you probably don’t need it. Your question has done its job.

This might surprise you. When you confessed you had been into pornography back in 2011, it took me about a year to recover, but I think my former trust in you had been overwrought anyway. Nothing spooks my generation more than men who are never wrong, or at least, refuse to admit to it. Brokenness is the single most respectable and redeeming element in a man. Seeing you repent brought a reality check, and now my admiration for you is touched with the realism of something that is thoroughly human, self-examining, correcting, not perfect but certainly holy.

Recently, I asked you for some financial advice and secretly braced myself for some banal, American stuff I could have repeated for you. But you never really answered my question, and when you came back, it was obvious you had been thinking about it. Travel light. I did not like this two-word dictum at first but am finding it to be a fantastic piece of advice. I do not know if I will ever be able to live it out completely.

Influence is an underrated force. Perceptions of reality, which are gathered through observation, influence, and our concept of God, soak into our lives and surface in unexpected places. Some discount the importance of theology, saying these heady studies distract from the practical nature of Christianity. How can the study of God divide itself from practicality? It is this dichotomy that gives us statements like, “He is so heavenly minded he is no earthly good.” This is merely a phrase advancing the proposition there is something like being good for one and not the other, which is nonsense. We can read a man’s theology, or lack of it, in an hour of conversation because of the connection between his pie-in-the-sky God and his lifestyle. All this is to say what I most appreciate about you: You celebrate seven Sundays a week, and your earthly riches, strangely, get invested into heavenly funds by using them to proper ends.

It is Monday here, and I need to fulfill the chief end of man at my job. Which is another concept I owe you for: The dignity of honest labor and the pleasure of good work. Anyway, take a minute to write me back if you have a chance. I know you’re a busy man, and if you are like most, don’t have time for idle letters to the younger generation even if we could use them.

The future is an obscure thing. Not scary necessarily, it’s only we never becomes professionals at living. I bump and rattle along; I never get the joke until it’s too late to laugh, only discover the owner’s manual after the project is completed. Whether my fumbling is incompetence or just part of finding my way, still my destiny hinges on the present and I must learn to live it. To do so, I have hedged my bets in people like you who have something worth having and can help us find it.

Sincerely,

One of the Many Young Men