Words have immeasurable power.  Yehuda Berg is quoted as saying, “Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate, and to humble.” The Bible says that “death and life are in the power of tongue.”  Our words have the ability build up and also to tear down, to divide and to heal.  Some words are more powerful than others.   There are eleven words in particular that have the ability mend a relationship strained by our own mistakes.  Those eleven words are…

There really is no such thing as a “self made man.”  Nearly all of us have had different people influence and pour into our lives.  Denzel Washington is quoted as saying, “Show me a successful individual and I’ll show you someone who had real positive influences in his or her life. I don’t care what you do for a living—if you do it well I’m sure there was someone cheering you on or showing the way. A mentor.”  To go anywhere significant in life requires some guidance along the way.  In fact, here are five types of mentoring we all need in order to grow to be our best:

Upward Mentoring – Upward mentoring is what most people think of when they picture mentoring. An upward mentor is someone you look up to.  Many times they are older, been around the block a time or two, and they are able to mentor you because they have been there and done that before.  This could be a boss, a parent, a pastor or a good older friend.  Upward mentors have learned some lessons in life and want to pass them off to others who are coming after them.

I was always a pretty good student.  I wasn’t the best student, but by the grace of God I did manage to graduate from both college and seminary with honors.  When tests would come around I would have to study a lot to do well, but for the most part I did in fact do well.  I didn’t study like some students though. Many students would head to a study group, Starbucks or a library to hunker down.  I would usually go one of two places, outside if the weather permitted or into a room where I was completely alone.  I did this for the privacy, but the privacy wasn’t because I needed quiet, it was so I could talk to myself.  I’d find a spot where no one was around, and I would repeat and recite aloud my class notes over and over again until I had them memorized down cold.  One summer, when I was taking an intensive Hebrew class, I would spend hours a day walking up and down the backroads around the seminary I attended, flipping through Hebrew vocabulary and grammar cards.  I probably looked like the town crazy person walking down the street talking to myself, but those many hours alone practicing allowed me to do very well in my intensive summer language classes.

There is tremendous power in going somewhere private to study, rehearse, or practice in solitude.   Susan Cain, in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, describes a study conducted on violinists.  Researchers broke the violinists into three groups: world class career violinists that solo on the international stage, great players that may play in an orchestra or professionally in some capacity, and those that were okay but ultimately would most likely end up teachers rather than actual performers.  

You probably know someone who has done it.  The person who rides the coattails of someone else through life.  Maybe they have a great boss that carries their entire department and allows some underachievers to coast along noticed.  Perhaps it is a gifted pastor who God uses to grow a church, and because the church as a whole is growing the department of the staff leader by default grows along with it.  Sometimes this gets noticed and corrected, often it can overlooked.

Obviously, people skating by is not how it is supposed to be.  In the book of Acts, which is in the Bible, we read where the early church begin to grow rapidly.  The church was growing so quickly in fact that some of the basic things the church was supposed to be doing, like feeding widows, started to fall through the cracks.  Realizing that something needed to be done, the apostles called a meeting and decided that they needed to find some new help to take care of the things that had begun to slip.  In Acts 6:3 we read how they found their new help, “Now look around among yourselves, brothers, and select seven men who are well respected and are full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom.  We will put them in charge of this business.”