mentorship

Nice to Know: Nine Tips for Mentors

My upcoming book, CrossWise Living: Navigating Transition, includes a section on mentoring. I tell the story of my friendship with Faith Greiner Field, who has taken the seeds I’ve planted in her life and is producing a harvest that far exceeds anything I could have accomplished on my own.

Faith recently wrote to tell me how she’s using what she learned from me to invest in the next generation. Her beautiful thank you letter is folded up in my jewelry box, where it will likely remain until the day my bereaved loved ones divide up my earthly treasures. I’ve included just an excerpt here because I believe

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Nighttime Prayers

Nighttime Prayers: Irene

Today’s guest blogger is my beloved brother, Dr. Ed Nelson. He is a research chemist by profession, but has the soul of a poet and the heart of a servant. He and his wife Janis demonstrate what it means to live a life of love as they selflessly care for their aging parents.

The piece featured below is especially meaningful to me. Many years ago, Irene prayed for the salvation of her daughter’s boyfriend, and then later, his wild -child sister. I am eternally grateful for the role she has played in my life as a spiritual mentor.


Nighttime Prayers

by Ed Nelson

My wife Janis desperately needed a night off, and so I encouraged her to take our daughter Corrie out to a movie. This left me with the job of putting my mother-in-law Irene, afflicted with Alzheimer’s, to bed. I pointed her toward the bathroom where she dutifully went in and brushed her teeth. It was sort of a messy business— I had to help her turn on the electric toothbrush and clean it and turn it off when done. Old age was taking its toll on her mind, and she was becoming less able, less aware, more confused with each passing day. I reminded her to put on her pajamas, and I went to repair her toothbrush.

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Walking with Faith – Introduction

Walking with Faith -Introduction

Walking up to the edge of the Pacific Ocean is an exercise in steeling one’s nerves. Icier by far than the Atlantic, the Pacific does not beckon bathers the way warmer Hawaiian waters do; it dares you to enter it. It taunts you with its aquamarine beauty while it threatens to shock you dead from the cold. It’s much harder even than to stand on a pier and dive into a New England lake where it is all over in an instant. No, at the California beach you have to go shallow before you can go deep. Whether you dart in like a child or tiptoe in inch by painful inch like a matron in a vast black swimming corset, it’s a process. Never comfortable. Always worth it.

I’m not afraid of my shallow side. I recognize that you have to go wade through the whitewash before you can ride the waves. Not that I surf mind you, but I do know first hand the joy of riding in on a boogie board. Not with reckless abandon, usually with some thought of the possible chiropractic implications, but with joy nonetheless. The exhilaration of those few moments always begins with my having to grab the guts to get in the water, to assume the risk, to get out there and live a little. But you do have to go shallow before you can go deep.

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