Morning Thanks--a mentor

Every kid had a choice, probably still do. For their final year of catechism, every kid in our church could choose to have a mentor, or to attend a class. Back then, twenty years ago or so, one of the kids said he'd like a mentor--me. 

I should have been pleased, should have been proud. At the time, I was teaching, full-time. I don't remember exactly, but I'm sure I had to have been a little proud. The kid chose me, after all.

So we started. He came to our house one Sunday morning, and we talked, came up with a curriculum, the Heidelburg Catechism, a foundation of the church and denomination we were a part of, then started the next week with the first q and a. 

Many years before, an editor had asked me to team up with a theologian and write a book of meditations for middle-schoolers. Didn't seem tough. The theologian chose the passages and sent me overviews. It was my job to make those ideas sing. Back then, our own kids were that age. 

I soloed on a few more books, little ones, all of which did relatively well. After a couple of hundred meditations, you get accustomed to the genre. Writing devotions for kids wasn't particularly difficult, and what I wrote somehow found enough of an audience that what I did was worth my time--and theirs presumably.

So when this kid wanted me to mentor him, and we decided on content, I wandered back into the genre I knew quite well. I sat down and wrote meditations for some time, walked and wrote my way through the whole Heidelburg Catechism. What I wrote came out some time later--a book, devotions for teens. That's it, up top.

That was 2001. I know it got read; sometimes I even heard from happy readers--let me correct that: "the folks of happy readers." Maybe I should say "happy folks of kids." But I'm proud of it--was then, still am. When you write something like that, you're in it, and I am. Today, it's shelf life is well behind it. It's up here on my shelf along with a ton of other books that are long out-of-print. 

Well, I take that back. I just looked. Amazon has one left. Better hurry!

Yesterday I got a request from a broadcast ministry I used to know quite well, The Back to God Ministries, who would like to translate the Every Bit into Chinese and eventually run it on line, a e-book, free to gadzillions of Chinese speakers around the world.

Eighteen years ago, two of us sat in our living room on those Sunday mornings. He'd have read the Heidelburg q and a on tap that day--plus a meditation or two I'd written. And we'd talk--I hope all of that did some good, my year as a mentor.

Every Bit of Who I Am is a book, like so many others I'd written in the basement of a hundred-year old house in a small town in the northwest corner of Iowa. Soon enough, technology will outfit those ideas in a whole new wardrobe, an ancient language, then put those words up in a screen the whole world can see. 

Through nothing less than an act of God, those words will be out there once more looking for a continent of new readers, all of which makes this morning's thanks a slam dunk, doesn't it? Nobody's coming to our house. We don't even live there anymore. But I'm still a mentor.

I'm awed really, awed and very thankful.