Did you know that it takes 13 years to make a cricket bat?

13. Frickin. Years.

Ridiculous! Just think about the type of frustration that bat maker must endure when all he can do is tend to the trees and wait. Yet it is impossible to get the right quality of wood for this bat unless the tree grows for thirteen long, arduous years. Talk about delayed gratification! You don’t tend to see that kind of discipline in our modern culture. When we want something to happen, it must happen NOW.. because our frustrations and crises are NOW.

Another typical example is setting a goal to lose weight. We decide we are going to follow ‘such and such’ a diet to get those pounds off, and then after three months we are hopelessly discouraged by the tiny (sometimes miniscule!) amount of improvement we see when, for example, only 500g is lost every month.

And so we give up.

Yet what if we continued? After one year we would have lost 6k, after two years the total would rise to 12 kg. At the end of the third year, 18kg! In conjunction to that, imagine the benefits we’ll reap if in the second year we decided to start exercising a little more as well! The bottom line is, we live so unwisely, simply because we are chasing immediate gratification.

It’s the same with our finances. We can chip away little by little at that seemingly insurmountable mountain of debt, or cent by cent save up for something we’ve got on our bucket list. Each small contribution counts towards something huge, if we could just have enough patience to last until the harvest.

Nowhere is this principle more clearly illustrated than in mentoring. Week after week our mentors are investing their time, energy, hands and listening ears in their mentees and not seeing much fruit coming back. And after three months most are also probably hopeless discouraged about any change happening in either of their lives. But if they can find the strength to persevere and keep putting in the effort and patience, just maybe after only two years they will get to experience and benefits of a mighty harvest!

And so, as we plough into another year we encourage our staff and volunteers to keep chipping away and keep their eyes on the vision of the harvest that is coming. And just what is that vision?

The sustainable, transformational growth of all people towards purposeful living.

We want to see our students, mothers, fathers, employees, managers, CEOs, church leaders and  attendants…everyone!…growing stronger. We want to see them becomingresilient and bouncing back, tackling problems, overcoming and living free in abundance! And to do this, our goals are to get mentoring happening in every sector of society by 2020..

So what are you waiting for,  signup today and join the mentoring movement!

by Tammy Mewes

 

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