Mentoring

While writing about my brief “career” with the Starfires 4, I was reflecting on how significant it was for me to be honored and welcomed into relationship with older guys that I respected. That was heady stuff for a 12 year old. I don’t even think I had a close friend of my peers that I was even able to share that with. It was way off their radar screens. Today, I find that I enjoy mentoring younger people, teenagers, in music. I like being looked up to, yes even a hero. Is hero too strong a word? I want to be a hero to someone. I hesitate to say that. Then I open myself up to someone laughing at me, “Well, you’re ok but you’re certainly no hero. Ha ha ha!”

Some years ago I was worship leader and director of music ministry for my former church (Herr Direktor!). The pastor’s 3 sons were on my worship team at one point. I found this a very gratifying experience. They looked up to me and respected me for my musical experience and, I think, for my eclectic tastes and the fact that I appreciated contemporary music. In fact, I believe strongly this is true because to this day they tell me that this was a seminal experience for them and they are grateful to me for it.

So nowadays what I find I like to do is, when I find talented young musicians, to befriend them and encourage them. They seem to look up to me. If possible, I invite them to play with me, to offer advice, if requested. I find this very gratifying. Perhaps it’s validating for me? Validates my life, my past?

Now comes the responsibility and humbling part of mentoring, in fact of being a musician in general. I find that I gravitate to being a big fish in a small pond. In other words, if I find a small pond where I’m perceived as the best, I can feel that I’m the best in the world, in a sense (my world). There comes a day when someone walks in that is better than you. It always comes. How do you handle this? Everyone, even the greatest, has to acknowledge that someone has something you don’t. Yet you have something no one else has. You have your own song that no one else can sing. You must go from the Win-Lose mentality, i.e. someone must lose so that I can win or if another wins I must lose, to valuing every human being’s contribution without diminishing your own.