Batterson and Foth on Mentoring

Well hello, friends. It's ticked both again with stories to make sense of it all, and it's the first week in March. Can't believe it's the first week in March, but here we are. We've been working our way through known, the book, finding deep friendships in a shallow world. And we're at that place where we are wrapping up the idea of covenant and what it's like to have covenants. And one aspect of covenanting, if you will, is what we call a mentoring relationship. Back in 2008, my young friend, half my age at that time, Mark Batterson in Washington, DC, wanted to have a conversation on that subject. So we went out to a couple of our favorite places in front of the National Academy of Sciences with this huge, wonderful statue of Albert Einstein sitting down in a front-by-sweather. And of course, people crawl up on his lap and all kinds of stuff. It's a fun place to be there, and the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And there we had a conversation in May of that year, 2008. So we're going to reprise that. We're going to share with you some chunks of that. And it'll hopefully be of some encouragement, or at least some interest. When we originally videoed this, Mark framed it in the context of two biblical characters, the Apostle Paul and Timothy, sort of his spiritual son. So that's the context for the conversation. Here we go on the idea of mentoring. Someone wise once taught me about history giving. Really? Yeah. And if you really want to get to know someone, you've got to know their history. And I love kind of your stories of growing up. What are some of the best experiences or some of the shaping experiences as you grew up in India and even your journey beyond that? I think being in a culture so totally foreign to me, so totally other than Oakland, California, helped me not to be afraid of things different. Just the mix, the sights, the sounds, the smells. For years, I would walk into a store and smell curry powder and I was back in India. Being raised in a rigid British system in school, you learned about discipline. I tell the story that when I was a little guy that we had a little locker beside our beds and we called them tuck lockers, you put comics and candy in there. And I was tapping it one night in the boy's dorm where the little guys were, as called the bird's nest. And the assistant matron came in and sat me in the hall for two hours waiting for the head matron to come back. She didn't come back. And so the next morning, I was getting ready and I had my pajamas on. I was making my bed with hospital corners because that's what you had to do when you were four and five in the British morning school. And the matron came in and said, were you the little boy tapping the locker? And I said, yes. And she made me take off my pajamas and she bent me over her knee. It took off a smooth sole tennis shoe and just wailed the tar out of it. You know, I never did that. My tuck locker again. But my first achievement was in that school. Recently, I went back with some friends and was standing on the playing field and said, I think I remember winning some hopping race or something here. And the next day, we went into an area where they had yearbooks from this school. And I looked at 1948. And at third paragraph, it said the flat run and the frog hop race for six year olds was one, both one by Dickie Footh. I peaked early. You know, that was it from that on. You know, if only those had been Olympic events, if only. So there are all kinds of influences in our lives, aren't there of things that shape us. Sometimes we don't even remember those influences or who they were until we're having a conversation like this. In those early years, who really had influence in your life, who was a voice that spoke into your life in a profound way. There was a, there was a lady. She was a beautiful lady, a single lady who taught the high school class in our church. Her name was Blanche Adams and all the sophomore boys were in love with her. You know, she was maybe 14 or 15 years older than we. She later married. But she was an example to us of vivaciousness and authentic spirituality that really touched. I don't know that I've thought of that in the last 30 years till this minute. Wow. That that she isn't one of the persons that I reference because most of my references come from a little later in my life. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that's interesting because you you don't always know if you're being a Paul to a Timothy. I mean, Blanche probably has no idea. A Blanche to a Richard. You know, and that's one of the cool things about potential that we can have such influence in people's lives without even knowing about it. It was simply faithful to the calling of gods had on our lives. So that was Blanche Adams in Oakland, California when I was a teenager some years later. But let's go back to India for a few minutes. My parents lived 200 miles away. They could come twice a year to see us by virtue of their responsibilities. But I remember more than once somebody coming up and saying, Dickey, your daddy is here. And I'd go running down the driveway and I stood on this driveway and remembered this back a couple of months ago when running down the driveway and I jumped into my dad's arms and he was six two and three quarters 240 pounds. And we had this game where I'd stiffen my legs and he would take me by the ankles and he pushed me up in the air like that, you know, pushed me up. And when he pushed me up in the air like that, like I could see forever. And my understanding of the father is when you jump into his arms and he holds you up and he says, folks, look at this. This is my world. You know, this is, this is my space. Yeah. This is, these are my people. Yeah. Anyway, for me, that's a, that's a pretty profound metaphor. Isn't it interesting the way different experiences almost become metaphors for life? Yeah. And you know, for me, I think it's some different, you know, experiences playing basketball or otherwise, but I mean that, Dick, that's not a bad metaphor for mentoring either. I used to stiffen my legs and Dick would lift me up in the air. This is frightening. This is, this is going weird. But it's kind of that idea that we stand on the shoulders of giants. You know, one reason why we're out here at the Einstein statues because it's one of your favorite places in DC. Einstein, for me, it began my love of reading. I think you know, when I was a senior in college, I read 800-page biography of Einstein, loved it, and fell in love with reading. And I never go anywhere without a book. And so I brought one with me and it's called Apprentice to Genius. And it's an interesting book about how in the realm of science, scientists are influenced by their scientific mentors. And in fact, a fascinating study in here that I think frames some of what I want to talk about today. Harriet Zuckerman did a study of American noble laureates and a study 92 of them who had done prize-winning research in the US by 1972, field of physics, medicine, chemistry. She found that more than half 48 had worked as students, postdocs or junior colleagues of older Nobel laureates. And when I read that, I thought, and that is really interesting. And I don't know how to frame it yet or how to think about it, but your community determines your destiny or who you hang out with in large part is going to dictate who you become. I've even heard studies that have said you're going to make the, your salary is going to be the average of the five people that you hang out with the most. I don't know where that comes from. We need different people to hang out with. We do. If there are any wealthy people that would mind hanging out with me and Dick, we're here for you. Well, that would be great, but you know, I just read that study and I thought to myself mentoring and this idea of being in a Paul Timothy relationship for both parties is so critical. I think our relationship is unique like any relationship. And so, you know, I don't know that we can say, hey, your relationship should evolve the way ours has. And I don't even know why you took a particular interest in me. I was going to ask you, when did this start? Well, you know, I think there's a little bit of backstory here that you planted a church in Illinois about the same time my father did. And you became your friends. You were both kind of on the cutting edge with high impact churches. And so the families knew of each other. And when we moved here, I think probably Laura's mom and dad were probably concerned about us. I said, hey, we need someone to look out for them. And I think they told you that we were here and they told us, hey, they're here. And I don't remember the first meeting, but I do remember, I think one of the first times you ever invited us over is for Thanksgiving, which was awfully kind because we didn't have family here. And there's no place to go. And then we played trivial pursuit. And you mentored us. In a way, I've never experienced it. It was deep, wasn't it? It really was. And I think after that, I came to the conclusion, I mean, you're about the most trivial person that I know. Yes, you remember that? Yes. There's so much information up there that's absolutely useless. It's exactly right. I mean, it's really incredible. But you can carry a lot of conversations with useless information. Yes, you can. When we think about mentoring, we think about formality a lot of times or structure. But I think there's an affect called hospitality that is the atmosphere in which mentoring occurs. I used to think hospitality was you got to fix punch and cookies and invite people over, but hospitality really is inviting someone into your space. So sometimes it expresses itself that way. We've had dozens of people invite us into their space when we were younger. We had dozens of people invite us over for meals because you're poor. When you're young, at least most of us were. And just to have, you know, home cooked meal is just terrific. Works great with college students. Just that little idea of how do you invite someone into your space? One of the principles that you taught me early in our relationship is I was just seeking out leadership advice. You know, we're this core group of 20 to 25 people kind of getting off the ground. And I remember asking you what advice you would give to me. And one of the things you share with me was invite someone to come along with you no matter what you're doing. And then you recommended a book called Never Eat Alone. Do you remember that? This idea of just don't do stuff by yourself. You know, if you're going to go golf and invite someone to go with you if you're going to go to the hospital, invite someone to go with you. And I think so much of what we're doing is a church, even our church planner and residence capacity is kind of came out of that idea. How did you learn that early on? And I mean, isn't that really mentoring, even though most people don't think of it as mentoring? Absolutely. When I was in my junior high years, my parents' relationship from my observation started to fray. By the time I was in high school, it was pretty difficult. And when I was 21 and three months married, I got a letter from my father saying he was leaving my mom. And in that tension of watching a pastor's home come a part. In that tension, I was quite vulnerable for somebody who could walk into my life and help me. And when I met Ruth and met her family, her father became that person to me. If I had to identify one person that walked with me intensively and took me the way I was, it was he. When I went to ask for Ruth's hand in marriage, it was Christmas Eve 1962. And I called on the phone, masked my voice, so Ruth didn't know who it was, and asked Roy Blakely if he would meet me in the parking lot of a local elementary school out in the country near Modesto, California. He was a farmer at heart. He was a pastor, but he drove up in this old pickup truck. I climbed up, and I said, I really love your daughter Ruth, and he said, we kind of like her too. And I said, I'd really like to marry her. And he said, well, I think that could be a range dick. And I said, but you know about my parents' situation. And I'm scared because I think it might be genetic. And for whatever reason, I felt that I could say that to him, even though I wasn't his son-in-law yet, and I voiced this fear. And I remember him putting his hand on my shoulder and saying, Dick, why don't you, why don't you just love Jesus and love Ruthie? And we'll love Jesus, Opal and I, that is why for my mother-in-law, why don't we just love Jesus and we'll love you and we'll walk together. And it'll be okay. I trust you. Sometimes somebody can, in 20 seconds, say something that changes your life. And I think intuitively and subconsciously, when he did that, I said, I want to be like this guy. I'll tell you what, when you put your hand on my shoulder, just like Roy put his hand on your shoulder, I just, I had this thought. I wonder if we over-spiritualize this identity of, you know, the elders have placed hands on you. Like, is it? And see, I think there's something, there's some kind of mantle that's passed on. There's something supernatural and spiritual that's beyond just, hey, we're going to lay hands on you and pray for you. It's also that the fingerprints are left on you and inviting those people to come into our life. You know, one of the things I like most about my friend, Mark Patterson, is he's an action guy. He's a doer and he's always, as we would say, back in the day, throwing down the gauntlet, challenging you to either look at something in a different way or do something in a different way and enter in this conversation. There he goes again. He brings that up. Don't just wait for a mentor to show up, you know, proactively look at your life, and it may be that the person that's right next to you, and they're not going to be a perfect person. And I think that's what I enjoyed about our relationship is that, I mean, you've gone through some things over the years that it's been a joy for me to be able to pray for you. And certainly, I feel like I've been more on the receiving end, that it's just been a joy to have that shared relationship. I think one other thing that I just want, I mean, just put in for a minute here, one of the things too, is that like, we don't meet every week for coffee at Ebenezer's. I'd like to, but we don't. There have been gaps where we haven't met for some time, but it doesn't mean we couldn't talk or it doesn't mean we weren't praying for each other, and it doesn't mean that the relationship changed. It just means that things got busier, you were traveling or I was and so forth. There are a whole range of kinds of mentoring things. I was talking to the guy the other day about mentoring moments, like when Roy Blakely did that for me in the car. That was a moment. You know, I've been up on a repounding shingles with him, and it wasn't near that profound, you know. Just there's a whole range of ways that contact and influence and engagement occur that are not necessarily formalized or sometimes not even rhythmic, but they are in fact still could can be profound. Yeah, and one of the things I think people are afraid of with mentoring, either on both sides of the equation, is it going to inconvenience my life or is it going to, like I'm so busy, I have so many different things to do, but I think one of the things I've discovered is make it fit in the rhythm of your life, and we've done that. We both like golfing, so occasionally we'll hit the golf course. We both like coffee, so we'll drink a cup of coffee together, and we trade books. We trade books, and I'm learning that with my son too, with Parker. I'm trying to figure out what does he love to do, and how can I learn how to do that? I've never played lacrosse in my life, and he picked it up, and so I'm going to go out and get a lacrosse stick and start practicing with him, and we went wall climbing together this week. Well, I mean, that's not my deal growing up, but it's something he loves, and so I know if I want to be in his life as a mentor in his life, I want to kind of fit the rhythm of his life, and in that way kind of become a part of who he's becoming is my son. Hey, so a couple of questions for you, and then if you have any questions for me, we'll just go for it. Hey, we're in a city of monuments and memorials, and one of the themes in Timothy is this idea of legacy. What kind of legacy are you going to leave? I think Timothy, in a sense, is Paul's legacy. So you've got the Lincoln Memorial, you know, the Mancipation Proclamation, you know, it's a legacy. You've got the Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. What is Dick Foss' legacy? I think maybe a conversation I had on an airplane a bunch of years ago, it was on an airplane flying out of Chicago to, I think it was Memphis or someplace, and this businessman I was sitting next to started a conversation, and along the way I asked him, what are your three goals in life? And he looked at me and said, why don't you tell me your three first and I'll tell you mine? And so at that point I said, I always want to find myself in the Kingdom of God, that is under his rule in relationship to him. Number two, I always want to have close or tight relationships with people. And three, I never want to stop adventuring all of my life. And I think the two and three are are subsumed in number one, but for me breaking those out helps. And what I have found is that most of my adventures are with other people coming back to that thing you asked me before, about when you do it with somebody, it's like Jesus sending out two by two. Anyway, I think that thrust or that theme is really important to me because these monuments are dust. I mean, I don't know what the scenario will be, whether it's a million years or something cataclysmic, but these monuments are dust and our bodies are dust, but our spirits, our relationship, that goes on. And so whatever investment is made there, where your treasure is, that's where your heart is, whatever investment is there, that's what counts. So when Paul lobs Timothy by saying, you know, your grandma and your mom, I see their fingerprints on your soul when he encourages him in that way, Timothy is Paul's legacy. You know, I don't know that legacy is the same as Epitaph. I love that epitaph. I told you I was sick. So an epitaphs on a grave marker, it's on a stone. A legacy is something completely different than that. I think all ultimate legacy is relational, is spiritual, is moral, is human. The investment we make in people always has a return. It's compound interest. It's not affected by the stock market or by economic, not by the stock market, by economic conditions. And what a way to go. So perhaps many of you listening know that Mark Batterson is a writer of some renowned, if you will, I don't know, 20 books now. And I remember I remember the day he was a 27-year-old and he said to me, who was a 54-year-old or you know, I think I'm supposed to write. And in my mind, and I told him this, I say in my mind, I said, yes, sure, because a lot of people on the right books. But it is proved to be true in a big way. And sitting there in front of the Lincoln Memorial with our feet in the reflecting pool, he said something to me that nobody has ever said. And I won't play you that part because it was hard for me. I had a little trouble talking when he said it. But he said, you know, I have this upcoming book called Wild Goose Chase, which is Wild Goose was the Celtic Christian euphemism or metaphor for the Holy Spirit. And he said, I want to dedicate it to you. And I was totally caught off guard. And I didn't want to play it because it feels self-aggrandizing to say it, except that there is this interaction between people who share their lives that makes some of those things kind of natural. And I was very touched. I still am touched by that. I haven't written a book to dedicate to market. I've got to get after that. But anyway, toward the end of our time, he said, I just want to talk to guys because this was being recorded for the congregation, the extended congregation there in Washington, DC. And again, he's always the guy who kind of throws it down and says, let's look at this. Here he is. Maybe I could talk to guys for a second. Man, I sure would love for guys to be able to have a relationship with another guy where they can cry together. Because I think we need those people that we can be vulnerable with. And Paul needed Timothy and Timothy needed Paul. I wonder if I don't want to presume anything upon you, but I wonder if if you would just take a couple of moments or here at this reflecting pool, kind of reflecting back on life, if you might just share some words with national community church, this spiritual family that you've been a part of. And if you feel comfortable, I think this would be a cool place just to maybe allow you to pray for us and pray for me. And again, relationship isn't ending. We're going to have you back. And that's part of the joy of being in relationship. But I wonder if you would just share maybe some reflections with us just a word of challenge, just like Paul challenged Timothy. And then maybe if we'd have the privilege of you praying for us. I don't know if I can talk. When we talk about mentoring, the thing about mentoring that is so cool and has been cool for me with my Roy Blakeles and my MacGarvis and my Howard Mom Steads and my Blanche Adams and my Mark Batterson's and my Doug Kose is that it's a safe place. It creates a safe place. And for us, who are part of this family called NCC, would to God that we are a safe place in tumultuous times. What a profound thing that would be in this city. For there to be hundreds of safe places where where there's light and where there's acceptance and where there's such excitement that people stand on tiptoe to see what's coming next. So I would just encourage you as we leave this locale, we'll be back a few times a year but as we leave this locale, that when I be encouraged in this, when I think of Washington DC, sure I'll think of the nation's capital, but I'll think of this family of friends at NCC and the friends that I am with week to week as being the heart of what this is about. Please know that you're loved. Don't know all your names. You add people every week, but Ruth and I have grown and flourished in part because of you being here in DC and we love you. God bless. Do you want to pray? Yes, for us. Yes, yes. Lord Jesus, thank you for these friends. Thank you for this man and for Laura and for the kids and for the team. Thank you for the honor and the privilege of being a part. We pray that as these friends continue to grow in you, that your life will be made large, that your truth will be writ large and that your name will be lifted out in this place, ongoing as it is now, but even more and deeper. We love you, Lord. There's nothing that we can't do if you're in it and if you're not in it, the stuff we do isn't worth anything. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Bless these friends as they go in your grace. Well, that's it for this week. Thanks for listening in and thanks to those of you who subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to for this podcast. And until next week, this is Dick Fault signing out. God bless. Have a great week. Bye-bye.