I mentor because I was mentored.

I was young and just starting seminary. My first seminary professor in my first seminary class walked in slowly carrying a large stack of books and papers. He set them down on his desk, looked across the hundred or so students in the classroom and said, “Beloved, let’s begin.”

“Beloved?” I responded with a bit of sarcasm in my mind. He doesn’t even know me. Am I going to have to sit through King James lectures all semester?

But sit under his lectures I did, and I might have even learned some of the content as well. But the real lesson was always, “Beloved.”