Melissa Kruger: Growing Together: Taking Mentoring Beyond Small Talk

It's not just the non-Christian who desperately needs the gospel. I need it. I need reminders. We just desperately need it.

Life on life, discipleship. More than sometimes I need a far off internet person to tell me that. I need the person sitting down at the table with me to say, keep running.

It's worth it. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app.

This is Family Life Today. OK, I want you to recall something for me and go back to— Wait, wait, wait. First of all, you know how bad I am. I know. I don't remember anything but football plays.

That's all I can remember from college. No, you're going to remember this. OK. I want you to recall and think back to when you first started sharing your faith.

I do remember that. With other people. What did you feel when you did that?

Scared to death. Uh-huh. Totally dependent on God. Yeah. What did you do for your faith? Oh, absolutely energized.

Yeah. I mean, I'm exaggerating a bit. I don't think there's anything I've done in my Christian walk that energizes my faith more. Which would explain why you went into ministry. Yeah, I mean, my probably number one gift is evangelism, so I always have a heart for that. But yeah, you talk about even if my walk is cold or stale or dry, I get a chance to share the gospel with somebody. It's like you're on a mountaintop.

Yeah. And the same is true for me. When I've had the opportunity to tell somebody about Jesus, actually, it just happened today because I had an opportunity coming off the flight. There was a woman who was in tears, and she was standing right beside me in the airport, and she said, Hey, am I going the right way?

And I said, Where are you going? And she couldn't continue to talk because she started to cry. And then she said, This is the first time I've flown without my husband.

And he just passed away. And she just started crying hard. And so I held her hand the whole time, and I asked her to tell me about him.

It was sweet because I got to love her, hug her, pray for her for a second, and walk her to where she needed to go. But there's something when we do that, it feels so right, you know? And I like where we're going today because we're going to talk about discipleship. And what we both just did was discipleship. It's the Great Commission.

Yeah. So what are we talking about today? We've got a guest sitting over there. Melissa Krueger is in the studio. Melissa, welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited because your book is called Growing Together, Taking Mentoring Beyond Small Talk and Prayer Requests.

What a great title. And neither of those are bad things, necessarily. Good point.

But how do we go a little deeper? Because I always want to say, I mean, prayer requests are good. Yeah, it's not a bad thing.

We want to have those. But you have three kids, you're married, you've written several books. Directed women's ministries over the years.

For 10 years. Yes. So why is this a passion for you?

Yes, this book, actually the outline of this book was on my computer for probably 10 of those years. Because I watched women in the church desperately wanting to have deep community with one another and not knowing how to get there. So older women in the church wanted to invest in younger women. Younger women wanted the investment of older women. But they would kind of get together for coffee and they would talk about, oh, it's been such a busy day. Did you see the traffic?

Oh, this weather. They'd be stuck in the small talk. And small talk can be a great way to connect, but it's not a great way to go deep. And so I wrote this book actually to be a springboard for deeper conversations. So it's not actually a book that's about discipleship.

The first two chapters cover that a little bit. But it's really a book that I hope women will take, read together the content about being a woman who prays, and then have conversations about how's your prayer life? How have you learned to pray better as you've aged?

Evangelism. Talking about these things that sometimes we know we want to have those conversations, but we just stay in comfortable places. Yeah, but I really want to ask older women in my life, hey, what are you thankful you did as a mom?

What do you wish you hadn't done as a mom? And sometimes we just don't know how to get there. Well, it's interesting. I'm the only guy sitting in the studio, but I'm a little bit surprised because I don't know if I represent all men, but I think I do. We think women go deep.

Well, that's so interesting. It's like men don't go deep. We talk about surfacy stuff. But when we see women, even like when you go to a conference, they sit together and they start talking right away. And we are assuming they're going places we would never go immediately. But you're saying a lot of it's just small talk? I'll speak for myself in that that can be the most comfortable place to go.

And man, we can go there and we can lay there all day long. I was with a group of my friends one time and we were at lunch and we were talking about all those things you said. The weather, somebody's kids are going to a dance and the dress that their daughter got and how the kids are doing. And this is the part of me that's not very subtle sometimes.

This is terrible. And some of you would think I would not be her friend. I said, hey, we've just been talking about nothingness for the last 45 minutes.

And so they're like, I didn't know if they'd be offended, but they were really good friends. I'm like, you guys, I want to know, how are you doing? Let's get into some stuff. And so, yeah, no, Dave, we can stay on the surface. Melissa, do you think that's true? Oh, we're experts at it. I mean, we can stay there, like you said, a long time because we have a lot of words.

And so we can just stay in certain places. And I realize I'll get to the end of a lunch and finally I'll say, tell me what's one thing I've been praying for you this week. And then all the real things that I wish we'd been talking about for the past 45 minutes come out. And you just see it turns the conversation. Just a simple question like that can turn the conversation to now I hear what's on my sister's heart in a heavy way. That you just don't feel like, well, where's the right place to say, hey, my marriage is falling apart. Where's the right place to say, I'm really concerned about my kids and I don't know what's going on with them. Where's the right place to say, this relationship is broken and I don't know how to fix it with my mother-in-law or my mom or whatever.

And so sometimes you just feel like you need permission to actually go deep with one another. Have you had that? Have you had someone that's mentored you?

I am so thankful. I had two women early in my Christian life. I actually became a Christian.

I was raised in the church, but I really came to hear the gospel and understand it through a high school ministry called FCA. And a woman was a teacher at the school and she ran a large public high school and she was there sharing her faith. And that relationship is not a formal mentoring relationship at all, but I would just go up to her room. And she would tell me all her thoughts on dating and being in the Word. I mean, I can still remember her saying, you shouldn't be leading others if you're not in the Word yourself. And those things, you hear them as a 16-year-old from a teacher, you're like, okay, yes, ma'am.

I'll make sure to do that. And then all through college, I was mentored by my InterVarsity staff worker. She met with me for three years at the same restaurant. I can still remember studying First Peter with her. I can still remember doing ministry with her. And what I loved about that relationship, she was mentoring me while letting me do ministry.

So it wasn't just a pouring in, it was bringing along. And that was really key for me to learn that, oh, I actually have questions when I'm in the game myself. I did that same thing in college where my mentor was meeting with me weekly. Yeah, I had never looked at the Bible.

I knew nothing. And so she's teaching me this, and I'm like, this is amazing, like how to pray, how to share your faith, how to allow the Holy Spirit to really have access to your life and to be all in. And then I would lead this Bible study. Everything that I led in the Bible study was exactly what she had just taught me.

And then I would say, this didn't work and this did work. And it's exactly what Jesus did with his disciples. He sends them out and they all came back and talked about it. Yeah.

It's interesting. We have instances, Jesus clearly, he taught the 5,000. You see that. But he was the farthest thing from a mega church pastor. He didn't have a big internet ministry, obviously. He invested in 12 people.

And I think in the Christian church, sometimes we suffer from the, I should be doing more. And Jesus changed the world by investing in 12 men. And there were other people in their circles. And then he invested even in three more. On the transfiguration, he had a smaller group up there with him.

And it changed the world. And these are all men who failed him. They all made mistakes. I mean, Peter could not get it right who he was. He had to rebuke them. It was a definite instance of he was trying to teach them.

And they were sometimes very slow learners, like we all are. But it's amazing what that investment did. That's what he built the church on.

Those men, as they went out as apostles, he built his church on it. And it's kind of amazing when you think about, oh, I don't need to be a teacher of thousands. I can be a teacher to six throughout my life and faithfully do that.

And who knows what the Lord will do with that. Now, what's that sort of look like in post-college life? Because both your examples were college.

I have the same example. A young man named Bill who is just two years older poured into me, taught me discipleship, taught me. And it's biblical that I need a Paul and a Barnabas and a Timothy, someone in front of me, someone beside me, someone behind me in my Christian walk. And yet so many college students who are part of a ministry, you get post-college. And often we don't live in that kind of rhythms in our life, especially moms like you two. And dad's the same thing.

So why is that? Yeah, and I found it really hard post-college to find mentors. And part of it was lifestyle.

We moved the first five years of our marriage, we moved every single year. Well, it's hard to even get to know someone's name, much less be mentored when you're moving that much early on. And so I found mentoring through books in that stage. And what I try to tell people sometimes is a mentor is a wonderful thing to pray for, just like it's a wonderful thing to pray for a spouse or a wonderful thing to pray for children or anything like that. But sometimes the answer's no. So we might walk through seasons where for whatever reason, we just don't have an older person in our life in the way we would like.

And that we can trust the Lord to, that He's doing something in our lives at that point. Because I would say when I was in my mid-20s, I desperately wanted just to go to a Bible study because I had these young children. My brain didn't feel like it worked properly anymore. And I just wanted to go and receive. Instead, I was in a young church plant. I was one of the older women.

Me too. And so I was the one teaching the Bible study, be nursing on the side, teaching, babies crying everywhere. And that was the Lord's will for me. That's how He was shapening and fashioning me at that moment. So I always say keep praying for one and be patient as the Lord brings them into your life. I also like to say sometimes you can get them a little bit here and a little bit there. So I would have one older woman that I would always go to with my mothering questions, Christian mothering questions.

I'd have another woman that I might go to about her prayer life. And I would just take the opportunities as they came. It didn't look as formal as it did in college. And part of that is you have a lot of time in college.

You sure do. That's why I always say to people, don't view going off to college as a neutral time that you can just live however you want. It's not just that, oh, you didn't party and drink and do all these things. It's you might miss on so much great discipleship.

You think it was just, oh, it didn't really matter. I'll do the Christian thing when I get out and have kids or something. But all those years of investment I'm so thankful I had from college. Me too. They shaped me. And I think they can shape our kids and to even pray that our kids will experience that for sure. Last night I was with a group of women, like 130 women, with this ministry called Herd. And we had a panel. Hey, you better explain the herd thing.

It sounds like it could go one of two ways. A herd of women or women longing to be heard? Well, we named it. Actually, these young women in their 20s and 30s named it because they said women are longing to be heard and seen.

Not only from God, but from each other. They long to be heard by one another and seen. And so on the panel you have from teenagers to 25. And then we have young moms. We have someone that's divorced and single now in her 40s. We had a mom with six kids of all teenagers and into the young 20s. And then we had a woman that's 60 and she has a lot of grandkids. And it was so fascinating to me as each woman shared the struggle of this stage of life and also the victory. And I'm telling you, every single woman was crying because as each woman shared her struggle of maybe like, not like, I don't know my identity in this phase.

And this is what a 22-year-old saying like, I don't know what Jesus says about me. And then you have the 55-year-old woman saying, me too, like that's me. And then you have the woman that's been divorced and in so much pain and shame. And she feels like she somehow failed. And so we have other women that are saying, me too. And the mom whose teenagers are figuring out, am I going to walk with Jesus or am I not?

And another one of those sons that she had was in the hallway when a school shooter shot his best friend. And so now you're struggling with fear, anxiety. And I looked around the room and these women are crying because for the first time, people are voicing what they're feeling. And then you bring in scripture and you bring in somebody that says, I've been there and I understand. We want to flock to those people.

Why don't we have it in the church as much as we want? What do you think? I think we're afraid.

Me too. Older women sometimes can get trapped in, one, I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to invest in younger women. And here was the other lie. I'm too old.

Nobody wants to listen to me anymore. Yes, yes. I've heard that so many times, that exact thing.

And or they look back at their life and they're like, I messed up. I failed. And so I'm not good enough. Yes. And I'm like, oh, that's what we need. That's what I said last time, we need you because you learned so much from that mistake. Yes.

Call back to us. Tell us what you learned through not obeying God. Sometimes, you know, the scripture is full of the negative example too. That's what we see all over. We don't need perfect mentors.

There are none for one, but we just need women who want to point us to Jesus. The example I give at the start of the book about what mentoring is, is this image that I remember from my childhood. My dad, I came out upon him one day and he was tying this one small tree that was all bent over. He was tying it to this bigger oak. He was tethering them together so that it would grow straight. This tree limb, I think we kids had been jumping off of it, like bouncing on it and all these things. So he was tying it to this bigger tree. And that big tree was just standing beside the younger tree. Yeah, and they were tethered together and it was helping it grow straight. So the strength that it had from years of, I'm in North Carolina, so we have ice storms all the time, years of withstanding, all these storms and hurricanes and all the things we all get, it had stood firm. And it just stood beside providing strength. And I like that image because this bigger tree actually doesn't make the younger tree grow. I thought that was so good in that illustration.

Yeah, it just takes the pressure off you. Jesus is growing his church. He has a plan for his people.

God is working to conform that person into the image of a son. I'm just standing beside. I'm just offering the strength the Lord has given me to someone else. And when I can bring it down to that, I'm much less intimidated. Because it's scary to me when someone asks, will you mentor me?

In fact, when this book came out, a friend walked up to me and she said, would you mentor me? I was like, you don't need me. You're fine. And we think that.

I think everyone's fine. Here's what I can think. I got nothing. Yes. I got nothing, girl. Yes. But they must see something in you, Melissa, for that girl to come up and say it.

Yeah. And it doesn't have to be perfect. I think we have to have all the answers. Sometimes it's saying, I don't know what to do, but I'm going to pray with you. And I'm going to sit here beside you. And I'll be here when all the questions come. And I'm going to be that listening ear when you need it. And hopefully somewhere along the way I'll have a verse that I can remember that might help or something.

But a lot of it is just walking side by side. You know, I've been to Chaplain Alliance since I was 28. In fact, now that I say it, I remember at the time somebody said, you're the youngest chaplain in the NFL. And I had no idea. Of course, that was a long time ago. But here's what happened.

When I was about 40, 42, 43, I thought, I'm too old. And I went to one of our players who was part of my ministry. He's a number one draft pick of our team. And his name was Luther Ellis. And I had led him to Christ. And I'm mentoring this guy.

And I said to Luther, I'll never forget. I said, dude, be totally honest. I know you'll be truthful with me. Am I too old to relate to the guys and the players? And I'm good with that.

If I am, we'll find another person and I'll move on. And I said, I think my days are done being a chaplain because, you know, when I started, I was a peer. I actually played against some of these guys in college. And now I'm like their dad's age. And he looks at me.

I'll never forget. And he goes, dude, these are your best years. I go, what do you mean? He goes, now we see you as a mentor. We don't want a peer. We want a mentor. We want somebody who's lived a little bit and is a dad and raising kids.

We want somebody ahead of us that can pour into us. Please don't quit. I think your best years are ahead. And to me, that was a shock. I'm like, really?

And of course, I did it for many more years. But that's what I hear you saying. The next generation, our kids and our grandkids' ages, if there's anything I've seen is they are looking for mothers and fathers because they often haven't had them, especially in the spiritual world. So if there's an older woman listening right now, what would you say to her? She could be 40-something and she feels like her days are done to remind her, no, your days are not done.

Yeah. I would just say if you know Jesus, you have the world to give someone. If you've known Jesus five more minutes than I have, then you have five more minutes to give me. And you're giving me the greatest gift because what do we hear?

In His presence is fullness of joy. And so when I give what I know about Jesus to you, whatever I've learned and whatever has been revealed to me through His Word and by His Spirit, I mean, that's treasure. I mean, what an inheritance.

I mean, that's the inheritance I want to leave my kids. But that's the aroma I want to leave everywhere I go, is this aroma of Christ. And there's something, the world needs that. I mean, the non-Christian needs it, but you know what, the Christian needs it too. Because I think we sometimes think we're just persuading the non-Christian. But yeah, the book of Hebrews is all about persuading the Christian, Jesus is better and don't give up. Don't give up.

And so, you know, it's not just the non-Christian who desperately needs the gospel. I need it. I need reminders. Keep running the race. Keep after it. It's worth it.

I'm a little bit farther and I'm looking at the view and I can tell you it's good. And I need someone to tell me that. And we just desperately need it, life on life, discipleship, more than sometimes I need a far off internet person to tell me that. I need the person sitting down at the table with me to say, keep running.

It's worth it. I remember the first time I heard Bill Bright talk about the Great Commission in Matthew 28, and go and make disciples of all nations. And I'll never forget, because I was young, I was 19, I thought, me?

Me? And yet something arose in me that thought, God could use me with my messed up past and all the wrong that I've done and it was not pretty and the abuse that I've gone through. God could use me? And the amazing thing is, is he changed me.

When you're discipling someone, he changes you when you're doing it. You think like, oh, I'm giving this gift to this person. But as we said at the beginning, Dave, something happens in us because we were created to share Christ. We were created to share the good news. And I think you're right, Melissa.

We can sit in church as consumers and we get filled up, but there has to be an outlet to that. And when you give it away, it changes us. I'll just add, I think one of the first places to give it away is your own kids.

Yes. And those are your number one disciples. So, Mom, whatever you're getting, give. Dad, whatever you're learning, pass it on.

And I'm telling you, you will be energized as you watch your legacy become godly. Yeah. I used to teach high school, high school math. And actually, I would put kids in different groups of some kids who knew it really well would be in a group with maybe a kid who didn't know it as well. Because I knew when the kid who knew it well had to teach someone else, he learned it better.

Of course. And so the reality is, you know, we often think the lessons we're teaching our children are about our children learning it. Sometimes I was like, as a mom, I'd be like, oh, this is for me, isn't it? What I'm having to deal with with my child is actually the Lord teaching me. And the same is true in spiritual mothering or mentoring or whatever we call it.

We think it might be about helping the other person see when it's God wanting us to see a truth more clearly. And so it's a wonderful privilege to get to walk alongside people because that's why it's called growing together. We're both growing as we're in this process of walking toward Jesus together.

That's Melissa Krueger with Dave and Anne Wilson on Family Life Today. Stick around, Anne has an encouraging word for women in just a minute. But first, like we just heard, Melissa's book is called Growing Together, taking mentoring beyond small talk and prayer requests. You can get a copy for yourself or for a friend at familylifetoday.com or by calling 800-358-6329.

That's 800 F as in family, L as in life. And then the word today at Family Life, we believe one on one relationships like mentoring are so vital. I know in my life, some of the biggest change has happened because one person who's a little farther down the road than me, took the time to speak into my life. You can help equip men and women and teens to become mentors when you join us by giving financially at Family Life. And all this week with your donation, we want to send you a copy of Bob Lapine's latest book. It's called Build a Stronger Marriage. It's a great book to go through as a couple or maybe even with another couple you could mentor at the same time. That's our thanks to you when you give this week at familylifetoday.com or when you call with your donation at 800-358-6329.

That's 800 F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. All right, back to Anne with an encouragement for women to step out in faith and be a mentor. And I think as women think about this, like, why does this matter? Because God wants to use you right where you are. I know some of you are like, I have no time. But just look around.

You'll be surprised when you open your eyes of just maybe someone's by you that you can love them. You can ask the question, how can I pray for you? I like your suggestion too, Melissa, is find somebody that you like how they pray or they're a great mom or man, they know their Bible.

Just ask them for coffee and see what happens. God wants to use us and he wants to equip us to make disciples. Tomorrow, David and we'll be joined by Jordan Rayner to talk about how to get back our time with all the distractions that come. No, ma'am.

Exactly. Well, that's tomorrow. On behalf of David and Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.