Learning to read was both natural and easy for me as a young child. Words became like pictures that offered a portal into a world of color, beauty, imagery and a strange kind of power. Yes, the ability to interpret the meaning of the lines on a page was power, even for a small boy. By second grade I loved words even more because they had moved from simple vocabulary to story. They had become a direct doorway into imagination. The Hardy Boys mysteries, the Sugar Creek Gang and other stories acceptable in my Christian home became frequent companions at night under the covers with a smuggled flashlight but also outside on a summer’s day or in the private world of boyhood imagination. Books from school were allowed, so I readTo Kill a Mockingbird, Black Like Me andThe Red Badge of Courage. At home we also listened to stories on the radio—missionary drama and rescue from addiction on the mean streets of the cities. Of course, the constant companion in my family was the Bible, with its stories of women and men of faith, courage, conviction and obedience. Only later did I discover these people also had stories of disobedience, fear, deception and failure. Later also came my “intellectual period” with Russian writers Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The Beat Poets and Ferlinghetti were companions for a time and, by contrast, so were Dag Hammarskjöld, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. Now I am eager for Wendell Berry, Billy Collins, David McCullough biographies, and even pulp fiction.

At one point I traded fiction and poetry for what I deemed to be more scholarly work as I studied history, political science, theology and spirituality. But somehow my calling as pastor, teacher and preacher kept stories close. You cannot preach gospel well without story, just as you cannot live the meaning of gospel well without engaging your own story. We often say at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology that you cannot take others farther than you have been willing to go yourself. One of our signature programs is the Story Workshop, which takes people into the crucible of learning to tell their story of tragedy to a small group. A trained facilitator is present to assist in “reading” the story well together because we believe our spirituality is shaped by narrative and how we tell the stories of our lives. Story is not only fiction or history, chronology and timeline; story is meaning making in its most formative sense. We are formed by our story and we are formed as we tell our story to others and as we learn to read our life as storywith others. We who are mentors might be considered selfish people. We mentor others because we love story, and we read the lives of our mentees because we receive so much as we do. On our best days, we know it is about the other, but on all days we are deeply touched because we’ve been invited into their life.

Spiritual mentoring is learning to readall of their story—desire and tragedy, beauty and shame, glory and failure. It is not simply to mark change in the way we chart the upward growth of a child in pencil on a doorway in the bedroom; not simply a timeline to chart years passed, moments experienced and events undergone. In spiritual mentoring we recognize all of life as story. Mark Twain said his first rule in story writing was that “a tale should accomplish something and arrive somewhere.”1 Others point out that a story has, at least, a beginning, a middle and an end. Reading a story, then, starts with an understanding of how a story actually “works.”