What God Wants For Your Life

Real Yodas in the workplace and in on-on-one relationships function in a way that is very different from the patterns I described yesterday.

Real Yodas start with the young yedi knight…

The people I have known who functioned like true mentors always put their apprentice first.  They may have had their own agendas, anxieties, responsibilities, and frustrations — but they set those aside to give their full attention to the person they were mentoring.

Real Yodas find a place for young Jedi to grow…

They looked for places where their apprentice would grow.  The agenda wasn’t a matter of getting a job done or one of hazing.  They thought developmentally about the needs of their apprentice, they looked for experiences that would contribute to their growth.

Real Yodas share their wisdom.

They didn’t use what they knew to manipulate or control.  They shared it with their apprentices.  In that way they prepared their apprentices and preserved a growing body of knowledge.

Real Yodas walk with their apprentices and find themselves with friends.

Launching an apprentice was only half of the work.  Caring enough to walk with them through life and encourage them mattered as much as the early stages of the relationship.  The gift in it for Yodas was the apprentice became a friend and peer.

Famously, Yoda observes, “Always two there are, no more, no less: a master and an apprentice.”

“Well, yes, if lucky you are.”

But in my experience of sending students off to mother church — and in an ecumenical setting, there are lots of mothers — I have watched in horror at the number of those apprentices who are forced to travel alone.

It’s a dynamic worth describing, because in most cases you have either been an apprentice or you have the opportunity to be a master.  How you handle those experiences is a spiritual issue.

So, in the interest of candor — what happens to young Jedi Knights in the nascent 21^st century?

HAZING…It is an ancient ritual with roots in human barbarism, but in some quarters it has not died out.  Its inspiration lies in the emotional satisfaction that it gives the Faux Yoda.  To humiliate is to feel superior and so much the better if pointless rituals and endless hoops extend the experience.

SLAVE LABOR…The apprentice could be valued, nurtured, and trained.  But in the words of despair.com, “You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor” and far too many Faux Yodas know it.  As a result, all too often the apprentice is saddled with work that the master would rather not do.

THE GENEROSITY OF COWARDS…Some apprentices are in the wrong place trying to do the wrong thing; and the masters are often so conflict-adverse that they fail to tell the truth.  As a consequence some apprentices turn slowly at the end of a rope — encouraged to endure, but with no real future.

NEGLECT…Other apprentices find themselves saddled with masters who have no ambition to be Yodas.  They are so captive to fear, ambition, or both that they are incapable of aiding their apprentices.

There may be other patterns, but those are the ones I have seen more often than not in over three decades of work between the academy and the church.  If all of this leaves most young Jedis feeling as if they have been stranded on Tatooine, it is not surprising.

The problem with such behavior — in any work world — is that it debases the apprentice and it robs institutions of the wisdom that could be transmitted with careful attention to the needs of the apprentice.  Worse yet, it is the kind of behavior that breeds cynicism and nothing corrodes or weakens the spiritual moorings of any community than the disaffection that follows on well-fed cynicism.

What to do about it tomorrow.