I was driving the car listening to an audio tape, in the days before blogs. The narrator was talking about asking questions in a mentoring context. He spoke about Jesus being full of grace and truth and I was thinking about how I work on that with mentees. How do you see yourself having a balance of grace and truth when asking questions of your mentees? He said, “If you see yourself as 80% grace and 20% truth, or vice versa, and you are praying to God that you might be more 50/50, then you’re an idiot”.
That caught my attention rather abruptly. That was exactly what I was praying! He went on “What you ought to be praying is that you will end up being 100% of each”, because Jesus was full of grace and truth. In the mentoring context, grace carries the meaning of having empathy, listening etc. Truth includes being blunt, frank, – naming up things that need to be named up – or being prepared to ask the difficult question.