dead mentors

about 4-5 years ago i was challenged + challenged myself to read a healthy and steady diet of dead guys.
the thing i reminded myself over and over until it became a part of me was

"i need some dead mentors."

there's just too much great stuff out there written by peeps who have been dead for 50 years or 500 years to only read the stuff that's being published this year. i vowed to keep a steady influx of both the current & the long gone in my reading list.

at one point i had some kind of quota or minimum for reading dead guys, but now i've had a lot of dead mentors. i see the value in good ones and i gladly read them consistently. NEED to read them.

i've had dead mentors over the last few years like -  Augustine, Julian of Norwich, John Wesley, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas A' Kempis, Brother Lawrence, Jonathan Edwards, Mother Theresa, John Calvin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John of the Cross, Martin Luther, Evelyn Underhill, A.W. Tozer, C.S. Lewis, Lesslie Newbigin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Merton, Karl Barth, David J. Bosch, Norman Vincent Peale, Francis Schaeffer, Dale Carnegie, Randy Pausch, Kyle Lake, etc...

this practice i instituted of having dead mentors has been a great one. it's helping to form me as a man and for that i'm forever grateful to them. (on that note, i have hopes and i pray often that in some forms i could be a dead mentor to someone else in 300 years somehow. but that's a thought to expound on for another day.)

on vacation i've been reading an amazing book. it has full on changed my life. (well, technically the proof is in the pudding as far as life change goes, so we'll see... but i feel as though it has definitely changed my life.)

it's a book i picked up off my late grandmother's shelf at some point. thankful to her that i could "borrow" her book. it has rocked my world. excited to write all about it tomorrow.