An Indirect Mentor - Leighton Ford

Leighton Ford is mostly known for serving alongside Billy Graham. More recently, he has shifted his focus toward mentoring young leaders. His son, Kevin, served with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Virginia when I was at UVA. I remember meeting Kevin at a chapter camp at Windy Gap and then buying Leighton's book titled Transforming Leadership. I read the book that summer.

Years later, I had the opportunity to meet Leighton Ford when he spoke at MVPC. I reread Transforming Leadership before he came and I was able to see how much I have learned (or better put - realized what I have yet to learn and experience) about leadership after 14 years. At MVPC, he preached on the subject of "Paying Attention" and he shared from his new book The Attentive Life.


I bought the book but I didn't open it until this weekend. I am 2/3 of the way through it (the last 1/3 is always the hardest to press through) and I have been refreshed by the content, especially his emphasis on slowing down in our attention-deficit culture.

As I have been reading the book, I have felt like I have been mentored by a great person. I know that I have found a treasure of an author, a book and/or a person when I get that sense. I love feeling like I am sitting down with a person as I hear his/her voice through a book.

One area of mentoring from Ford came from his variety of life-giving perspectives on love. One of his definitions of love is "focused attention." He shares the following words from the Scottish preach Alexander Whyte about love based on the apostle Paul's words from Ephesians 3:

The love of Christ has no border: it has no shore: it has no bottom. The love of Christ is boundless: it is bottomless: it is infinite: it is divine. That is passeth knowledge is the greatest thing that ever was said, about it... We shall come to the shore, we shall strike the bottom of every other love: but never of the love of Christ!... You, who have once cast yourself into it, and upon it -- the great mystic speaks of it as if it were at once an ocean and a mountain, --- you will never come to the length of it, or to the breadth of it, or to the depth of it, or to the height of it. To all eternity, the love of Christ to you will be new.

Let that mentor, refresh and restore you today as you consider the love of Christ.

I know that I felt my soul restored by that quote and many other prayers and stories in this book.