I Don't Offer a Program. I Open My Life.

What mentoring actually is—and why it's different from everything else you've tried

"And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others." (2 Timothy 2:2)

When my kids were growing up, their friends knew where the pantry was.

They didn't ask. They didn't wait to be served. They just came in, opened it, and took what they needed. Sometimes they sat at the counter and we talked. Sometimes they just grabbed something and kept moving. Either way the pantry was open and they knew it.

It wasn't until years later—when someone opened her life to me the same way—that I understood what I had been doing all along.

I went through a mentoring program in 2018. For the first time someone invited me to know her—not as a teacher, not as someone with content to deliver—just as a person. She opened her life and let me look inside.

What I found wasn't a curriculum. It was her. How she had come to know Jesus. How they related to one another. The things she had learned in the hard seasons and the things she was still learning.

I wasn't being taught. I was being shown.

And in being shown her life I started to see my own differently. I started to understand what it meant to be known—not just useful or capable or impressive, but actually known. And I started to sense that being known was somehow connected to knowing Jesus more fully. That coming to know another person in the safety of a trusted relationship was itself a way of coming to know him.

I realized I had been doing this my whole life without knowing what to call it.

The open pantry. The door that was always unlocked. The willingness to let people into my actual life—not the curated version, but the real one. The one with the mess and the questions and the things I was still working out before God.

That was never a strategy. It was just how I lived.

The mentoring program gave it a name. And it gave me a vision—for what it could look like to create that kind of space intentionally, for women who were hungry for exactly that kind of knowing.

That's where 4th Gen came from.

If you asked me what 4th Gen is I would tell you this:

It is a year spent learning to know ourselves in Christ by coming to know each other in safe community—and so learning to let ourselves be known.

Not a Bible study. Not coaching. Not therapy. Not a church substitute.

Just a year. A small group of women. A covenant about what we each have to give and what we each hope to receive. A space where being known is not only safe—it's the whole point.

I am not the teacher. Jesus is. I am the model—the one who opens the pantry first, who is willing to be known first.

Because when you know you are beloved—really know it—you can open the pantry without fear of what people will find inside.

The name 4th Gen comes from 2 Timothy 2:2. Paul to Timothy. Timothy to reliable people. Reliable people to others.

Not a program handed down. A life opened up. What you receive you entrust to others—not as a duty but as an overflow. Because what was opened to you changed you and you want the same for someone else.

That's the vision. Not to raise women to my level. To walk alongside them until they find their own—and then watch them open their pantry for someone else.

If that's you—keep reading. There's more to come.

Reach me at [email protected]. And my book—You Were Made for This—is coming soon at runwithhorses.org.