This is the fifth installment in my Mentors Blog Series. Today I honor Westin Noble. I met Westin Noble during a trip to New York to compete in a chorale competition at the Lincoln Center and I’ve only had one email conversation with him since then to thank him for his mentorship. The total sum of his mentoring was in the form of encouragement. He was conducting us and doing a workshop with our choir and he stopped the song in the middle. He walked over to me and he said, “You’re a beautiful man.” I don’t know why, but that stuck with me. Something about the way he noticed me in a crowd of people, stopped everything and chose to recognize me was powerful. It gave me great courage in a time when I was trying to figure some things out.

Later I learned some other interesting tidbits about him. The most notable was his involvement in WWII. This is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Due largely to the intense patriotism of World War II, and anticipating an eventual call-up, Noble volunteered for military service and was called to active duty in February 1943, in the spring of his senior year. Nevertheless, arrangements were made for him and others to accelerate their studies and complete their final semester prior to commencement. He graduated magna cum laude. Trained as a tank driver, he saw action in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and was part of the main Allied thrust into the heart of Nazi Germany in 1945. Noble “liberated” some items from Berlin during the initial stages of the Allied occupation, including a marble bust of Beethoven previously owned by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, which he mailed home among several items.

Pretty amazing right?

Past Mentor Blog Posts:
Andy Benton
Cheronn Foster
Jason Foster
Coach Vance Walberg

This is the fourth installment of my Mentors Blog Series. Today I honor Coach Vance Walberg. He is currently the Assistant Coach at UMASS, but he was the Varsity Boy’s Basketball Coach at Clovis West High School while I was in school there. He was also my PE Coach. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but a PE Coach CAN have a profound impact on someone. I was never a motivated PE student, but there was something about Walberg that motivated and inspired me. One thing you’ve got to know about me is that negative motivators have little-to-no affect on me. Walberg drew it out, he made you believe you could do anything and then you would do it. He was tough on his students, but in a positive way. He made the class come together, cheer each other on and he forced us to know all about Character Counts.

I remember him teaching us about TRRFCC (Terrific). This acronym is what enabled me to remember the 6 Pillars of Character Counts.

• Trustworthiness
• Respect
• Responsibility
• Fairness
• Caring
• Citizenship

If you dig up the dirt, you know he wasn’t perfect. But looking past anything negative, this guy I respect. He wrote a college recommendation for me to Pepperdine, where he later coached for two years. He was one of my mentors.

Past Mentor Blog Posts:
Andy Benton
Cheronn Foster
Jason Foster

This is the third installment of my mentors blog series. Today I recognize my brother, Jason, as a mentor. There are really two main reasons I think he’s been a great mentor in my life. 1. He’s shown me a lot about fatherhood. You don’t realize how much you pick up on that stuff, until you have your own kids. 2. He, like my sister, has taken control of his life in the area of physical fitness. I used to be the skinny one in the family. But my siblings are putting me to shame, running all their marathons and for those two reasons. I am proud to say that Jason is one of my mentors.

Past Mentor Blog Posts:
Andy Benton
Cheronn Foster 

Some familiar faces around New Vintage Church released a new music video…

This is the second release from my Mentors blog series. My sister is one of my mentors. She’s resilient. She’s smart. She’s self-reliant. She takes responsibility for her own life. She is a great woman-of-God and awesome Aunt. Here’s a part of why she is a mentor.

Other Mentors Blog Post:
Andy Benton 

When I was a freshman at Pepperdine University, my roommate and I were invited to attend a bible study on Sunday nights at the president’s home on campus. It was on those nights, in that invitation-only crowd of students I learned some life-lessons from a man-of-God. Andy Benton was one of my mentors and in this video, you can see why… he’s a man of prayer.

Thank you Andy for investing in students like me.

This post is a part of a series of posts on my life mentors.

I love releasing these.

Everybody has mentors. They’re the people you look up to. Most of the time they don’t even know they’re your mentor, but you’ve chosen to learn from them. I’ve had tons of people I’ve looked up to. One thing remains as the bottom line of every mentor, they’re Christian men and women and I respect them all for different reasons. I’m in the process of writing a series of posts on those mentors. Who knows… maybe you’re on the list and you didn’t even know it.

The purpose of this blog series is to honor them and so that I can flesh out exactly what and why I learned from them. The first one releases this Monday.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear from you… who are/were your mentors and why?

I wrote a quick poem the other day. For some odd reason I thought, “What if they had email in the middle-ages?” And this is what my brain cooked up.

If the kings of old had through email told
their subjects and knights their orders,
the lives of wives and simpleton tribes
would’ve kept from being martyrs.

Chew on that for a minute.

I dream of taking my unborn daughter (she’s due May 22) to an event like this one day.

Do you have one of these in your community?
Tell me about it.