Tearing Through Short Stacks with Teenage Boys

My guys tear through their short stacks of pancakes.   And I mean that a couple of different ways.  Sure, we regularly impress Denny’s waitresses with the total number of pancakes our table consumes in a breakfast sitting.  The $4 All-You-Can-Eat Slam was surely not designed to make money on a group in our demographic. 

But there is still another way my guys tear through their short stacks.  They use their hands to rip the pancakes. 

It shouldn’t have caught me off-guard. But it did.  It only took a moment for me to pop off our booth’s vinyl cushion and break into a ‘How to Handle Your Cutlery’ mini-lesson. Being the father of three Ethiopian children, I should have been a little more graceful.   Table etiquette is clearly culturally bound.  All three of my mentees reminded me as much.

“I don’t care what people in here think” boasted the de facto leader with some swagger and scrunched eyes for emphasis.

“It’s way more efficient this way”

“You gotta admit that JP!” added the third.

They had a point.

But so did I.

In my mind, I knew wasn’t a hill to die on.  It wasn’t something to make them feel ashamed about.   But it was worth the discussion for sure. 

They deserve to know that there is a dominant culture that will judge them based on perceptions, wrong or right.   They deserve to know what particular decorum is in specific settings.   That’s why we talk about tipping when we get the bill.  It’s also why they get the ‘how to treat a lady’ speech right before the big dance.  The ability to interact and connect with divergent types of people is a useful skill.  And I want them to posses it.

This is a slice of mentoring.   But it is not the whole.  

Mentoring is greater than, not equal to the teaching of manners.

That’s why I’m not going to ‘trip’ if they tear up the hotcakes on our next trip to Dennys.   The number of meals we share together is actually the more important measure.   If I get to be around these guys as they mature into caring husbands, exceptional employees, involved fathers and courageous community leaders, then we both win.  We are both being made more and more into the image of God, under this scenario.

And that is worth infinitely more than stacks and stacks and stacks of pancakes, whether politely sliced or efficiently torn.