Twelve Qualities of Sponsorship
1. I will not help you to stay and wallow in limbo.
2. I will help you to grow, to become more productive, by your definition.
3. I will help you become more autonomous, more loving of yourself, more excited, less sensitive, more free to become the authority for your own living.
4. I can not give you dreams or "fix you up" simply because I can not.
5. I can not give you growth, or grow for you. You must grow for yourself by facing reality, grim as it may be at times.
6. I can not take away your loneliness or your pain.
7. I can not sense your world for you, evaluate your goals for you, tell you what is best for your world; because you have your own world in which you must live.
8. I can not convince you of the necessity to make the vital decision of choosing the frightening uncertainty of growing over the safe misery of remaining static.
9. I want to be with you and know you as a rich and growing friend; yet I can not get close to you when you choose not to grow.
10. When I begin to care for you out of pity or when I begin to lose faith in you, then I am inhibiting both for you and for me.
11. You must know and understand my help is conditional. I will be with you and "hang in there" with you so long as I continue to get even the slightest hint that you are still trying to grow.
12. If you can accept this, then perhaps we can help each other to become what God meant us to be, mature adults, leaving childishness forever to the little children of the world
They say your sponsor should not be a close friend, that there should be an objectivity there so she can see what is there, not what she or you see what you want to see. Sponsorship for me was often a two way street.
Some people need TLC, allowed time to heal. Others need tough love, so they can't since into depression and they need the Good Orderly Direction, because they just don't know. You can't know what you have never been taught.
