Denzel Washington says: “How important it is to give children a firm foundation? Show me a successful individual and I’ll show you someone who had real positive influences in his or her life. I don’t care what you do for a living—if you do it well I’m sure there was someone cheering you on or showing you the way. A mentor. I’ve had that push in my life, going back as far as I can remember.”

Denzel Washington considers his godly, hardworking parents as his first mentors, but when he was 6 years old, he spent his after-school hours at a Boys Club where he learned how to play ball and how to focus and set his mind on goals. He learned also about the importance of personal choices. He says, “I learned about consequences and the difference between right and wrong.”

There was a special teacher guiding the children in that Boys Club, a man who so impressed Washington that the little 6-year-old began to imitate the teacher. The teacher hung college pennants on the wall, pennants from the schools where “his kids” had graduated. The little boy’s goal became to graduate from college and to send his teacher a pennant to go on that wall.

Washington and his family lived in an inner-city neighborhood where he might have been labeled a “troubled youth” if it had not been for his mother’s intervention of working long hours to provide prep school tuition. At Oakland Academy, there was a special English teacher who always had his students begin the day by reading The New York Times. “That opened up a whole new world for me,” says Washington. “I started caring about what was going on outside my own small protected environment – Vietnam, Watergate, people struggling to make ends meet — I was soaking it all in through the morning paper.”

And then there was the teacher who loved Shakespeare and asked Denzel to do a scene from Hamlet. Later, another English teacher wrote a recommendation for grad school–his words were so complementary that Washington kept the letter in his pocket for years. Whenever things became tough, he would pull it out and read it again and say to himself, “It’ll all work out; something big is coming.”

We all need mentors, and we can mentor other lives as well. This Guidepost article, written by one of my favorite actors, prompted me to look back and remember those whom God sent into my life.

I read a greeting card once that said: “People come and go throughout a lifetime, but some come and touch your life in such a way that you are never the same again.” I wonder what I would have become had special people not touched my life.

My fifth-grade teacher stooped down and looked straight into my eyes; her words encouraged me to study and learn, and she gave me a passion for the written word. There was a young girl in ninth grade who asked me to be her friend when I was lonely and insecure and desperately needing a friend. Later, a neighbor took walks with me and prayed for me, becoming my spiritual mentor, and changing my life forever. Through the years, there were friends who showed up at just the right time, sharing their stories and prayers. Beginning with my mother, the mentors in my life were sent by God to shape and strengthen me.

Denzel Washington concluded his story by saying, “I had tremendous help along the way. Behind every successful person there’s always someone, a parent, teacher, coach, role model. It starts somewhere. There’s no reason it can’t start with you.”