What does it mean to be a follower? In modern English, we sometimes use the term to mean "interested". We speak of someone following a political campaign, or the career of an athlete or television personality, or a musical performer. In the coming weeks, you might encounter someone - or you might be someone - who is following the Olympics.
In talking about leadership, we're not interested in interested. Someone can be interested in Christianity, for example, without being a follower of Christ. Someone can be interested in a political campaign without being a follower of the ideals espoused by a particular politician. You can be confident that both Obama and McCain have individuals on their staffs whose sole job is to be completely interested in the campaigns of their opponent. These folks may be following, but they are not followers.
Let's consider what it means to follow - to be a follower.
Rule 1: Followship is Personal
To follow - to be a follower - implies that there must be someone providing you with directions. It all comes back to a person. Even if someone claims to be a follower of a political ideal, or a religious or social movement, that ideal or movement has its roots in some person. A person who says they are a follower of Marxism is, in fact, a follower of Karl Marx. A person who says they are a Christian is, in fact, a follower of Christ.
The personal aspect of followship has important implications. The primary consideration is that you simply cannot follow more than one leader. You may think that you can manage it, but in reality, it's impossible. Head out to the mall, pick two people at random, and try to follow both of them. They may travel in the same direction for a while, but sooner or later, they'll split... and you'll have to decide which one of them you will continue to follow.
Jesus made this point when he told his disciples, "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." (Mt 6:24). If you try to follow two leaders, sooner or later, you will need to decide which one of them you are really going to follow, because followship is personal.
Rule 2: Followship is Intelligent
Have you ever heard the term "sheeple"? It's a derogatory term used to describe people who don't give any thought to who they're following. It's an interesting slur, because it gets to the heart of a truth about followship: to be an effective follower requires being an intelligent follower.
My wife and I have spent some time with our girls teaching them what it means to be an intelligent follower - though not quite in those terms. We have tried to teach them to be discerning in choosing who they will follow. If you're a parent yourself, you've probably done the same thing, with the goal of teaching your children about "stranger danger". I want my children to be aware of the fact that not everybody is a nice person, and that they need to be careful and above all think about who it is they are going to follow. This is a good lesson for children to learn, and for adults to reconsider - to be an effective follower means that you need to be a thinking follower.
Deciding who you will start to follow is an important choice, and one that requires thought and consideration. Effective followship demands more than that initial consideration, though; it requires constant re-evaluation of the position of the leader, the position of the follower, and the direction in which both leader and follower are headed. An effective follower knows where they want to go, and chooses to follow a leader because doing so will get them to their final destination. An intelligent follower will realize when they've gotten off course because they're focused on getting to their destination, and not just on following someone blindly.
As a practical example, let's say that I find someone who says they are heading somewhere I've never been before - maybe Chicago. I've got a vague idea where Chicago is, relative to Pittsburgh, but I've never been there, so the idea of following someone makes sense to me. We hop in our cars, set out, and a few hours later, I see a sign that says, "Welcome to New York".
What do I do at that point? Well, if I'm an unthinking follower - one of the sheeple - then I continue following them, wherever they may be headed. However, most people at that point would probably either turn around, or stop and ask the person they're following, "Do you really know where you're going?" An effective follower is one who is is thinking not just about who they're following, but where they're going and how they're getting to the final destination.
In the book of Acts, Luke commends the Berean believers for being thoughtful, intelligent, and discerning followers of Christ. They earned this reputation because they were careful to check and make sure that what Paul was teaching them lined up with what they already knew about God and the Messiah (Acts 17:11). They knew where they wanted to go, spiritually, and were careful to make sure that the leaders they followed were taking them there.
Rule 3: Followship is Active
So - let's say you have some idea of what your final destination is. You also know that you can't get there on your own, so you've be careful and discerning and looked for someone to lead you to where you want to be. You find what looks like just the right person, and say, "Yes - this is the person I'm going to follow."
And then, you sit there, and wait. And wait. And wait some more, because the person you've decided to follow is just sitting there, going nowhere - and now, you're going nowhere with him.
To be a follower implies motion and activity. If a leader isn't moving, he can't be leading; and if a follower isn't moving, he can't be following. There's something very wrong in the relationship between a follower and a leader if one or the other isn't doing their particular job. Imagine a major league baseball pitcher who was unwilling to throw the ball, or a catcher who was unwilling to catch the ball once it was thrown! A leader who is unwilling to or unable to lead isn't a leader, no matter what they might call themselves; and a follower who is unwilling or unable to follow isn't a follower, no matter what they might want to think.
Whether you are walking along behind someone or following them spiritually, there must be some form of activity on both your parts before you can actually claim to be leader and follower. Unfortunately, while we desire excitement and interesting activities in our lives, the day-to-day activity of leadership and followship is often mundane. In crossing the continental United States, Lewis and Clark overcame hostile Indians, endured harsh weather, and made their way through seemingly impassible wilderness. While doing all this, they and each one of the men with them each took about 9 million steps. If they had ever lost their will to take that next, boring, mundane, stupid step, then they never would have completed their journey. An effective follower needs to recognize that while activity is neccesary, it is often routine - and that it is the dedication to the routine activities that is critical in followship.
The book of Nehemiah tells the story of the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. One of the key verses in the book is Nehemiah 4:6, where Nehemiah simply notes, "So built we the wall... for the people had a mind to work." Nehemiah was the leader of the effort, but their achievment - the building of the wall - was the result of the fact that both the leaders and the people had a mind to work, and were willing to take all the mundane steps that were required in order to reach their destination.
In the next few posts, I'll be expanding on these three rules of effective followship, and we'll look at what the Bible has to say about Christians and followship in particular.
Leadership 101: Followship
"Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ."
— 1 Corinthians 11:1
The world is focused on leadership. You can find training classes for leaders, books on leadership, entire web sites devoted to essays on and analysis of leadership teachniques. A quick search on Google for "leadership" turns up around 187 million results.
A similar search on Google for "followship" turns up less than 30,000 pages.
In everyday life, it is far to easy for the concerns of the world to leak into the life of the believer. If everyone around us says that leadership is important, and if our own experience is that leadership is important... well, then, studying leadership must be an important subject, right? When we fall into this way of thinking, we forget that God's ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:9), and that man often sees things very differently from the way God sees things (1 Samuel 16:7, Matthew 20:16).
God has made it very clear that followship, not leadership, is vitally important in the life of every believer. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed to His heavely Father and said, "...nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt." We call ourselves followers of Christ (1 Peter 2:21), and yet, as a group, we spend more time and effort trying to find or create leaders than we do trying to teach people how to be followers.
"Sure," you might be thinking. "We spend that time worrying about leadership, because leadership is hard! Anybody can be a follower." The reverse is certainly true as well, though. Anybody can be a leader. The focus on leadership is not to teach someone how to lead, but to teach them how to lead effectively.
Similarly, if we want people to be effective followers, we need to take the time and effort to teach them about what that means. Even more importantly, since all Christian leaders, by definition, must be followers of Christ, you can see that a believer must be an effective follower before they can be made into an effective leader.
I'm going to spend the next few blog posts examining what it means to be a follower of Christ. Before I get into that, though, let's look at what it means to be a good follower in general. Later on, we'll take these principles, and see what the Bible has to say specifically about those aspects of following Christ.
The Linux Kernel Boot Process
A nice little article on what actually happens when the Linux kernel boots, courtesy of Gustavo Duarte.
Online Biblical Language Resources
Since I posted a bunch of embedded Linux links earlier today, I feel like the "theologian" part of the blog is feeling a little anemic. With that in mind, here's some links for online Biblical langauge resources.
- Mechon Mamre includes parallel Hebrew and English texts, grouped according to Torah, Prophets, and Writings. It also includes links to audio files of the passages being read in Hebrew. I've not had the chance to use this very much, but I want to. Hebrew is a wonderful and interesting language, and I don't want what little skill I have with it to atrophy.
- A parallel Hebrew OT is avaialble via the HTML Bible. There is also a parallel Greek NT as well. Oddly enough, the Hebrew includes both Hebrew and transliterated texts, while the Greek only includes transliterated text. Odd.
- There's also online versions of the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew OT into Koine Greek, available from the Bible Database.
- Biblos.com includes a lot of different langage translations online, including four Chinese translations. It also includes a parallel Greek, Hebrew, and Latin translation for both the OT and NT.
- All of which are nice, but my workhorse of online Bibles is the Blue Letter Bible. It's a bit on the slower side, but the amount of data it provides - verse-by-verse links to translations, original text, lexical definitions, commentaries, cross references, and the like - are all presented very nicely.
Embedded Linux Activity
There's a lot going on in the embedded Linux community these days. Just some points of interest:
Aaaaand that's it for today. Enjoy!
- There's a new official linux-embedded mailing list, linux-embedded, that's seeing quite a bit of activity. Very encouraging. Lots of participation from the likes of Tim Bird, Mike Frysinger, Matt Mackall, Rob Landley, Wolfgang Denk, Robert Schwebel, Sam Ravnborg, Bill Gatliff, Paul Mundt... if you recognize any of those names, you know this is a list you want to keep track of. To quote Matt Mackall, "Linux-embedded is the place to be, folks. It's intended to be the catch-all list for embedded kernel work."
- Rob Landley's Firmware Linux project is plugging along. Firmware Linux uses qemu to build systems natively under emulation, though version 0.4.0 includes support for using distcc to accelerate a native build by calling out to the cross compiler. Supported platforms include arm, mips, ppc, x86, and x86-64, and Rob's stated goal is to support all the emulation targets that qemu supports. Neat stuff.
- Once again showing that mere mortals can't hope to keep up with his pace, Rob is also working on toybox, a set of standards-compliant command line utilities in a single binary. Rob was involved with busybox , and was the maintainer of that project for a while, so toybox is definitely interesting in light of the "let's start from scratch and do it better" approach he's taking.
- Fedora has several architecture-specific projects going on, including Fedora for ARM, SPARC, and PPC. My former boss-man at TimeSys, Manas Saksena, now works for Marvell, and is apparently involved with the Fedora on ARM project.
- If you've ever built a toolchain using crosstool, you may want to look into crosstool-ng, an attempt to take the ideas behind crosstool and re-implement them in a more user-friendly way.
Aaaaand that's it for today. Enjoy!
From the "What were they thinking?" Files
When I shut down my laptop, there are - inevitably - one or two programs running in the background that do not shut down properly. I haven't investigated what they are, but I suspect they're tray notification applets or something similar. In any case, I get a nice little Windows dialog telling me that the system is trying to shut down those programs, but gosh darn it, they just won't listen! A progress bar slowly fills, and when it reaches 100%, Windows (probably with much regret, and maybe just a little glee) kills off those unruly processes so it can finish shutting down my computer.
This is a momentary annoyance. If I'm waiting for the laptop to shut down, I can just click on the button that says "Go ahead and kill these processes now", and everything is OK. If I'm not waiting, then the timer runs out, and Windows does my dirty work for me.
What got to me as I did this - for the Nth time this morning, when I shut down my laptop to pack it away and head to work - was that this is absolutely insane.
Not the way Windows handles things. That's (shockingly) pragmatic. There's a recognition that not everything will work perfectly, and sometimes, you might need to apply a little brute force to smooth out the rough edges. What annoys me is that somewhere, there are apparently software developers - corporate software developers, folks making and selling software for a living - that have apparently managed to design, implement, build, debug, and test their stuff without ever shutting down their computers.
Because, you know, if they had ever shut down their systems, they would see that their software doesn't work.
What were they thinking?
This is like having a car where, when you turn off the engine, you need to pop the hood and disconnect the battery to finish turning off the radio. I mean, sure, it works, sort of. The car manufacturer has dealt with idiot radio designers long enough that they include a specialized bit of machinery that will even automatically disconnect and reconnect the battery for you so you don't accidentally leave your radio playing all night. So it all works, kind of.
The sloppiness and sloth involved in not even bothering to make sure that your software reacts properly when the computer shuts down is staggering to me. There are guidelines for this kind of stuff. Windows messages to handle. SDK examples galore about how to do it properly. And yet, professional software developers still manage to get it wrong.
I'd like to blame it all on management - the idea that someone, somewhere, decided to ship this software, even though there were some "non-critical" bugs, like, oh, not shutting down properly. Unfortunately, I think it's probably more likely that someone got sloppy, spent a few minutes poking at the problem, and said, "Oh, that's just the way Windows is. It's good enough."
So my annoyance doesn't really come from some software that doesn't shut down properly. It comes from the fact that there's someone, somewhere, in my chosen profession who just doesn't care enough about good software to bother fixing a glaringly obvious problem in their code, even though that's what they're paid to do.
That's just plain disheartening.
This is a momentary annoyance. If I'm waiting for the laptop to shut down, I can just click on the button that says "Go ahead and kill these processes now", and everything is OK. If I'm not waiting, then the timer runs out, and Windows does my dirty work for me.
What got to me as I did this - for the Nth time this morning, when I shut down my laptop to pack it away and head to work - was that this is absolutely insane.
Not the way Windows handles things. That's (shockingly) pragmatic. There's a recognition that not everything will work perfectly, and sometimes, you might need to apply a little brute force to smooth out the rough edges. What annoys me is that somewhere, there are apparently software developers - corporate software developers, folks making and selling software for a living - that have apparently managed to design, implement, build, debug, and test their stuff without ever shutting down their computers.
Because, you know, if they had ever shut down their systems, they would see that their software doesn't work.
What were they thinking?
This is like having a car where, when you turn off the engine, you need to pop the hood and disconnect the battery to finish turning off the radio. I mean, sure, it works, sort of. The car manufacturer has dealt with idiot radio designers long enough that they include a specialized bit of machinery that will even automatically disconnect and reconnect the battery for you so you don't accidentally leave your radio playing all night. So it all works, kind of.
The sloppiness and sloth involved in not even bothering to make sure that your software reacts properly when the computer shuts down is staggering to me. There are guidelines for this kind of stuff. Windows messages to handle. SDK examples galore about how to do it properly. And yet, professional software developers still manage to get it wrong.
I'd like to blame it all on management - the idea that someone, somewhere, decided to ship this software, even though there were some "non-critical" bugs, like, oh, not shutting down properly. Unfortunately, I think it's probably more likely that someone got sloppy, spent a few minutes poking at the problem, and said, "Oh, that's just the way Windows is. It's good enough."
So my annoyance doesn't really come from some software that doesn't shut down properly. It comes from the fact that there's someone, somewhere, in my chosen profession who just doesn't care enough about good software to bother fixing a glaringly obvious problem in their code, even though that's what they're paid to do.
That's just plain disheartening.
Sawdust Shock and Waterbeds for Cows
Via Marginal Revolution, a link to a WSJ story on the economics of sawdust, and... cow waterbeds. No - really.
File system geekery
I find file systems work interesting. This is partly because that's what my current job is, and partly because I am, very honestly, a raging geek.
With that in mind, here's some interesting links for those who care about such things as well:
And last but not least, a link to the list of file systems currently available in the Linux kernel.
With that in mind, here's some interesting links for those who care about such things as well:
- BTRFS - a copy on write filesystem for Linux focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.
- HAMMER - a highly available clustered filesystem being developed for DragonFlyBSD
- LFS - a log structured file system for Linux that supports snapshots.
- POHMELFS - the Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System.
And last but not least, a link to the list of file systems currently available in the Linux kernel.
Being a single-issue voter
In the past, I've seen people make comments about "single-issue voters". Usually something dismissive, along the lines of "You can't just be a single-issue voter, you know."
The problem is... everybody is a single-issue voter, whether they want to admit that or not.
How does the saying go? "Everything is always in the last place you look, because once you find it, you stop looking." I think the negative view of a "single-issue" voter stems from a problem of perception. We like to think of voting as a matter of selecting a candidate, when it is better modeled as a matter of eliminating competing candidates until we're left with a single option.
Face it - the chances that a political candidate will exactly match your views on all significant topics of political discourse is virtually nil. What you are left with, in that case, is an attempt to find the candidate that best matches your values. The logical and almost instinctive way to do this is to decide what issues matter most to you, and then eliminate candidates who don't match your views on that subject. If you have more than one candidate left, then you go on to the next most important issue. Lather, rinse, repeat until you are left with one person, the one who most closely represents your views.
This is where the "single-issue" voter comes from, and it's why we are all "single-issue" voters. When you follow this very natural selection process, you will always have a definite reason for rejecting a candidate. You'll find what you were looking for - a reason to reject - and after you find what you're looking for, you'll stop looking.
So if we're all single-issue voters, what does it mean then when someone explicitly hauls out that title as an accusation? Remember that the process of elimination is personal. You are taking the issues that are important to you, and deciding which candidates to eliminate based on your personal values regarding those issues. That should be enough to provide an accurate translation of the single-issue voter accusation, as follows:
In other words, it's an accusation that clocks in with all the weight of a third-grader's taunt - if that. Yep, I'm a single-issue voter. So are you. So let's stop arguing like a couple of kids on a playground and at least try to act like adults, m'kay?
The problem is... everybody is a single-issue voter, whether they want to admit that or not.
How does the saying go? "Everything is always in the last place you look, because once you find it, you stop looking." I think the negative view of a "single-issue" voter stems from a problem of perception. We like to think of voting as a matter of selecting a candidate, when it is better modeled as a matter of eliminating competing candidates until we're left with a single option.
Face it - the chances that a political candidate will exactly match your views on all significant topics of political discourse is virtually nil. What you are left with, in that case, is an attempt to find the candidate that best matches your values. The logical and almost instinctive way to do this is to decide what issues matter most to you, and then eliminate candidates who don't match your views on that subject. If you have more than one candidate left, then you go on to the next most important issue. Lather, rinse, repeat until you are left with one person, the one who most closely represents your views.
This is where the "single-issue" voter comes from, and it's why we are all "single-issue" voters. When you follow this very natural selection process, you will always have a definite reason for rejecting a candidate. You'll find what you were looking for - a reason to reject - and after you find what you're looking for, you'll stop looking.
"He's pro-abortion."
"She's opposed to gay marriage."
"He supported the war in Iraq."
"She supports legalizing drugs."
So if we're all single-issue voters, what does it mean then when someone explicitly hauls out that title as an accusation? Remember that the process of elimination is personal. You are taking the issues that are important to you, and deciding which candidates to eliminate based on your personal values regarding those issues. That should be enough to provide an accurate translation of the single-issue voter accusation, as follows:
"You're a single-issue voter"
means
"You don't share my values, therefore, you're wrong."
In other words, it's an accusation that clocks in with all the weight of a third-grader's taunt - if that. Yep, I'm a single-issue voter. So are you. So let's stop arguing like a couple of kids on a playground and at least try to act like adults, m'kay?
Power to become the sons of God
"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." - John 1:12-13
These verses caught my eye last week. As I read through the Bible, I am consistently amazed at just how much information is contained in just a few short sentences, particularly in the New Testament. Take Jude, for example - there are 25 verses in the entire book, and I know that I could preach a four part series on the first three verses alone. That's how much gets packed into those first three verses.
The first chapter of the gospel of John is the same way. There is a ton of theology, doctrine, and amazing revelation poured into that chapter. Let's take a look at just these two verses, and you'll see what I mean.
I. "But as many as received him..."
Consider the phrase "as many as". What follows is contingent upon accepting Christ. It isn't someone else's decision, not even God's - it's yours. Anyone who cared to receive Christ, experienced the consequences of that reception. That reception is a matter of faith, receiving him for who he was, the promised Messiah. Most of all, Jesus Christ was definitely a him, not an it. He is described as the living Word earlier in the chapter, and here is described as an individual person. Jesus was God made flesh, and we need to relate to Him and receive Him as a living person, not as a spirit, a thing, or an unknowable entity.
II. "... to them gave he the power to become the sons of God..."
This living Word, this person, this Jesus - he had both the right and the ability to make a specific grant grant of power: the power to become a son of God. The term "power" is a Greek work that can be used to mean privilege, liberty, or right. Those who received Jesus did not gain the potential to become the sons of God; instead, they gained the privilege and right to become the children (sons) of God (Romans 8:15).
III. "...even to them that believe on his name"
This phrase tells us that there is a very specific way to receive Jesus Christ - you have to believe on His name. Jesus' name - His reputation, His authority, His character - are the only way by which we can be saved (Acts 4:12).
Believing means having faith in something, or trusting in the truth of something. You have faith in Jesus' name (reputation, authority, character). You can have all the faith that you want, but unless you put that faith in something, it's useless; and unless you put that faith in Jesus, it's unprofitable. The purpose of that faith is to accept Jesus so we can be reconciled with God. We are sinners, at enmity with God. (Romans 8:7), and the only way we can become sons of God is if we are first reconciled with the Father (Ephesians 2:16). This reconciliation is only possible through Jesus; He is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6)
IV. "Which were born..."
Here, John gets to the gist of the matter: how salvation works, and how it doesn't work. He starts off with three negative examples, telling us what salvation isn't. His introduction in the previous sentence - receiving Jesus based on his name - lays the foundation, and this verse tells us what we should avoid adding to that foundation, no matter how much we're tempted.
First off, he tells us that salvation is not a matter of who you are ("not of blood"). Your family, your nationality, your race - none of that matters to God, and it is not enough to save you.
Secondly, salvation is not a matter of what you do ("nor of the will of the flesh"). No matter what we do, we can't measure up to God's standard of righteousness (Romans 3:23). If we try, we will always fall short.
Thirdly, salvation is not a matter of what others do ("nor of the will of man"). No other man, organization, or other earthly entity can declare you to be saved or unsaved. No other human being in all the world knows the state of your relationship with Jesus Christ except you; and no other human being can establish or disestablish that relationship for you.
Finally, John tells us what salvation is - it is a matter of god ("but of God.") It is God alone who can save (Jonah 2:9). But it is the receiving of Jesus that grants the privilege of salvation by becoming a member of God's family. The conclusion has to be, then, that if God alone can save, and salvation is only accomplished through Jesus... then, obviously, Jesus must be God.
All in all, some pretty amazing stuff. The simplicity of salvation, the certainty of receiving Christ, the adoption of sons, the denial of person, works and organized religion as a means of salvation, and finally, three words that make it obvious that our Savior isn't just a man of God, but is God himself. Wow.
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