I was sitting in my room and studying when a thought dropped in my head, I really can’t remember what it was about but the thought ended with what I thought was a mockery chant we used to do when we were younger “follow follow make you shine”. For some reason, I was so convinced that I used to sing it with all my other friends and sometimes even dance to it and as I was thinking on the phrase; follow follow make me shine, I was inspired to write a little something.
It wasn’t until I had finished writing, that it suddenly occurred to me that the original chant is “borrow borrow make you shine” for when you borrow something from someone and you end up looking great in it, or for someone that has been marked as a perpetual borrower.
Anyways, I already wrote the article and everything in it still stands true. So for the purpose of this article, let’s all assume that the correct thing is “follow follow make me shine” because it really does.
'Follow follow make you shine' was one of my best childhood songs. We would sing it to make fun of any of our friends that we felt was copying something that someone else did but thinking of it now, was it really an insult or a form of high praise?
Right from birth everything we do is based on copying. Like one of my friends wrote a while back in an article, children learn to walk because they see other people; their parents, siblings etc., walk, she explained that most times, children with more siblings do walk earlier than usual because they’re surrounded by more “walking people” and I have found this to be true. I am fully convinced that if a child was to be raised by apes, as in the Legend of Tarzan, he would end up growing up to walk and talk like them.
As children we like to copy everything we see. We see an adult do something and we want to do it too, we hear an adult say something and we try to repeat it but as we begin to grow up and are able to make well guided decisions, we become responsible for who we follow or copy.
A child that was raised in an abusive home may be abusive to girls in school because that’s what he sees his father do and he doesn’t know any better, it’s not his fault but if he carries that behaviour and grows up to be an abusive man just like his father even after obviously knowing that it is wrong, then it becomes his fault.
So basically, it’s not really follow follow that makes you shine but rather it is who you follow that makes you shine.
I was listening to a sermon by my spiritual father, Reverend Temilolu Aliu earlier today and he was talking about divine process, he talked about how for everything God wants to do in your life he puts you on a process that will build capacity in you for the demands that the calling or career will bring. We know that God Himself will not come from heaven to take you on a process but he works through men so God will put a man in your life or put you in a place that will build you, guide you, release the locked deposits in you and maximize your potential.
I’ll be sharing an example from the sermon. God wanted to use Moses to deliver the children of Israel from bondage in Egypt and so he put him in a place and process to build him up for the task. Just as it’s not possible for a worldly Christian to conquer the world, God knew that it wasn’t possible for a man with a slave mentality to free the Israelite's from bondage and so He made a way for Moses to be found by Potiphar’s daughter and be raised in the palace but even after that, God still took Moses to the wilderness to further work on Him.
This shows us that even while God is taking us on a process, even as we’re copying or following the man that God has put in our lives we must not neglect the place of personal fellowship with our Maker. It is not enough to have a spiritual father or a mentor, you must also be a man or woman of the secret place, God Himself needs to brood upon you and shift and break the things that need to be broken.
Looking into Scriptures, we see some people that did follow follow and ended up shining because they followed the right people very closely; we see the story of Elijah and Elisha, Paul and Timothy, Paul and Titus, Moses and Joshua etc.
Lastly, I want to mention something my spiritual father always says; in life there will always be unconscious teachers, make sure you’re not an unconscious learner. I’ll use the example I mentioned in the beginning to explain this; the abusive father was an unconscious teacher, in that he was unconsciously teaching his son the wrong way to treat women, it’s possible that the son may think everything his father is doing is completely wrong and still grow up to be just like him because he was an unconscious learner. He hated what his father did but as he watched it happen, it somehow registered in his subconsciousness and he too ended up behaving like that.
Be careful who you follow, be careful what you grant access into your mind and your heart because these are the things that determine whether or not and how brightly you will shine.
Image Credit: scottcochrane.com