Shepherd's OS

A part of my soul burns right now with the messages of Haggai and Zechariah, as they are our current study in house church. I’ve summed it up as, “Just think what God will do if you will only obey.” Zechariah in particular spins out these marvelous visions of grandeur, even to the point of eclipsing the reigns of David and Solomon. While he certainly meant this literally, more importantly was the insistence God would do it on one level or another. What God does in Heaven does not wait on us to participate, but what happens here on our plane of existence most assuredly is conditioned for us by our level of participation with His plans.
There remains a great deal of human history yet to be written, and so very much of it will be what it will be. A certain thread of it all remains what God has planned all along. But His plans include a vast amount of room for those who choose to participate knowingly and willingly. His glory will shine, but there is plenty of room for us to turn and face that glory and bask in its glow. No one can explain in any detail what that might turn out to be, not without a specific word from God, but we can know in general His glory welcomed into our lives will certainly bring massive changes hard to imagine.
In the process of pursuing my own portion of that, I find myself sharing in a lot of things I never expected. Oddly enough, I now understand the roaring anger Jesus felt when cleansing the Temple. The Shepherd’s heart understands not every sheep in the flock will make a proper sacrifice for the altar. It’s hard to characterize in concrete terms what that means, but in a broad general sense, the shepherd must care for a lot of those who simply aren’t going to make it. Even if you know precisely who they are in advance, you cannot in good conscience, in seeking God’s glory, offer them any less good opportunity to graze in green pastures and drink the still waters. You still have to carry that rod and staff on their behalf to protect them from however much harm you can deflect.
I apply this in every sphere of my life. I try to make room for the idiots who will never get it. Yes, at times I get tired of it, but I am angered most when others offered a chance to take up the staff don’t quite understand their personal vision of efficiency has no place in the Kingdom.
Let’s take a familiar example: computer software. God appoints that certain people will receive the gift and calling to understand how to make computer software. Only some precious few will ever hear the shepherd’s calling in it. Most will not. Most only want to know what’s in it for them. We who hold the shepherd’s heart understand that; we aren’t the least bit surprised. All the more so when the very same talent making people so good at working with computers tends to make them so bad at understanding people. So we have a huge load of code jockeys who try to program people by how they write their code, trying to force people to fit some ideal which favors their private vision of what computers are supposed to do.
This lack of interest in what the rest of the world would like to have is why coders seldom get into management positions. You can’t sell that purity of computer perfection to ordinary humans. So we have software companies who hire coders and pay them to do things the coders would rather not do. Meanwhile, the burning vision of coders drives them to things like Open Source software. How nice that so many projects out there are available for free downloads — if it happens to meet your needs. Getting Open Source coders to consider what average computer users actually want is harder than pulling teeth. All the more so when the project in question swells in size, requiring larger numbers of coders to work together. Unless the project management can keep them under a good humanitarian direction, they will create perfect software almost no one likes to use. Sure, people like them will love it, and they’ll be convinced of their own greatness. Meanwhile, the rest of the world ignores it because it’s contrary to their needs and purposes.
Open Source people as a whole don’t understand because as a whole they aren’t responsible to anyone who understands people. The incidence of shepherd’s hearts among Open Sources coders is negligible. And it makes me angry, because God says anti-shepherd attitudes make Him angry. Granted, the profit seeking exploiters of the merchant culture isn’t that much better, but the resulting software does tend to meet human needs. What do you suppose is the likelihood of ever having a software culture based on the shepherd’s heart? People who love people tend not to write software. Yes, there are other ways to look at this, but I am a prophet of God and it’s my job to warn humanity God is not pleased. There aren’t many software projects, commercial or free, which please God.
If someone ever does create a software project with a shepherd’s heart, that’s what God would run on His computers.