Follow back

After a friend took his time to tell me about twitter: trending topics, tweeting directly at celebs etc – I just knew I’d fall in love with it. So, I joined, but discovered there was much more to it. The quantity of followers you have, and the quality of what you tweet determine how much fun it will be for you. My 1st few weeks on twitter wasn’t fun at all – I didn’t have up to 10 followers. Getting followers was like getting rich – serious creativity and hard work was required. Only God knows the number of “pls follow back” in total that I sent to people and the number of creative and funny tweets I posted before my followers started increasing little by little. The essence of someone following you is for the person to have access to always see your tweets on his/her timeline, and also access for both of you to send direct messages to each other’s inbox. After 3 yrs plus on twitter and about 120 thousand tweets, I now have about 4,050 followers. What an achievement! But it would have been much cooler if I had more followers and wasn’t following many people. But, I currently follow over 3,000 people.

This is what Celebs don’t do. Celebs don’t need to tweet much before having followers. Celebs don’t send “follow back”. They always have loads of followers but never follow many people. For instance, Lady Gaga follows 136,400 people and has 41.4 Million followers. Cristiano Ronaldo has 26.1 Million followers and follows just 88. Eminem has just 346 tweets, 18 Million followers and follows Nobody. Zero! Can you imagine?! He’s not even following his best friend or closest family member. To get a celeb to follow someone, it takes prayers, praise, worship and luck. Before I got Don Jazzy(a Nigerian music producer) to follow me, I lost count on the number of times I sent “pls follow back sir, you are my hero”, “you are the best thing to happen to Nigeria, pls follow back” and many more – to him. If you want a celeb to follow you, you just don’t end at “follow back”, you have to coat it with praises – even if you have to steal it from a quote. Celebs just have their way around twitter. Like getting more followers than other users wasn’t enough, there’s also a verification mark that makes them stand out. To get verified on twitter is not something I’ve really verified, but I know one needs to be an internationally known celeb. I even used to think one must have a certain number of followers and maybe tweets before getting verified, until January this year.

Aliko Dangote who is the richest man in the whole of Africa got verified the very day he joined twitter. He did not even post 1 tweet before having thousands of followers and appearing in the news, that’s early January this year. The month(not even day) that i joined twitter, nobody noticed except me – such is life! And of course, Dangote wasn’t following up to 15 people – typical celeb trait. But something happened a day after he joined twitter. A follower of mine named Lovette – just all of a sudden discovered that Dangote was following her. The funny part was that she wasn’t even following Dangote and she didn’t even beg him to. Before she knew it, her twitter handle was all over Twitter. She became a celebrity. These are the times when you get the full picture of the saying; “Failure is an orphan, but success has many parents”. Her primary school friends called her; people that never tweeted at her – did that day, loads of people followed her, I was so proud that someone Dangote was following is my follower – I showed it to people around me, people all of a sudden found her more attractive and wanted to date her, loads of questions were asked: “how did you get to know Dangote”, “are you guys related?, introduce me to him pls”, “are you having an affair with him?”, “I’m a first class graduate, pls, help me tell Dangote that I need a job”..don’t know if it’s true, I even heard that her ex-boyfriend wanted their relationship back. These show us the gravity of what it means to be followed by a celebrity.

Far before twitter came into existence, Jesus had been using the words: “Follow back”.  Errrrm..wait a minute….Celebs actually don’t use that word. In fact, an authentic celeb is not supposed to even tweet that to a fellow celeb – how much more to a non-celeb. But Jesus did. So, can we say Jesus is a non-celeb and not on their level? Well, maybe. I think it’s true, because He is far more than that. Jesus is not just a Celeb, He created All the Celebs. He is the Almighty God. The one who did not just make the Universe, He sustains it – makes sure the natural laws don’t fail. But, He used the words “follow me”. Over 2,000 years ago, He did not just tweet it, He said it to a set of guys who were down down the societal class. It wouldn’t even be inappropriate if I called them “class-less”. A set of guys that people around them had already written off. If they were to be animals, they would not even be worthy to be placed side-by-side with Dogs, they would be under Dogs – yes, they were Underdogs. They were People that nobody would even want to talk to, not to talk of following and walking together with. Pharisees even from afar see them as sinners; for some of them, their relatives saw them as thieves; they were liars – their friends saw them as Liabilities, their existence bothered their parents, they were such a burden. Surprisingly, these were the people Jesus said those words to. Those 2 words ended up making them do exploits and are now celebrated till date – both on earth and in heaven. This “follow back” Jesus offers definitely has a greater effect than that of twitter. This one transforms lives.

According to John chapter 1 vs 40, Andrew was one of the 1st set of people that followed Jesus. And in verse 42, he Brought his brother Peter to Jesus. In that same chapter, Jesus told Philip; “Follow me”, and Philip did. And guess what happened? Yes, you are correct – Philip also Brought Nathanael to Jesus. In Matthew 9:9, Jesus told Matthew; “Follow me”, and Matthew did. You should already have an idea of what happened next – Matthew Brought his sinner friends and fellow tax collectors to Jesus. I can go on and on. Even the woman at the well of Samaria who wasn’t even among the 12 disciples had a similar “follow back” encounter with Jesus and brought the whole villagers to Jesus.

The Dangote and Lovette story did not end there. Few hours after that sweet moment for Lovette, Dangote got to discover that he had mistakenly followed a “non-celeb”, so he un-followed her. Well..At least, it’s in history that Dangote followed her! But do you know that Jesus – who created Dangote and is far richer than 1 Billion Dangotes put together – did not mistakenly follow us? He followed us intentionally. In fact, he backed it up with the words; “Follow back”.

Jesus is using this article to say to you…or can I say tweet to you personally; “Follow back”. The fact is that He is already following you, that’s why He showers His Love and mercy on you everyday, but you need to follow back to be able to enjoy and have a strong and deep relationship with Him. You might say; “but, I’m already following Him…I’ve even been following Him for many yrs now”, instead of saying that, what you should be asking yourself is; “Am I doing God’s will? Am I bringing People to Jesus?”. Do people tell you; “how did you become this close to Jesus, can you introduce me to Him?” If you are truly following Jesus – just like Andrew, Philip, Matthew and even the Samaritan woman at the well – you would always bring people to Jesus; both with your words and actions. Why not just give Jesus a chance and just click on that invisible follow button in your heart right away and follow Him back. Unlike twitter users, Jesus can never un-follow you, He’s ready to follow you forever and ever. The best decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life was to follow Jesus. Why not just do the same now? It’s such a huge privilege that the maker of the maker of Twitter and the maker of the whole Universe is begging, running after you and telling you these sweet words anybody would love to see or hear from a celeb: “Follow Back”. So, Follow Back!

Source: heavenspost.wordpress.com