When I was applying to college, I dreaded seeing the essay topic, “Please describe your leadership style.” There’s a story that goes around every few years about that one applicant who wrote something like, “With so many leaders seeking admission, the college needs to accept at least one follower, and I am that wonderful follower.” According to the story, the writer of what I like to call “the follower essay” was accepted and flourished at the university.
Jesus calls us to lives of following, where we must be willing to deny ourselves and take up our cross. For many of us, those words seem to have lost some of their meaning. We tend to think about the cross as a symbol of our faith rather than as an instrument of execution reserved for those of whom the Romans wished to make an example: rebellious slaves, traitors, pirates, and similar ilk. Our society has made the idea of denying ourselves into one that focuses more on seeking to better our bodies through diet than Jesus’s focus on sacrifice. When we deny ourselves and take up our cross, the Messiah calls us to consider ourselves as less important than those around us.
I keep a Post-it note on the computer monitor in our home office that illustrates this idea: “God first, others next, me last.” This reminder does not mean that I should seek to place myself in a position of unnecessary subservience but rather to heed the words of Jesus from John 15: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”