God for Geeks

Simple Scrum Diagram

I think it helps people have a good relationship with God if they create a personal metaphor that gives them a more direct perspective on His work, and His plan.  In the case of most of the faithful I know, they also happen to be passionate about writing computer software.  One of them even gave me a great idea for helping me shape my personal understanding of God a little better, which could easily turn into multiple blog posts spanning several paragraphs.  See, something I'm extremely passionate about is the concept of agile software development, specifically in the desire of moving towards continuous delivery.

I was having a faith conversation regarding predestination and free will with a fellow developer who I'm also working on agile practices with, and came to an interesting theory.  God, to me, is like the ultimate agile developer - He definitely gave each and every one of us the free will to work on his Life product however we so choose, and while he has every single epic perfectly planned, the sprints that we go through do not get planned until it's implementation time.  He even has a great backlog of user stories that he has certain individuals assigned to.

I italicized some terms that are part of the concept of agile development, I can, and will, write about God as a Product Owner (another one of those buzzwords), about how Life is a product, not a project - also an important distinction - and all kinds of other things that combine agile development theory with my strongly increasing faith.  I don't know yet how long this blog series will carry me - I'm not really doing it for me, I'm doing it because He assigned this user story to me, and He wants me to carry it out.  I'm going to do my best to move out of His way, and let Him work through me and my understanding of software development to explain His purpose for me, and for Life.  I don't know yet exactly where this journey will take me, nor do I know all of the technical implementation details of the user story.  All I know is that the final result will be His story, told through the eyes of a developer that loves Agile practices.

I'm not sure yet what a good starting point would be.  Scrum is a simple concept, with so many complex and interacting components that each one could certainly grab my attention for the length of one, or possibly many, blog posts.  I guess I just need to move out of the way and let Him give me some guidance on where to start first, seeing as He is the Product Owner (He owns Life) and His Son is the ultimate Scrum Master (Jesus removed Sin as the ultimate impediment).  Maybe that's a good place to start - explaining what a Scrum Master is, or what a Product Owner is, and explaining why I see God as the Product Owner of Life.  I'll pray about it a little bit, but I've been inspired by the Holy Spirit to keep working on this - and while He is patient, He also has a reason for calling people to action.  Thank God for his inspirations!