Rude

Hey, friends! So I’m trying something new. Every once in a while, I’ll be doing a post about faith and pop culture. In these posts, I’ll analyze something in pop culture (such as a song or movie) that’s become really popular lately, and I’m going to see what insights we can gain from it about our world and about living the Christian life. Sound interesting? Good. Let’s get started.

For my first post in this series, I’m going to be looking at the song “Rude” by Magic. You can listen to it here. Mostly, I chose this song because I cannot get it out of my head no matter how hard I try. Regardless of its message, this song is ridiculous catchy just from the melody, which I think is part of the reason it’s so popular. But I think there’s more to Rude than just a memorable tune that has made it such a hit.

Rude is a song about a young man who is in love with a girl. He decides he wants to marry her, so he shows up on her father’s doorstep and asks for his permission to propose to her. For whatever reason, the girl’s father doesn’t approve of the guy, so he says no and adds that he’ll never approve of his daughter marrying him. The young man then proceeds to ask the father, “Why you gotta be so rude? Don’t you know I’m human, too?” and then finishes by announcing, “I’m gonna marry her anyway, no matter what you say, and we’ll be family. Why you gotta be so rude?”

This song has a lot going for it as far as connecting with our culture goes. It’s got a love story. It’s got an underdog hero who has to face a mean (or rude, rather) tyrannical foe. It includes a scandalous secret marriage. And it features something that connects with an unfortunately high number of teenagers and young adults: disrespect for parents. I know I sound old-school saying that, but I think it’s true. There is something about our culture that encourages young people to show disrespect to those in authority over them, especially people that are older. I think this says a lot about our society.

At first glance, one may think that this song has nothing to offer Christians, who emphasize respecting authority and take marriage very seriously. Many Christians may reject this song as immoral and choose to ignore it completely. But I think that if we take a deeper look at Rude, it does have some things to teach us.

Human Rebellion

First of all, I think that if we’re really honest with ourselves, we can each see a little bit of ourselves in the song’s protagonist. He sees himself as the hero standing up against a great, evil foe. When he hits a wall, his first inclination is to push against it, without even considering that maybe the girl’s father is looking out for everyone’s best interests. Isn’t that so much like us? When God tells us no, don’t we all have a tendency to fight against that? We see ourselves as the great heroes in our life stories, and sometimes we go against what God has for us. It’s human nature, and I think we see a little bit of that in this song.

If we see ourselves as the guy in the song, then the story has a little bit of a different spin to it. It’s no longer about a disgraceful young man being disrespectful (or rude) to his girlfriend’s dad. It’s about us and our own sinful tendencies. Sometimes we look God in the face and say, “Why you gotta be so rude, God?” But just as we understand that the guy in the story is out of line, so we must understand that we are out of line, too, when we treat God in this way. So this song teaches us that we can all be like the guy in this story if we aren’t careful, and we all need to fight our tendency to rebel when God tells us no.

A Loving Father

Obviously, the song is meant to cast the girl’s father in a negative light. He’s supposed to be the bad guy, the rude one that the title refers to. But as Christians, we can look at the song in a different way. In truth, the father in the song is probably right for turning the boy away. As far as he knows, the boy has nothing to offer his daughter. He is ultimately protecting his daughter from someone who may cause her harm down the road. That’s how our heavenly Father is with us.

Among the many things that God does for us, he is our protector. He knows better than we do what is good for us. And he fights for us. He defends us from the evils of this word. To us, that sometimes look like God is shutting a door in our face or trying to ruin our fun. It may look a little rude. But the truth is that God’s plan for us is the best life we could live, so we have to trust him as the loving Father that he is.

The Bride of Christ

There’s one character in the story who doesn’t get a chance to speak, and that’s the daughter. We can connect with her, too. The Bible describes the church as the bride of Christ. Collectively, we are his true love, and we have committed ourselves to be faithful to him and him alone. And yet, like the girl in the story, we are often faced with opportunities to “run off” with other things. It’s true that we don’t serve other deities like the Israelites often did when they were accused of cheating on God. But we do let other things take his place sometimes. We’ve promised to make him our number one, but we sometimes elevate other things above him, making those things our “gods.”

So in a way, we are like the girl in the song. Like her, we have a loving Father who tries to protect us. But ultimately, it comes down to us. In the song, the unnamed girl has a choice: Is she going to say yes to the marriage proposal and forsake her responsibilities, or is she going to honor her father and turn the boy away? We are faced with the same question in our lives. Will we be faithful to Christ, or will we pursue other things and let them take his place?

I’m not going to lie. I bought Rude on iTunes, and I listen to it often. I know it has some issues. But it’s also catchy, and it’s something that has connected with our culture. So I’ve tried to find ways of looking at it that are positive and relevant to the Christian life, and I’ve tried to present those ways of looking at the song with you. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the song! Give it a listen, and let me know what you think. Thanks for reading, friends, and I’ll see you next week!

iOS 8

As many of you know, I’m an Apple fanboy. I love my MacBook and my iDevices. They help me do a lot of cool stuff. And I’m sure a lot of you are at least vaguely interested in Apple as well. Maybe you have an iPhone or an iPad, or you just like to know what’s going on with the most talked-about tech company in the world. If you fall into any of those categories, this Stuff Devon Likes post is for you. It’s all about iOS 8.

iOS 8, the newest software for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches, released to the public this past Wednesday after a few months of beta testing. Although not as eagerly anticipated as last year’s radically redesign iOS 7, iOS 8 still made a splash with its new features. In this post, I’ll be highlighting just a few of them.

My favorite new feature in iOS 8 is responsive notifications. I hate having to open the Messages app every single time someone texts me and I want to respond. Now, I don’t have to. If I’m in the middle of something else on my phone or if I want to respond from the lock screen, all I have to do is swipe the notification, and a quick response text area opens up. It’s quick and handy. And this feature isn’t limited to Messages. It applies to emails, calendar alerts, tweets, Facebook notifications, and more. All of these notification types come with their own custom ways of interacting with them. I love it.

Another cool feature is Notification Center widgets. Android users have been boasting about widgets for a long time, but now they’re finally on iOS! When you download an app from the App Store, many will now come with an accompanying widget that you can place in your Notification Center. That way if you want to check the score of your favorite team without opening the app, you can do so right in Notification Center. You can also manage your bid on an Ebay item, create a new note in Evernote, and more, all from Notification Center.

iOS 8 also gives users a smoother flow when switching between devices. If you start an email on your iPad but have to leave before you finish it, you can pull it up on your iPhone instantly and complete it on the go. If you open a web page on your phone but want to see it on your iPad’s bigger screen, you can do so instantly from the iPad’s lock screen. You can make and answer phone calls on your iPad as long as your phone is on the same WiFi network. And you can receive and send SMS messages on your iPad, too. That way all of your messages are on all of your iOS devices. This smooth flow between devices is called Continuity, and it’s automatic. It will also work with your Mac when OS X Yosemite drops, possibly next month.

These iOS 8 features are just a few of my favorites. There are so many more I could list. Extensibility. Better Siri. Simple audio and video messaging. New photo editing features. Family Sharing. The all-new Health app. Third-party keyboards. The list goes on and on. The moral of the story is that if you’ve got an iOS device that’s capable of running iOS 8, you should install it. It looks a lot like iOS 7, so you won’t have to re-learn anything. You’ll just have a lot of cool new tools at your disposal. Thanks for reading my quick review of iOS 8, friends. See you next week!

Misguided Gratitude

In case you’ve been living under a rock lately, the iPhone 6 was announced last week, and it’s awesome. I stayed up late Thursday night (and into Friday morning) to be one of the first to pre-order the new phone through Apple’s online store. These pre-orders are always crazy and difficult. The servers get slammed by the thousands upon thousands of people clamoring to be the first to get their hands on the precious new hardware, so it takes a while. When I finally got through and was preparing to check out with my new iPhone 6 Plus, I realized a horrifying fact: I couldn’t change my shipping address from my parents’ house to my apartment in Waco. Not wanting to miss out on my opportunity to buy the new phone, I checked out anyway, hoping I would be able to change the shipping address later.

Well, I wasn’t able to change the shipping address online due to some kind of weird new AT&T policy (shocker), so first thing Friday morning, I called Apple Support to see if they could help me. I ended up waiting on hold for an hour. I had time to go to the gym, eat breakfast, and get ready for the day all while listening to Apple’s hold music, which gets really old after a while. But finally after an hour of waiting, I was greeted by the friendliest customer support representative I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. He apologized for the long wait and immediately changed my shipping address, all while being kind and personable. The experience actually made the hour-long wait seem not so bad. As soon as I got off the phone with him, I took to Twitter to post about what a great experience I had had. But then I realized something: Why was I posting my gratitude toward this individual on Twitter, where he would probably never see it, when I could have actually told him what a great job he had done over the phone?

I just got off the phone with the nicest and most helpful Apple customer support agent ever. And he fixed my shipping address!

— Devon Michael Dundee (@devondundee) September 12, 2014

This is an example of what I call misguided gratitude. Instead of showing sincere gratitude to the person who deserves it, we proclaim our thanks to the world. But for what purpose? Sometimes the person may receive the gratitude that way. For example, if you know the person and tag them in your post. But usually, the person we should be thanking is someone we don’t know, and they never get the pleasure of knowing that their kindness and courtesy was appreciated.

I think that ultimately, misguided gratitude is more about ourselves than about the person we claim to be thanking. We want to seem grateful, but only in a way that benefits us. This isn’t the way we should be. Gratitude isn’t about building ourselves up. It’s about encouraging and affirming someone who we feel deserves some sort of recognition.

And gratitude doesn’t have to be a public act, either. Usually, it’s the smaller, private acts of gratitude that mean the most. If I had taken a few seconds to tell that Apple employee, “You did a really great job. Thank you so much for your help. You’re very good at what you do,” it might have made an impact on his day. It may have even given him that little extra encouragement to keep up his positive attitude, knowing that it was doing some good. But instead, I chose the route of misplaced gratitude and missed out on a great opportunity to build someone up.

Let’s take the time to show gratitude to one another, and let’s make sure we’re doing it in the right way. A thank you card. A short text saying how much you appreciate someone. Or even saying the two simple words, “Thank you,” to someone who does a small kind act for you as you’re going about your day. Showing gratitude isn’t difficult, but it’s something we all struggle with. Hopefully we’ll all learn from my mistake and direct our gratitude in the right direction in the future.

Friday Night Lights

Those of you who (like me) grew up in Greenwood know what it’s like to live in a small town that centers its identity upon the local high school football team. The whole town shows up to the home games, and the streets are deserted during away games. The head coach and the main players are treated like local celebrities. And it seems like all anyone can talk about from August to December is the next big game.

I’m not critiquing this kind of local football culture. I loved growing up in it. I wasn’t totally sucked into it like some people I knew, but I enjoyed going to the games on Friday nights, and I really appreciated the sense of community and identity that Greenwood Bulldog football offered. Now that I’ve gotten older and moved away, I can’t attend the games anymore, but I still root for the Bulldogs every Friday night, especially now that my little brother Drew plays on the team. I think my upbringing in Greenwood is part of what led me to connect so strongly with the TV show Friday Night Lights.

Friday Night Lights tells the story of Eric Taylor, the head coach of the Dillon Panthers football team, and his family as they try to navigate the crazy, hectic world of Texas high school football. The first season of the show begins with Eric’s becoming head coach of the Panthers after working as an offensive coach for several years. Expectations are high, and Coach Taylor’s skeptics are vocal as the season begins. Everyone in town has an opinion about how the coach should handle his team. And everyone wants to see the team win the holy grail of high school football: the state championship.

The team’s entire strategy is based around Jason Street, the best high school quarterback in the nation. Jason has been training for years for this season, his senior year, and everyone expects him to do great things. But in the first game of the season, Jason gets critically injured, leaving his team and new head coach Eric Taylor with a huge problem: How do they carry on without their star player? Part of the story of the first season is about Jason dealing with his injury and about his backup, sophomore and all-around nice guy Matt Saracen, trying to find his place as the team leader.

Although on the surface, the show seems to be about football, football is really just a tool that the writers use to develop the characters. Everything that happens on the field reinforces and symbolizes what is taking place in the characters’ personal lives. Friday Night Lights is extremely character-focused, and the characters they’ve created are dynamic, realistic, and very easy to connect with. It’s easy to find a favorite character or two that you really root for, and it’s fun to see their stories unfold. The show’s creators use a unique three-camera filming style and allow the actors to do a lot of improv, which leads to very real, very relatable conversations.

There’s no way I could cover all the characters on Friday Night Lights in this short blog post, but I will name a few of my favorites. Tami Taylor is the coach’s wife who finds herself working at the school as a guidance counselor. She’s sassy but wise, and she has some great one-liners throughout the show. Julie Taylor is Eric and Tami’s daughter, and she serves as the main love interest for Matt. Landry is Matt’s best friend. He plays a small role in the first season, but he becomes more and more important as the series progresses. Tim Riggins is the team’s fullback. He has some behavior issues, but he’s also got a good heart, and he’s grown to become one of my favorite characters. Buddy Garrity is a former Dillon Panther who now is in charge of the booster club. He’s the classic high school football player who never grew up, and his entire life revolves around Panther football. There are so many more characters on Friday Night Lights, and some cast members come and go throughout the seasons. If you decide to watch, you’ll find one or two characters that you especially connect with and root for, and that makes watching the show really fun.

Friday Night Lights really serves as an introduction to Texas culture. The show’s creator insisted on filming in the state, so the entire cast moved there for the duration of filming. The show captures the small-town feel and the state pride that comes along with growing up in the great state of Texas.

And the show deals with some real-life issues. Racism, sexism, drug abuse, grief, and abandonment are just a few of the themes that come up multiple times throughout the show. They have no problem taking these issues head-on and portraying them in ways that help the viewer understanding issues that they may not face in their own lives but that are problems in the world around us.

Friday Night Lights is a show about growing up in small football town. It tells some incredible stories about realistic characters whose lives revolve around God, football, and the great state of Texas. Football serves as a great mechanism for developing the characters and also adding to the show’s tension, but make no mistake: This is a show about life, not about football. I think Friday Night Lights is a show that can appeal to anyone who’s willing to give it a chance. It’s one of my favorite shows of all time. So check it out on Netflix or via the incredible DVD box set, and enjoy everything that the Dillon Panthers have to offer. Thanks for reading, friends! Texas forever.

Desensitized

The other day, I was having a conversation with someone and suddenly felt very uncomfortable. I had no idea why. I was perfectly comfortable with the person I was talking to. And I agreed with what he was saying. But for whatever reason, I just felt oddly uneasy. It took me days before I finally realized what it was. Every once in a while in the conversation, the guy I was talking to would use a curse word. I didn’t recognize that he was cursing at the time, but I did recognize this odd sense of discomfort as a result of it. And it took me some to realize where that discomfort was coming from.

This is a classic case of desensitization. That’s when you’re exposed to something so many times that you start to notice it less and less until eventually you don’t even notice it at all. When I was younger and I heard someone use a curse word, my response was immediate. It would get my attention and elicit some sort of emotion, usually shock. But now that I’ve been around it so much, my response has gotten weaker and weaker to the point that I sometimes don’t even recognize it anymore. It’s like when you come out of a movie and someone says, “That movie had so much cursing in it!” and you say, “Wow, I didn’t even notice.”

Now I wouldn’t say my desensitization is that bad yet. But that experience last week really was an eye-opener for me. I didn’t realize how susceptible I was to being desensitized, especially as someone who works in ministry. It can happen to anyone on any number of different things. That’s a part of the world we live in. But we have to be aware of it if we’re ever going to be able to do anything about it.

Desensitization isn’t necessarily bad in all cases. Think about how frustrating it would be if you woke up every time your air conditioner kicked on during the night. You wouldn’t be able to get any sleep! Thankfully, we become desensitized to these noises in the night, and we ignore them. Even in the case of curse words, a certain amount of desensitization can be good for some adults. If you work in a place where people are cursing a lot, it probably wouldn’t be best for you to have a strong emotional response every time you heard a cuss word. You’d never get any work done, and there’s no possible way you could witness to your unsaved co-workers if you were constantly upset with them.

But desensitization can go too far. If you were desensitized to something dangerous in your environment, such as the sound of an approaching vehicle or a threatening animal, that would be really bad. And if we get completely desensitized to things in our environment that are harmful to our souls, that can be bad, too. If you get too desensitized to hearing curse words, you may one day find them slipping into your thoughts or even out of your mouth! And we can’t have that. We’re meant to live in the world but to not to be of the world. As Christians, we’re called to be different. And too much desensitization can get in the way of that.

So what do we do about desensitization? It’s a tough question to answer, and every situation is different. But I think there are a few general principles that we would all do well to keep in mind when it comes to this topic. First of all, we need to recognize that desensitization exists, and that it is a threat. Secondly, we need to limit our exposure to harmful things in our environments as much as we can while also living in the world as we’re called to do. And finally, when we feel ourselves becoming too desensitized, we really need to search our hearts and eradicate the parts that we’ve allowed to become tainted by the world. We can only accomplish this with God’s help, and it’s going to require diligent prayer and time with him and his word every day.

We all become too desensitized from time to time. It’s a side effect of living in the world. And it’s not something to be ashamed of or feel guilty about. It’s something to watch out for and take care of when it becomes an issue. God has great plans for us to do wonderful things in his name as we live in the world. Let’s continue to do so as we also seek to become more and more like him each and every day. Have a blessed day, friends, and I’ll see you next week!