LADY IN A CAR. I hired a company to help me promote a Christian song, Thank God He’s My Savior, and I got this lady riding in a car and looking at the camera for 10 seconds. This is one of the few scenes I could show you. I think TikTok may clock me.
THIS IS TOO BLASPHEMOUS, ridiculous, and hilarious to keep to myself.
It’s a TikTok thing: TikTok meets the Bible.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been trying to promote the only song I have ever released. There are companies that are supposed to help you do that. One of them is Playlistpush.
Here’s how their TikTok campaign works.
Pay up
First, I give them $380. That’s the least they’ll take.
I create a TikTok account—immediately after which my computer becomes an Airbnb for guests that Malwarebytes has to sequester into a digital dungeon.
My job with TikTok is to upload a “sound,” which in my case is a 32-second clip from my song. The lyrics in the clip quote the prophet Habakkuk (3:17-19) who’s about to suffer a disaster. His response: “I will thank God… To higher ground he leads on.”
TikTok “videographers”—a term I mutilate by using it in the context of what is coming—are supposed to create short videos with the tune and lyrics of my song.
Bums, breasts, and the Holy Bible
For $380, I expected to get a few nice videos that tracked with the lyrics of my song. But the first videos they sent confused me.
- A 10-second Spanish lesson on handmade flash cards. The words had nothing to do with God or faith.
Huh?
- A sleepy-looking young woman putting on her morning makeup.
What?
- A college girl presenting glamour shots of her real estate, with particular emphasis on the rolling hills of her lower back forty. I not only rejected her video, I blocked that sucker.
Holy Moley.
- A comely young lady of college age standing in her bathroom with a towel around her waist. She held her back to me. It was a lot of back. But she teased her angle to the left, enough for me to see that she was cradling a protuberance in her hand. Near the end of the song clip, she shook her lower back forty and the towel trembled.
She thinks I’m going to pay her for that? My wife would kill me. At the very least, she would ground me from the harmonica.
- The last straw: another young woman sitting there staring at the camera for 9 seconds. She held in her hands a colorful tubular object about the size of an empty roll of toilet paper. In the final second, she exhaled a double-lunged cloud of vapor. She was vaping to the tune of “Thank God he’s my Savior.”
Do you need a light? Come on people, what’s going on here?
Do these ladies have Daddy issues with God? Is that why they seem to salute him with a finger by blowing smoke in his face and thanking him kindly for the gift of their back forty?
“Oh, William”
I began a conversation with William, a rep at Playlistpush.
I pushed and he pushed back.
He began by reminding me that all these freelancers have to do is give 10 seconds of video. And since I selected the default generic “concept,” they didn’t have any concept to follow beyond their common sense.
I should not have relied on that.
I described the videos for William. Kindly. I wasn’t angry. Well, not at him. I was angry and defensive for God, as if he needed it. And though the videos repulsed and disgusted me, strangely they entertained me with their ridiculosity.
It was all so bad that it was funny.
I knew this was a moment I needed to capture and process.
Pretty Good-13 descriptions
I wrote in the company’s message box online:
“William, I’m looking at these. A woman with a breast hanging out and shaking her butt. And another with ‘glamor’ shots of herself in a string bikini. I’m almost ready to shut this down as a total loss for me…These are so ridiculous that they’re disgusting and funny at the same time. Which is not a good concept for a religious ‘sound.’ I’m a writer. This is worth writing about.”
Paragraph that convinced William
A few moments after sending that message, I saw the vaping video. I added that one to William’s list and said:
“This is a perfect blend of blasphemy, ridiculousness, and hilarity. It’s jaw-dropping. It’s like ‘What’s next? Two teenagers going for it in the back seat of a Buick to the lyrics of “Thank God, he gives me the strength to go on?”’”
A little while later, William came back. It was like a conversion.
I didn’t have him at the first “hello.” But I think I got him with the “back seat of a Buick.”
He apparently looked at the videos, listened to the music, and suddenly understood the problem.
We worked up a “concept” for the “videographers” to use so we could discourage them from blowing raspberries at God Almighty.
“Create a video sharing what you’re thankful for. Make your video relate to God or to our kindness and love we have for one another.’’
Forty bucks left
By then, William said my budget had only $40 left. But he added that he would toss in a one-time-only $50.
I’m down to the last few dollars now, and I have only three 10-second videos that got a barely passing grade of 3 on a scale of 5.
That’s 30 seconds for $380. About $13 a second. And that’s $46,800 an hour.
Inventory
I just checked and I now have on TikTok 2 followers and 7 likes. I had the 2 followers before the campaign.
I’m making my own TikTok videos from now on. I made two this morning. They’re on my TikTok channel.
I did not have one video that followed the concept and that played the 32-second “sound.”
I have about a dozen videos, but I rejected all but a few: a dad feeding a baby, the Spanish lesson, and a couple dancing on the beach with text that wished me a Happy Valentine’s Day.
An afterword
An “afterword” is also known as an epilogue, the backend of a forward. It provides closure to the story.
My lingering quandary is this: What am I to do with these vaping, protuberanced souls who seem so out of touch with God that they:
- Publicly diss him
- Or don’t recognize how offensive their videos are?
I’ve written for these folks all my life. Out-of-the-faith people have always been my target audience, as they still are with the Casual English Bible® I’m paraphrasing.
And yet these young adults shocked me with their response to lyrics from the Bible—and doggone it, to my music.
TikTok may clock me
I don’t like surprises like that.
I’m trying to introduce people to my song, to acquaint them with Habakkuk’s incredible faith in God during a terrifying and tragic time of invaders leveling Jewish cities.
But I might as well quote the American Pledge of Allegiance in French. That wouldn’t make sense to anyone except the ninth-grade French teacher who taught it to me.
“Je jure fidélité au drapeau des Etats-Unis de l’Amérique…”
It could be that “Thank God He’s My Savior” won’t connect to many except people leaning into Christianity, or the folks already all in.
Who draws people to God?
Yet, I don’t think it’s up to a song to draw people to God.
And it’s certainly not up to blog articles like this. It’s not up to authors, preachers, or Sunday school teachers.
God’s Spirit is the one to reach us, I believe—sometimes in mystical ways and sometimes through something as simple as the fleeting kindness of a passing soul.
Maybe the best I can hope is not to get in the way all the time. I can’t help it some of the time.
Also, perhaps there is something for me to learn from those otherworldly videos, eventually. But in this moment, I sit here dumbfounded.
Not at the loss of money. But at the loss of Christianity.
My God.
It’s all feeling less funny now.
Ballet from Habakkuk
Trying to end on a positive note.
I just released a new video of Habakkuk’s song. If you enjoy ballet, here you go:
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I just got an update. They produced 17 videos, most of them are embarrassing. The were seen by 500,523 human beings. They generated 7,293 “likes.”
Good for them. Not for me. I still have the same 2 followers and 7 “likes” that I had before the campaign.
So, essentially the campaign takes my music and uses it to provide an opportunity for others to grow their list while doing nothing but embarrassing me.
This has been a helpful education and introduction to the world of publishing Christian music.