It might of been your 3rd grade teacher, your junior high basketball coach, or your Sunday School teacher. When we hear the word "influence," these kinds of people in our lives instantly come to mind. The truth is, it is impossible to inspire ourselves. Our worldview is shaped by how people interact with us and the things they do for us.

It's like people treat the ideas they are shaped by as a meal they offer on a silver platter to people they influence. So the consumer who is offered these ideas has the choice to pick whatever idea they want. We often are drawn to the ideas that are offered by the people who we think care about us the most. So how can we know a music artist really cares about their listeners?

A way you can hear care for a listener is the effort put into an album. For an example of a music album that changed me I will use Propaganda's "Excellent". For some context, Propaganda is a battle rapper/poet from the LA area. He often switches from a spoken word syncopation to spitting bars in your typical hip hop form. The album was produced by Beautiful Eulogy, another hip hop outfit that mainly works with an organic sound, recording with a lot of live instruments which goes against the typical hip hop way of sampling and trap beats. "Excellent" is a very different album compared to what I was used to. But it challenged me in so many ways. It was presented in such an intellectually challenging way that I had to listen to the whole thing four times through to really get it. It opened my eyes to racial reconciliation within the church, being more concerned with listening to other people than telling others everything I know and realizing I know enough to know I don't know that much. This album helped me view God in an entirely new perspective that still lined up in a Biblical sense. The depth, the creativity, the uniqueness were all aspects to show how much Propaganda valued getting this message God had shown him to any listeners. The care in the craft is something that drew me in.

Back to the metaphor of how all these ideas can be treated as many different people serving different entrees. Sometimes people go with the idea that is best advertised and the person offering the meal doesn't really care about its consumer. This is how some of the most toxic ideas are consumed and they destroy people. Prosperity gospel, "sexual integrity is dead", and "You are not your brother's keeper" are all toxic ideas that are so prevalent in our society. The people spreading these ideas don't care a single bit about their followers to these ideas. When an idea is truly good then it can be cared for. When we actually show love for people then we can share our ideas that shape us.