When you hit rock bottom, you discover its one perk: there’s nothing left to be afraid of. From the vantage point of that valley, life and death may seem a matter of indifference. It is with recovery that fear returns. Clawing your way out of the valley teaches you just how easy it is to slip back in.
“I thank God every day… But I know the things He gives me He can take away.”
It is on this precarious point that Benson Boone’s song, “Beautiful Things,” places us. This may be the song that skyrocketed Boone to international fame—by some counts it was the most played song of 2024—but it does not tell the tale of a soaring star awaiting a crash. Rather, the song’s protagonist has arisen from rock bottom but is terrified he will bottom out all over again.
Boone (along with Evan Blair and Jack Lafrantz, also credited with the song) tells this story in terms that are plumb simple. You might overhear any of these phrases in the checkout line at Salvation Army:
For a while there, it was rough
But lately, I’ve been doin’ better
Than the last four cold Decembers
I recall
The protagonist looks back at a four-year rough patch, the “cold Decembers” suggesting not only seasonal temperatures but seasonal depression and lonely Christmases past. These years of family estrangement are behind him, since he goes on to say that he sees his “family every month” and has “found a girl (his) parents love.” Whatever this rough patch was, these lines hint that perhaps his previous girlfriend(s) weren’t of much help and his family is relieved he’s finally dating a good influence.
Things are looking up, so he responds by thanking God for his new girl. But his prayers are less motivated by joy than fear: “I thank God every day… But I know the things He gives me He can take away.”
Themes of faith are not foreign to Boone’s music. One hears of going to church (“In the Stars”), loving Jesus (“Slow It Down”), promise rings (“Sugar Sweet”), and other such echoes of his upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But unlike these more generic references to faith, the line that what God gives he can take away alludes specifically to the Book of Job.
Job, too, went through a rough patch. After receiving the news that all of his livestock (some 1,100 strong), his servants, and his ten beloved children have been destroyed,
Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshiped, and said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 1:20–21 KJV).
But in “Beautiful Things,” Job’s words are not found amid the four cold Decembers, but when things are on the upswing. The protagonist’s situation is less like the suffering throughout the middle of the Book of Job than the recovery at its end, when God restores Job’s fortune (now 2,200 animals) and family (a fresh set of 10 kids). But how does Job feel when his fortune is restored? Is he overflowing with relief and elation? Or has his prosperity returned with a new aftertaste? Now he knows just how easily God can take what he has given, and that with no notice (Job isn’t offered a window into God and the Satan’s heavenly face-off). Job has learned something about the beautiful things he has regained—just what ephemeral, precarious things they really are.
Boone’s protagonist is a bit less concerned with livestock, as his main squeeze gets prime airtime for what he’s “terrified” of losing. But it’s not just her he’s worried about:
I found my mind, I’m feelin’ sane
It’s been a while, but I’m findin’ my faith
If everything’s good and it’s great
Why do I sit and wait ‘til it’s gone?
Alongside renewed harmony with his family, his recovery has restored his mental health and spiritual life. Now he has “peace” and “love.” So when his girl stays the night and he thinks he “might have it all,” it’s not merely a statement of her importance. He wants to keep his beautiful girl, but also these “beautiful things” like his sanity, family harmony, and relationship with the God he prays to.
But he’s afraid. Afraid that if she goes, these beautiful things will follow. That’s why the song’s chorus morphs from pleading with his girlfriend into praying to God:
Please stay
I want you, I need you, oh God,
Don’t take
These beautiful things that I’ve got
If God takes what he has given, he will lose his girl, his family, his mind, even his faith. He’s not so sure he won’t “curse God and die” (Job 2:9).
I didn’t grow up listening to pop music. Post-classical minimalism? Check. Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms? Of course. Tuvan throat singing? The soundtrack to my junior year in college. So it might sound odd for me to talk about “discovering” a pop sensation like Benson Boone. But as someone who doesn’t listen to the radio and generally tunes out the background music at Staples, it was indeed a discovery for me in the way that your friend discovered Sigur Ros or AnnenMayKantereit (though perhaps a bit less smugly).
It also may be unsurprising that a song about losing what we love speaks to what Jonathan Haidt calls “the anxious generation.”
It started with asking myself, “I wonder what music is popular right now?” As I did not know, I searched. Spotify answered, “Beautiful Things.” I was amazed. This popular song has some teeth. I was moved. You hold your curly-haired four-year-old, give it a listen, and just see what happens to your eyes. And I was curious. Why is this the song that’s topping the charts? A song about the terror of losing what you’ve got?
Benson Boone struck me as a Gen Z singer with a predominately Gen Z audience. This intuition was confirmed when I learned he grew his initial following on TikTok. Teen girls are a major demographic at his concerts—no surprise there. It also may be unsurprising that a song about losing what we love speaks to what Jonathan Haidt calls “the anxious generation” (with TikTok to blame in Haidt’s view).
Gen Z are also placed at a precarious point. On the one hand, they are the beneficiaries of an era of relative peace and prosperity. World wars? The Depression? Getting drafted? 9/11? Ancient history. Yet suburbia is no longer the bubble it once was.
Growing up with a smart phone teaches you that peace and prosperity are rather unevenly distributed. Alongside curated images of opulence, you are greeted daily by apparitions of famine, abuse, and war. The past decades have seen the erosion of public discourse, higher suicide rates, and increasing distrust of our public institutions and our neighbors. The faults in the foundation laid by previous generations seem poised to bring down our educational, governing, and religious institutions. “Deconstruction” is now an established member of the Christian lexicon. Ours is a moment low on optimism. Perhaps “Beautiful Things” speaks to such a moment. A time when we’re “up at night thinkin’ [we] just might lose it all.”
Yet perhaps Boone has not only touched our moment’s fears but tapped into our hopes. An argument could be made that at its roots “Beautiful Things” presupposes both God’s goodness and his sovereignty: every beautiful thing is one of his gifts and it’s his business which gifts we keep and which we return. However, Boone’s song finds no comfort in depicting God as a kindly father who loves to give good gifts to his children. Yet at the same time, Boone’s protagonist still hopes against hope: he prays. Whatever ideas the song implies about God may be less significant than the fact that the core of the song is addressed to God.
Which brings us back to Job. While the beginning and ending chapters of Job are preacher-approved, most of the book is a protracted conversation between Job and his less-than-helpful friends (Job 3–37). Job’s position is that he’s righteous—if he could just get a date on the calendar before God, he would be vindicated. His friends’ position is that Job’s suffering indicates that Job must have sinned—God isn’t unjust, is he?
At the end of the day, Job’s righteousness seems to lie in the fact that he seeks God, even when he hopes against hope.
When God at last shows up, he doesn’t answer the perennial questions which preoccupied Job and his friends. Instead, he asks if Job was there when he created the world (Job 38) and lists a venerable menagerie of animals (Job 39–41). After this encounter, Job “repent(s) in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). God then turns his sights on Job’s friends and says He’s angry with them because—as it’s typically translated—“you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7 NRSV).
But this statement poses an interpretive problem. Didn’t Job just repent for saying things that he “did not understand” (Job 42:3)? Is Job right when he calls God “cruel” (Job 30:21) and says God hates him (Job 16:9)? And don’t Job’s friends say some true things about God, even if they’ve misapplied them? Consequently, some biblical scholars have observed that a better translation would be that God is angry “because you have not spoken to me steadfastly as my servant Job has” (my translation). On this reading, the difference between Job’s theology and his friends’ has less to do with its content than its direction. Job’s friends talk about God. Job talks (complains mostly) to God. At the end of the day, Job’s righteousness seems to lie in the fact that he seeks God, even when he hopes against hope.
When I was curious why “Beautiful Things” rose to international fame, it wasn’t just because the song is a personal apocalypse of doom and gloom. I was curious because of its direction: “I need you, oh God. Don’t take these beautiful things that I’ve got.”
After decades of pop anthems telling us we just need to join hands, pull together, and build a better tomorrow, perhaps we’re ready for a new hope. A hope that looks not around to humanity’s collective goodness and not within to our deepest self, but without. Not hope born from optimism, but desperation. Hoping against hope that God will show up after 35 chapters of arguing, shut us up, and set the record straight. Hoping we might say with Job, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5 KJV). In an era when our prosperity and institutions seem so fragile, my hope is that we might begin looking for something with more staying power.
I need you, oh God.
We need you, oh God.
