Yearning for Love
The lyrics talk about how we’re all yearning for love. How we feel an emptiness—a hole in our hearts—that we’re trying to fill:
‘Cause the hole inside my heart is stupid deep, oh, stupid deep
“Stupid Deep” recognizes the emptiness each person faces, the lack of purpose we feel, and the attempt to fill it. We’re deeply yearning to be known and loved.
All my fellow enneagram twos out there can definitely relate to this—their basic desire is to be fully loved and accepted. But it isn’t just enneagram twos—all of us, on some level, yearn to be loved. To take it a step further, we yearn to be both fully known and fully loved.
Trying to Earn Love
“Stupid Deep” sees the individual’s struggle as each of us try to fill that hole and earn love. The song, over and over again, asks questions, wondering if all our ambitions, goals, and efforts are really us trying to earn love. The lyrics say:
What if all the things I’ve done
Were just attempts at earning love?
Then Bellion gets specific, looking at the things we sometimes strive after:
What if where I’ve tried to go was always here?
And the path I’ve tried to cut was always clear?
Why has life become a plan, yeah
To put some money in my hand?
I think we can all relate to this. Maybe we’ve become super focused on how large a paycheck we can get, as we assume that more money, more stuff, and a certain economic status will grant us love, acceptance, and happiness. Or perhaps we think the answer is to be adventurous, so we plan a beach trip or a backpacking journey across Europe. Or maybe we think we have to act and live a certain way to get on the path to marriage, a successful career, and a happy life in which we’re accepted and loved. We’ve bought into the idea, perhaps unconsciously, that we can earn love and acceptance.
But Bellion seems to recognize that’s not the answer, that perhaps we’re losing sight of what we’ve had the entire time.
Getting Love for Free
Bellion has a surprising line in “Stupid Deep”:
When the love I really need is stupid cheap, stupid cheap
He also sings,
What if who I hoped to be was always me?
And the love I fought to feel was always free?
His introspective journey seems to arrive at an understanding that, while he’s been working at earning love, at trying to become someone worthy of love, all along that love was stupid cheap—free. He seems to be inferring that love is already there, and it can be neither earned or bought.
Isn’t this a picture of unconditional love? And who embodies true, perfect, unconditional love? Of course, it’s Jesus. In Him, we’re offered stupid cheap—free—love. That’s the picture of grace.
Bellion’s Story
Maybe you’re wondering if Jon Bellion’s “Stupid Deep” is actually talking about Christ or if instead, it’s simply a song about the human condition in which, with a Christian worldview, we see Christ.
For example, if you’re versed in well-known Christian author quotations, the very idea of having a hole inside your heart probably already had you thinking about the “God-shaped holes in our hearts” quotations appearing in Christian memes. The idea is based on Augustine, who wrote in his Confessions, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you [God].”
A little research on Bellion shows that he calls himself a Christian, and in many ways, “Stupid Deep” appears to be a reflection of his own life. In an interview, he spoke to the success he received when he wrote “Monster” for Eminem and Rihanna. He said, “I wrote ‘Monster’ and thought that it would solve a lot of my problems, that I’d have money in the bank, but I felt no different. I was still searching for something.” He also said that artists seek validation and try to prove themselves, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, because the public doesn’t actually care.
Then he explained he had become a Christian and how that has changed him. He said, “It’s freed me up. I came to the realization that I’m a child of God and that’s my identity. If this all goes tomorrow I don’t have the proverbial rug under me that can be pulled out. I’m taken care of and there’s someone who loves me.”¹
So, while the lyrics don’t specifically say “Jesus,” it seems Jon Bellion is really talking about the unconditional, stupid cheap—free—love we have in Jesus. While we’re working to fill our God-shaped holes this way or that, through money or adventure, or through marriage or proving our worth, love is already there for us, free.
God’s love was costly—Jesus’s death on the cross—but it’s stupid cheap for us.