Out Of The Woods

 

The above three lines are from the ending of Taylor Swift's Out of the Woods music video. The video is a journey of Taylor fighting and struggling in mountains, snow, oceans, and of course the woods; something of a picture of the struggles of a relationship in a rocky place. At the end of the video, she emerges onto a peaceful beach looking ragged and broken by her experiences and finds there an untouched, unblemished version of herself, and the words appear:

She lost him.
But she found herself.
And somehow that was everything.

She lost him. Their relationship never made it out of the woods. They failed. 

But she found herself. Taylor speaks to the idea of “expressive individualism", that the purpose of life is to find and express your individuality and that you “find yourself” by fighting through and emerging triumphant from all the constraints placed upon you by others.

And somehow that was everything. Why does this song/concept so resonate with us? Because, deep down, we all just want to be fully known and totally loved. And we are sold the shortcut of “knowing yourself” and “loving yourself” so we no longer have to be dependent on anyone else for our happiness.

While I agree with the longing and desire this conveys, I'd like to challenge Taylor's solution here to this problem. 

Yes, even in the Christian life there is an overarching story of discovery that makes sense of all our trials. But the difference is that it's radically God-focused, not self-focused. It is the story of how Jesus finds and rescues unworthy sinners; it's not our own attempts to find ourselves. It’s all about how God expresses Himself in amazing grace to the world through the death and resurrection of His Son, not how we express the worth we think we have in ourselves.

Jesus told us (in Matt 10:39) that "the one who finds their life will lose it, but the one who loses their life – for His sake – will find it." Sounds like it's not self-discovery, but Jesus-discovery that is key. 

The Gospel that calls us out of the woods of sin and brokenness and into the clear of Jesus' grace and redemption beautifully rewrites those lines from the music video:

She lost herself. 

But she found Him. 

And somehow that was everything.