God Sends the Rain
I started writing this song on a drive home from work a very short time after Kim and I were married. The muse was the fact that the weather had been socking us with constant rain for much of the summer of 1992. The song's theme and words stuck, and I slowly added to them over the following months. It was nearly a year before I considered this song finished. I found the particular style was unusual for me to write, not one I played well on the piano. My reference recording has traveled with us across the country time and time again, but no one is ever allowed to listen to it, ha, ha. It is nice to witness this song coming to life after enduring the recording of the skeletal chord structure for so long. This version I am posting matches exactly what I heard in my head when I wrote it.
As I writing this historical recollection, my mind travels to memories of the town we lived in at the time. In addition to memories of all the rain storms from that year, I remember a car suddenly careening across the center line. It annihilated my car. I remember well standing in the rain that wet April day. That event began many interesting journeys within Kim's and my spiritual walks and learning process. We were very confused regarding why God would have allowed that car to be wiped out. We had recently sold our second car and Kim was seven months pregnant with our first child. To add insult to injury, we had followed someone else's financial advice to stop wasting money on rental car insurance. We had literally just removed it. This left us with no car and a baby on the way.
That car accident started a string of events that revealed some things in people around us that we did not realize were going on. God used this accident to keep us home more, to remove people from our lives who did not have our best interest at heart, and so many other positive things that never would have happened without that car accident. The car was a mangled mess, and the impact was intense. I should have been seriously injured, but I did not have a scratch. We did not like the situation, but we learned to respect it.
I think that second part of the song says it so clearly:
My heart without rain would be barren
A wasteland where nothing could grow
Sometimes God allows storms to come
Just so I'll come to know
That He sends the rain
Our lives have been plied with quite a few storms through the years. Yours most likely has as well. We often think we need things a lot sooner than we do. God will push the situation to the point where it seems too late for it to even matter. The pressures mount, we need answers yesterday, and nothing seems to be happening. God knows exactly what we need and when we need it. None of us likes life's storms, but we can be assured that God is always using the hardships ... the storms ... to help us grow.
Click below to hear this song.
