Song

When Thunder Rolls

The Song's Story

I wrote "When Thunder Rolls" in 2021, and even now I have a hard time explaining where the words came from.

The song took only about fifteen or twenty minutes to write. There was no struggle to find the next line, no agonizing over the right words, and very little of the usual process of working and reworking an idea that happens so often in songwriting. The words simply seemed to flow. I can only believe that God planted them in my heart.

My relationship with God has not always been an easy one. When I was eleven years old, my mother died. Her death changed something fundamental in the way I saw Him. I felt hurt, betrayed, and disillusioned, and I no longer felt that I could trust Him. There were other losses along the way, and some of them only deepened that mistrust. For many years afterward, I lived a life that I am sure was not pleasing to Him. I still believed in Him, still accepted what Christ had done on the cross, but I had trouble believing that He actually loved me, and I didn't really see a place in my life for a God I couldn't trust to keep me emotionally safe.

One of the deepest of those losses came when I was forced to give my daughter up for adoption. That loss became part of the second verse of "When Thunder Rolls":

My baby girl is gone, and now I'm all alone

Age and hindsight have changed my perspective on parts of my life. I can look back now and understand that some of my own choices played a role in things that happened. That understanding does not make the losses hurt any less. It simply allows me to see them differently than I once did.

Over the years, the faith and love of my Beloved Amy have helped draw me back toward God. I still struggle with trust sometimes. I suspect that, in one way or another, most of us do. We are human, and it can be difficult to understand God when what is happening in our lives hurts and confuses us.

Looking back now, I think "When Thunder Rolls" was given to me in part as a reminder of something I needed to hear myself: that God's sovereignty does not disappear when human life becomes chaotic, and His presence does not leave simply because the storm is raging.

The song moves between two storms of the heart. The first is Christ's anguish in Gethsemane and at the cross. The second is the anguish of a human soul crying out in the midst of anger, grief, and loss. In both, thunder becomes a reminder that pain and chaos do not mean that God has lost control.

Sometimes the thunder is not the absence of God.

Sometimes it is the reminder that He is still there.

Lyrics

Lyrics will be published here when the song is released.

Listen

"When Thunder Rolls" is in the process of being released through A Touch of Love Melodies. Listening links will be added here as they become available.