Life Is Hard (God Is Good)
I love the stories behind the songs we’ve chosen to include on the album, and researching them was really interesting. However, there are a couple of songs that were a little harder to track down. “Life Is Hard (God Is Good)” is one of them.
“Life Is Hard (God Is Good)” was written and recorded by the lovely Contemporary Christian artist Pam Thum. I didn’t find a story behind this particular song of hers, but I read something from the blog on her website that offered some insight into the place I think she (might) have been writing from.
Pam Thum calls herself the “real-life runaway bride”. She explains the turning point in her life when she decided (maybe for the first time ever) that she was not going to let fear lead her decisions any longer. She was at the altar, in a beautiful white dress – the whole works – when she backed out of the ceremony.
I love how she describes what happened next:
It was the right decision, but right decisions have a way of amplifying all of the terrible decisions that had led up to that critical day.
What she did took an enormous amount of bravery. It really is something from a movie. Maybe her example can lead us to ask ourselves, “How many times have I let fear choose for me, because I’m afraid of what people might think? Or if I fail? Or if I’m wrong?”
Which reminds me of a favorite “Dr. Phil-ism”:
You wouldn’t worry so much about what people thought of you, if you knew how seldom they did!
Sometimes I think we are scared to stand up for what we know in our heart is right. Maybe because it feels too hard to fix? Or someone might see us try, but we fail. What if we don’t know WHAT to fix? And, what if we don’t even know what to pray for? So we don’t stand up. And nothing gets better. When we let FEAR win, our TRUTH suffers in silence. I think “Life Is Hard (God Is Good)” is perfect for many situations. It seems to be able to relate to any number of reasons why we feel so helpless sometimes. One of my favorite lines is:
You start to pray, but there’s nothing left to say. So you just quietly kneel.
What a blessing to know that we don’t always HAVE to know what to ask for. When living takes the life out of us, it’s comforting to know God already knows what we need.
He truly understands every fallen tear.
Our treatment of “Life Is Hard (God Is Good)” is very gentle and simple, with just acoustic piano (played by the brilliant Wally Minko) and vocal. I hope it provides listeners with a warm reminder that God is always good, especially when life is hard.