This song was not used as the music for a Psalm. A good friend’s wife, who is also a good friend, had a nervous breakdown, and I was involved in helping put her in a facility where she would not hurt herself or others. It was really hard for everyone involved! This song was a result. This intro explains words in the chorus: “My pain cries out, My pain drives in, Is it just life? Or is it sin?” The verses became a way to express personal issues about suppressed memories, childhood drama, anger about parents fighting, youthful indiscretion, and my marriage going south. When one gets to be as old as I am, one starts to realize everyone has pain. Everyone has had, is having, and will have issues causing pain, “pain cutting like a knife.” It is part of life. We cannot know real joy, if we have not known pain. As we are taught in The Book of Mormon: “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.” So, we find ourselves “Learning life’s lessons, An awkward dance.” I selected two photos of Becki Velez’s wedding to represent this song, because it came to represent joy and pain in my mind. I Home Taught the Velez family at the time this song was written. Becki is very special, as I recall, the second oldest in the family, and I spent a complete day helping decorate for her reception. Shortly after the birth of her first child, she had serious medical problems, was hospitalized, and spent over a year recovering from intense physical pain. Last time I saw her, she was back to her wonderful self. When we go through pain, we can own it, or we can blame it on circumstances, or Satan, or life. “Yang coupled with yin,” other dimensions of the circle of life. “We must have faith, Hope and charity, Trust in the Lord, Repent, and look for the best.” I remember the months going through the divorce. Specifically, over the 18 years after Mom’s stroke and before she died I came to Salt Lake or Cedar City or St. George or La Verkin about once a month to see her. During the divorce I would fly into Salt Lake, rent a car, and drive down the back side of Utah Lake and through Delta and Milford to get home. It is about 74 miles from Delta to Milford, and this is one of the more desolate stretches of road in the Utah. Half-way, I found a road that went up into the mountains to the west, and for several months I stopped here and just screamed at the top of my lungs facing each of the cardinal directions, because I knew no one but God and the coyotes could hear me. Pain can be very hard. And like a thunderstorm, the pain fades into the background of our memory as we “Let pain cry out,” and “Let pain leave the scene.”
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