Sometimes life is hard, and when you’re excited, it’s going to get easy; it gets worse.

Just like that.

So Dad sends me a video of a girl who has a 2% chance of surviving cancer. She wrote a song, “It’s Okay,” and performed it on ‘America’s Got Talent.’

If the song wasn’t emotional enough, she then says, “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.”

How do you do that exactly? I need to know that everything is going to be okay beforehand.

I constantly fall into that trap. As long as I can live under the illusion that everything will work out, I’m happy. When I worry about the outcome, I’ll hold off on happiness until it’s over; thank you very much.

You see, I have unexplained nerve pain, and it’s disrupting my cancer treatment. I’m tired, and I don’t feel like dealing with another problem. Let me wave my magic wand and say, “Irradicate cancer treatment so I can go on my merry way.”

Only, I have friends who have lost their loved one, they’re caring for a sick family member or themselves, and they’ve lost a spouse to divorce.

Let’s face it; hardships are abundant right now.

So how do we find happiness, especially amidst our difficulties? We look to Jane, the beautiful singer who believes no matter what happens, it’s okay.

Only a few weeks ago, Alexandra came home from school and told me that they learned about a six-line poem found on a cellar wall in Nazi Germany. An anonymous Jewish person wrote it in hiding.

People have made songs about it, and Z Randall Stroupe wrote longer lyrics out of it in "Inscription of Hope." (That's the lyrics they used, but I'm jumping ahead).

One guy was so fascinated by the poem as so many stories are circulating about it that he did a five-part series researching it. https://humanistseminarian.com/2021/04/04/i-believe-in-the-sun-part-v-the-source/

But Alexandra read the poem in class and immediately heard a tune in her head. I asked her to play it for me. Incredible.

I told her to record it, so she didn’t forget. I try to teach her that when a song “pops in your head,” don’t abandon it, or it will abandon you. Take it seriously. It’s a gift that doesn’t happen to most of us. (I’ve taken a lot of classes to learn this very stuff).

A couple of weeks later, we were sitting at dinner, and I asked her what happened to her song. She had forgotten all about it.

But she reread the poem, and the tune came back to her. So Sky and Zana recorded it–just in time for their Gramka’s birthday.

There’s a special meaning behind that poem because Gramka’s mother hid a Jewish couple from the Germans in her attic in Poland while her husband was off fighting in World War II.

The girls’ great-grandma secretly slipped food to the couple and didn’t tell anyone in the household what was going on, not even the servants, as she put her entire family’s life at risk. I wrote about it last year for Gramka’s birthday. Warning: my posts were long back then so skip ahead to the middle if you’re interested in reading. Reigniting A Dream – Renewing Vows with MLK

The girls have always taken a particular interest in that story. They also loved hearing how she flirted with the guard to get out of communist Poland to make a life for herself in Paris, where she met her husband to follow him to Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, and the US.

She lives in Bolivia now, and though we’re separated by too much distance, she’s lived a life going from one unknown to the next, getting transplanted from Polland to Bolivia, having no idea how it was all going to turn out.

And just like Gramka’s mother, who had no idea if she would get killed for her compassion, she did it anyway. It’s the ultimate act of heroism to act regardless of the outcome.

But it’s a simple parenting moment. I’m trying to teach Alexandra to follow through with her creative impulses, but somehow the lesson gets turned back on me.

It makes me wonder if I could believe everything’s going to be okay, even when it doesn’t appear to be. The outcome shouldn’t matter. If others can find hope in their darkest moments, even when life is hard, maybe I can be happy, too.

And for those times when I’ve given up hope, and I’m tired, really tired, I have the girl’s song to remind me, “I believe.”