Live's "Lightning Crashes" takes place in a single building in a single instant. In one room, a young mother has just given birth. Down the hall, an old mother has just died. The same flash of lightning marks both. The song holds the two moments side by side and will not let us look away from either.
It was the biggest hit of the band's career. It is also one of the strangest songs ever to spend nine weeks at No. 1 on the Modern Rock chart: a meditation on death and birth with no chorus about love. What it asks is the oldest question there is. When a life ends, does anything carry on?
What Kowalczyk Saw
Ed Kowalczyk was about 21 when he wrote the song. He was sitting on his brother's bed in his mother's house in York, Pennsylvania, with an acoustic guitar. He has said that to this day he has no idea where it came from.
He pictured a hospital where births and deaths happen at the same time. One family mourns a woman while, in another room, a baby arrives. He has been clear on one point that listeners often miss. Nobody dies in childbirth in the song. The two mothers are different women.
The band dedicated the song to Barbara Lewis, a high school friend. In 1993, at 19, she was killed by a drunk driver who was fleeing police after a robbery. She was a registered organ donor. Her liver went to a 10-month-old baby, and her heart went on beating in a man's chest. Her brother-in-law later told Songfacts that the lyrics are mostly an analogy for that gift.
A Circle or a Line
Many listeners hear reincarnation in the song, and critics often describe it as a meditation on life, death and reincarnation. The text invites it. The dying woman's confusion, the song says, now belongs to the baby down the hall. In the chorus, the singer feels something coming back again, like thunder chasing the wind. Life does not end. It passes on and returns.
That is an ancient way of seeing the world, and the Bible knows it well. The Preacher describes it: "The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits" (Ecclesiastes 1:6). Generations come and go. The sun rises and sets. "There is no new thing under the sun" (1:9). This is life seen as a circle, and the Preacher finds it wearying.
Scripture as a whole draws a line instead. History has a beginning and an end. Each person lives once. "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation" (Hebrews 9:27–28).
The difference matters. A circle promises that something of us comes back. The line promises that Someone comes back for us. The song senses the first. Scripture announces the second.
The Grain of Wheat
Barbara Lewis's story is not reincarnation. It is something Scripture understands better. A young woman died, and because of what she gave, a baby lived and a man's heart kept beating. Her death became someone else's life.
Yeshua described His own death in exactly those terms. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit" (John 12:24). He said it days before the cross. The seed does not come back as itself. It gives itself away, and new life rises from it.
An organ donor's gift is a small, true picture of that pattern. It is not salvation, and no one should pretend it is. But it shows in a hospital what the gospel shows on a hill outside Jerusalem. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Barbara did not choose her death. She chose, ahead of time, that her death would serve. Messiah chose both.
Paul carries the seed image to the resurrection. "That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die" (1 Corinthians 15:36). What is raised is the same person, made new. The song imagines a dying life drifting into another body. Scripture promises that the one who dies will be raised in her own.
Travail
The song opens with a new mother crying. Her tears and the mourners' tears down the hall sound alike. Only the room tells you which is grief and which is joy.
On the night before He died, Yeshua used that very image for His disciples. "Ye shall weep and lament... and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world" (John 16:20–21). The cross would feel like a death room. It was a delivery room.
Paul widens the picture to the whole world. "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also... waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body" (Romans 8:22–23). Every hospital is a small picture of creation itself. Deaths and births share the same hallway because the world is in labor. Something is being born that has not arrived yet.
Lightning from the East
The song's great refrain is a feeling. Something is coming back. It rolls in like thunder, and the singer can feel forces pulling from deep in the earth. He never says what it is. A 21-year-old in his brother's bedroom sensed that death was not the end and that something was on its way.
Scripture uses the same image for the same longing, and it gives the answer a name. "For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be" (Matthew 24:27). When He ascended, the angels told the disciples: "this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner" (Acts 1:11).
What is coming back is not a soul looking for a new body. It is the King, coming for the bodies of His people to raise them. The old mother down the hall does not need to be recycled into someone else. She needs to be raised as herself. So does Barbara Lewis.
In the song, lightning crashes and a life ends or begins. In Scripture, lightning will flash across the whole sky once, and death itself will end. Kowalczyk said he never knew where the song came from. Elihu told Job that God is the one "who giveth songs in the night" (Job 35:10). Perhaps this one came from the groan of a world in labor, feeling for the One who is coming back again.