Oh my God, look around this place
Your fingers reach around the bone
You set the break and set the tone
Flights of grace, and future falls
In present pain
All fools say, "Oh my God"

Oh my God, Why are we so afraid?
We make it worse when we don't bleed
There is no cure for our disease
Turn a phrase, and rise again
Or fake your death and only tell your closest friend
Oh my God.

Oh my God, can I complain?
You take away my firm belief and graft my soul upon your grief
Weddings, boats and alibis
All drift away, and a mother cries

Liars and fools; sons and failures
Thieves will always say
Lost and found; ailing wanderers
Healers always say
Whores and angels; men with problems
Leavers always say
Broken hearted; separated
Orphans always say
War creators; racial haters
Preachers always say
Distant fathers; fallen warriors
Givers always say
Pilgrim saints; lonely widows
Users always say
Fearful mothers; watchful doubters
Saviors always say

Sometimes I cannot forgive
And these days, mercy cuts so deep
If the world was how it should be, maybe I could get some sleep
While I lay, I dream we're better,
Scales were gone and faces light
When we wake, we hate our brother
We still move to hurt each other
Sometimes I can close my eyes,
And all the fear that keeps me silent falls below my heavy breathing,
What makes me so badly bent?
We all have a chance to murder
We all feel the need for wonder
We still want to be reminded that the pain is worth the thunder

Sometimes when I lose my grip, I wonder what to make of heaven
All the times I thought to reach up
All the times I had to give
Babies underneath their beds
Hospitals that cannot treat all the wounds that money causes,
All the comforts of cathedrals
All the cries of thirsty children - this is our inheritance
All the rage of watching mothers - this is our greatest offense

Oh my God
Oh my God
Oh my God


- Jars of clay

Let's talk about one new song, "Oh My God." Where'd the idea come from?

Haseltine: Matt [Odmark, Jars guitaris] came to the band with this idea to use the phrase "Oh my God" in a song. It means so many different things and it's used in so many different contexts, but in the end, it means that at some point in every person's life, they have to confront whether or not God is real.

In the song, you express some of your own doubts. The press kit says that as a guy who grew up in church, you never felt like you had permission to ask whether God is real. What has happened in your life to cause you to ask that question now?

Haseltine: It's strange. The things that make me doubt God at times are really kind of mundane things. Like McDonald's.

Huh? Not AIDS in Africa or human suffering, but McDonald's?

Haseltine: No, it's not the suffering. It's the stuff that makes me go, "So this is the way the story played out. That God would have some guy named Ray Kroc start a hamburger restaurant called McDonald's." It's the way our world is structured, this idea of capitalism and the lottery, that make me go, "Is this all of man, or is this God?" Those things play a weird role in the story of mankind of working out his salvation and his place in the world. And those are the kind of things that cause me to kind of have these little crisis moments.

But it's the big things too. We just spent some time in Rwanda, and real violence makes me ask those questions too—the all-out violence of man to man. We visited this church in Rwanda where they'd set up a memorial to what happened in the genocide in '94, where 800,000 people were killed in less than a hundred days. Five thousand people died in this one church, and they'd left the bodies there; now it's just bones.

Gary Haugen from International Justice Mission was with us. He was the head of the UN investigation into the genocide, and he had actually visited this church in '94 and had to go through the bodies and do the forensics of the situation. He was describing the way people would get up in the morning, and they'd kill, kill, kill, then stop, have lunch, go back, kill some more, and then have dinner. Very systematic. It began as these quick killings, and then it turned into something more primitive as the restraints came further off. It began to be torture and humiliation and mutilation. It takes a long time to kill 5,000 people in a church. Think about being in there with your family as these murders get closer and closer, and to hear the screams.

I'm sure those people weren't praying, "God, please help me have a better car, or please increase my land." It was, "God, please stop the hand of our aggressor," and it didn't happen. That prayer wasn't answered for anybody in that church. And this wasn't the military doing this violence; it was their neighbors. That kind of stuff really sent me into a spiral: "What is going on? How does this fit in?" It does two things. It causes a bit of a crisis of faith, and at the same time, it also makes me realize there has to be a God, because my own sense of justice does not have a context for this. Only God's greater story of redemption can fit something like this into it, for 800,000 people to die, you know? God promises that there is redemption, so where is it? You know, it's a lot of those kind of questions. And those are all wrapped up in that song.

- http://www.christianitytoday.com/music/interviews/2006/jarsofclay-0806.html