Dear God...Love, Sarah

One of my favorite musical artists (I have a lot) is Sarah McLachlan. I was listening to my radio station the other and a song by Sarah that I had never heard came on. The title was Dear God. I searched for the lyrics to the song and read along as she sang. Sarah has a lot of passionate music that I enjoy listening to but Dear God was passionate in a different way. Sarah was angry in this song, to put it lightly. Here are the lyrics I was reading.

Dear God,
Hope you got the letter and
I pray you can make it better down here.
I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer
But all the people that you made in your image,
See them starving on their feet
'Cause they don't get enough to eat
From God
I can't believe in you.

Dear God,
Sorry to disturb you, but
I feel that I should be heard loud and clear.
We all need a big reduction in the amount of tears
And all the people that you made in your image,
See them fighting in the street
'Cause they can't make opinions meet

About God,
I can't believe in you.

Did you make disease, and the diamond blue?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too?!

Dear God,
Don't know if you noticed, but...
Your name is on a lot of quotes in this book,
Us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look,
And all the people that you made in your image,
Still believing that junk is true
Well I know it ain't, and so do you

Dear God,
I can't believe in...
I don't believe in...

I won't believe in heaven and hell.
No saints, no sinners, no devil as well.
No pearly gates, no thorny crown.
You're always letting us humans down.
The wars you bring, the babes you drown.
Those lost at sea and never found,
And it's the same the whole world 'round.
The hurt I see helps to compound
That Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Is just somebody's unholy hoax
And if you're up there you'd perceive
That my heart's here upon my sleeve.
If there's one thing I don't believe in.....

It's you.....
Dear God


The lyrics to this song and the questions that atheists skeptics and agnostics have cannot be ignored. I heard this song and I wondered how I could look at the same world that Sarah looks at and see the same pain and evil around me and yet realize that God is still real and He is still at work in this world. Part of the difference lies in the fact that while Sarah attributes all of this evil to God and His lack of intervention in this world, I instead attribute the evil to the fallen state of man. This answer is not good enough for some people and I can understand why. Logically, all of the evil in the world does not make sense with the idea of it coexisting with an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. This thought already carries some preconceived notions with it reagarding the problem of evil and what humans think God's role should be with evil, but that aside for now, I think that the problem of evil ultimately comes down to faith.

I have read many theodicies and I find many of them to be convincing, but I don't think that those theodicies are what ultimately convinces me to believe in God. Ultimately, faith and my own personal experience is what encourages my belief in God. How do you tell this to an atheist? When someone looks at the evil in the world and says that God should do something about that, how do you look at them and tell them that they just have to have faith. Faith about what? It seems ludicrous from a logical standpoint. I myself have questioned why God won't do something and why He continues to allow bad things to happen, but for some reason I still believe in Him. I have had my world swiped out from under me on two major occasions in my life which caused me to hit rock bottom in my questioning and I too have wondered why these turn of events have happened but I still came out on the opposite side as Sarah. There are countless others that I know personally and through reading that have questioned God's purpose and His will but still come out believing despite not finding answers to these questions.

I don't really have anywhere else to go with this post. This is just something that I thought a lot about the last couple of years and was reminded of it when I heard Sarah's song.