I’ve got good news, and bad news,
To tell you about God;
Good news, and bad news, to tell you about God;
The good news is he answers
Every single prayer…
Isn’t that fantastic ?Every single prayer !
But God has an awful lot of time on his hands;
God has an awful lot of time on his hands.
And God has a backlog of prayers to be answered
That stretches from Miami to the far side of Neptune …
You see, when you say a prayer
It goes into a file-o-fax
And usually sits there,
For three million years
And when god finally gets to it,
He takes it out and looks at it;
He leans back in his leather chair,
Considers it and ruminates,
He coughs and clears his throat,
Meanwhile another
Fifty five thousand years
Have now gone by

And when he finally grants your prayer
Your simple request
For nice weather
for your mother’s
Sunday game of tennis
Your mother’s long dead.
And you’re long dead.
And your entire species
Is oftentimes extinct or has
Up and left the planet
Or evolved into a creature that lives
Only in a dome and does not require
Sunshine to play tennis …

They say god works in mysterious ways
God does not work in mysterious ways …
God is predictable; God is organized,
But God has a lifetime that’s so very, very long
Compared to yours or mine.
It’s like, If you were a bug
And you crawled around the world
And you did it again
And again;
And again;
Like, trillions of times
‘Til your tiny little tracks
Created so much erosion
That the earth looked like a sphere with its center strip cut out
Like a humongus yo-yo
Lying on its side,
Well that would be an afternoon stroll before dinner
for God…

In the Cenozoic age
A long time ago
An australopithecus,
That is to say, a monkey
Was trying to run away
From a wooly rhinoceros
And while he was being chased
He wished that the heavens
Would open up and give
That wooly rhinoceros
A great big sunburn–
He was not exactly sure, how to say “melanoma”
Or “hole in the ozone”
But the sentiment was there,
And the prayer was there,
And you say…God works in mysterious ways?
God does not work in mysterious ways!
It’s just that god has an awful lot of time on his hands
God has an awful lot of time on his hands….

And oh, incidentally
If you think God is old,
You ought to see his parents
Livin’ down in Florida

God has an awful lot of time on his hands
God has an awful lot of time. . . . .

(lyrics: Dan Bern)