Songfacts®:

• Bono says this was "written from the point of view of someone who is having a crisis of faith looking at someone who has built their house upon the rock." The narrator is almost angry at the person whose faith doesn't waver despite all of the bad things that happen in the world.
• When U2 was working on this song, Bono's father was sick with cancer that claimed his life in 2001. That's reflected in these lines:
  
  I'm in the waiting room
  I can't see you for the smoke
  I think of you and your holy book
  While the rest of us choke
  
  In the book U2 by U2, Bono explains those lyrics: "I don't know why it's set in a hospital waiting-room in the days when people could smoke in such places. It could almost be the voice of my father, looking at me. The glower. The put-down. But that is the thing that runs right through that album, that gives it its cohesiveness, the ring of truth, connecting with what was going on in my life, connecting to my father and to my mother, which is probably what it all really comes back to, because I haven't been in a waiting room filled with smoke since I was 14 years old. I am always amazed when stuff like that comes out."