Speaking of the Beatles -

Check out this cute little three year old singing Hey Jude.

Lament

It’s time for a hair cut.  I’ve been dreading it for two or three weeks now.  I don’t mind looking cleaned up.  I don’t mind the idea of a hair cut.  In fact I can hardly bear having the hair growing over my ears.  I just can’t stand going to get a hair cut and never, never really getting a hair cut.  Every few weeks, I go through this cycle of mourning and lamentation at the demise of the local Barber Shop.

Dr. Wally

Before Stephen E. Robinson and Believing Christ, before James L. Ferrell’s, The Peacegiver, before serving at the county jail and later, at the juvenile detention center, before learning to engage, rather than merely reading, The Book of Mormon, before addiciton recovery and my connection with LDS ARP, all of which have taught me about the love and atonement and mercy of Jesus Christ; before all of that, was Wally Goddard.  I had grown up with lots of mistaken, mythical and nonsensical notions about God and my relationship with him.  Wally was the first to help remove the scales from my eyes.  This was long before he was famous.  He had not published; he had no PhD.  In those days the only thing I ever placed before his name was brother.

It is interesting though, that as I read his writings today, there is little that doesn’t echo from the days we pondered life together in our youth.  I rue that I wasn’t prepared to better understand what he was trying to teach me back then.  While it is clear I didn’t get much of what Wally had for me; it is also clear that he busted the first cracks in the crust of false notions that had me encased in fear, frustration and darkness.  Back then, Wally was to me, a  solitary voice in a culture of tradition, self sufficiency, anxiety and threat.  I, for example, subconsciously thought that God was holding me by the scruff of the neck, out over hell, just waiting for an excuse to drop me.  Had I ever articulated those words, I hope I would have recognized how foolish they are.  I never actually put it in those terms, though.  Instead, it was more like script silently written into the software of my thought processes.  Script, which I may have and often did disagree with, but script which still controlled my response to the circumstances of my life.  Wally initiated for me, the long laborious process of rewriting that script.

Wally is now more renown and has written several wonderful volumes that are as fresh and cutting edge as things get in Mormondom.  There is no heretical fringe type thinking, just honest, faithfilled truth that so many of us have missed in our lives.  You can read his Myth of the Month columns at Meridian Magazine or explore a collection of wonderful articles at his blog, Dr. Wally.