A Heartfelt Message from Neale Donald Walsch

When I was a boy, I used to go around saying, “Life is so simple. Why does everyone keep making it so complicated?”

I couldn’t understand why all the kids in school would get so kerfuffled when a big test was coming up or when the end-of-year grades were due. I couldn’t figure out (even when I was seven, eight, and nine) why Mom and Dad “got into it” so often at home or why Mom worried so much about stuff.

I was never clear about why anyone would be so concerned or worried about anything that they’d let themselves shift from cheerfulness to snippiness, from happiness to grouchiness, from inner peace to inward anxiety.

For some reason, I always knew things would work out—and they always did. Maybe they didn’t always work out the way I thought they would or exactly the way I wanted them to, but they always worked out in a way that brought me to my next highest good—and it didn’t take me long to catch on to what was happening and to begin to depend on this being simply “The Way Life Is.”

Now Mary O’Malley has written a whole book about this—What’s In the Way Is the Way—explaining it clearly and in wonderfully accessible terms.

I’m so excited about this book! I consider it to be one of the most important pieces of writing to come our way in a very long time, and it absolutely will be—of this I am sure—one of the most beneficial books you have ever read.

This book talks about how to deal with life exactly as it is occurring, not just when it’s easy to do so, but when it’s the most difficult—which, irony of ironies, makes it easy to do so.

And as much as I thought I knew about all this, boy could I have used this book when I was moving through the worst days of my personal journey. As with all of us, there have been some pretty tough ones. And in those moments we can easily forget—or at least I did—whatever we thought we knew about how to navigate the rocky shoals of life.

If in those moments I could have had something that I could turn to, something that could have helped me understand what was going on and how to get through it, I would have given anything. And if I had had something that I could refer to ahead of time so that I might have a specific approach to dealing with challenging moments, I would have considered it the biggest blessing of my life.

I can promise you that you will never find life more clearly explained than it is here, nor will you have placed in your hands more useful or powerful tools with which to negotiate its most difficult experiences.

It is true for me that as a child I seemed to know, intuitively, that life need not be as utterly discombobulating as I was observing people experiencing it, but I could not have told you why that was so—much less how to make it so. Mary O’Malley has done both here and thus produced one of the greatest gifts one human being could offer to another.

If this is a challenging time in your life (or if someone you know and love is moving through a challenging moment in theirs), you could not have been led to a more perfect resource than this book—nor to a more compassionate, understanding, spiritually aware, emotionally articulate, psychologically brilliant, and wonderfully able and capable messenger and teacher than its author.

Put simply, this book will show you the way to a better life, without needing a single thing to be different for you to retain your inner peace, your outer joy, and your overall well-being. Yet it is far from a theory book or a concept document. It is a practitioner’s guide. It is an easy-to-follow instruction book. It could easily have been titled Life’s Operating Manual. Drink it in as the nectar of the gods. For it is surely from Divinity Itself that flows such wisdom as is here.

Thank you, Mary O’Malley, for our days and nights are enriched by you and our wounded places healed.

From the Forward to What’s In the Way Is the Way.