This song was used as the music for Psalm 20. It is fun recording and writing about the songs I have written. The songs bring back many special memories. Especially this song. After our marriage and move to Salt Lake City, I insisted Marti and I go to the temple regularly. Marti did not particularly like the temple, even back then, and she still went along with me. This song is the result of a very special experience after one of our trips to the Salt Lake Temple. As we were leaving the temple, we saw a young black youth staring up at the spires of the temple. Asked him if he had any questions. He said, “Yes.” Asked him if we could buy him an ice cream and answer his questions, while we all ate. He said, “Yes.” His name was Alex Stamper, he was from an inner city back east, was in Utah as part of a program to break the violence cycle in inner cities, and was downtown Salt Lake on his day off. We ended up spending several evenings with Alex. We brought him to meet some of our friends. We talked about the program he was in, and what he wanted to do when he went back home. We ate ice cream. He did not want to tell us about where he was at, because there were a lot of bad people there, and we were “too good” to be exposed to the stuff he had to endure, even in Utah in his escape from the hood. My heart went out to Alex, and I wrote him a song, which I have never had the chance to share with him, about what I felt like he was trying to tell us. The 14th of July 1974 was just after Marti and I got back from our graduation trip to Europe (we increased our school loan to go on the trip because Marti was expecting Roice and we were sure we were not going to have a chance to travel for many years), and it was the Sunday before I was to report to work at Mobil Oil. I love the words of Alex’s Unspoken Prayer, and think they are the unspoken prayer of many of us. I submitted these words as a poem to a poetry contest, and it was published. Marti, the English Teacher, after she got her Master’s Degree in English from a university in New Hampshire, read the poem, and said, “This is really good.” Oh well! Click here to read the words.
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