The Shack - A Must Read

Last night, I was up until after midnight reading a book I picked up at Barnes & Nobles yesterday. Now usually when my mother tells me about something she saw on 700 Club, or some such Christian source, I supress eye-rolling. The latest craze in Christian books has always been a disappointment to me. But for some reason, I bought the book she had seen on an interview immediately and went home and started to read...

There are a few books throughout my life which have changed the way I think about most everything. Books like the Chronicles of Narnia as a child learning that Aslan's "not safe, but He's good." Later again C.S. Lewis' Problem of Pain opened a window to my soul, allowing the much-needed breeze into dark and stuffy corners. A.W. Tozer's Knowledge of the Holy on the goodness of God, and Thomas Merton's No Man is an Island challenging my own isolation tendencies. Growing up reading biographies, I remember Peace Child by Don Richardson. How that book haunted me, and Night by Eli Weisel. These were more than mental diversions from my hectic life, these demanded my attentions and emotions. I could not casually read at the local cafe for fear that I would begin to reverberate with sobbing, or have to set the book aside to get on my face before my God. These are books that causd me to think differently, feel differently and live differently. They demanded that I come clean and bare my soul so riddled with weakness. They required confrontation of my patterns of thinking, drawing my battered emotions into the light. These aren't your historical Christian fiction, which I can appreciate as a sort of mental respite, these are like collisions with God.

In all of my reading, I have never come across a book quite like William P. Young's The Shack. It is well written in a way that thunders through a sort of raw transparency. If is devoid of that tasteless Christian predictability littered with phrases and churchoelogy which I find so put-off-ing. It is refreshing, fresh, unorthodox, disconcertingly real, and wonderful. Well, here's the back of the book:

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted
during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally
murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness.
Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a
suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack
for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a
wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he
finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where religion
seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the
timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable
pain?" The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you
as much as it did him. You'll want everyone you know to read this book! 

My mother and her roommate sat in wing chairs across from me reading their own selections, which were frequently interrupted by either my sobbing and sniveling or laughing out loud. After numerous trips to the bathroom for kleenex, they kindly provided me a box. By the time they retired for the evening, I was ready for a private cry-fest.

The Lord used this book to assure me again of His heart, of how much He loves me, of the beauty and reality of His abiding presence, of the mystery of the invitation and acceptance in the beloved and I gained heavenly insights into the mystery of the Trinity.

As a child, I had a vision of Jesus. He wore Bermuda shorts and a flower-print Hawaiian shirt, had kind eyes and long hair. He wore flip-flops and invited me to come with Him through the nations. That childhood image of Jesus preserved through the years of religion without relationship. I knew that if that experience was real, and having happened to me, I was fairly sure that it was, that Jesus was different than so many people made Him out to be. The Shack resonates in my heart with the emotion that filled my little heart when I realized Jesus really wanted to hang out with me: an experience that changes everything.

I highly recommend that you go get this little book and set aside some 4 hours in private to read it. Make sure it's a place where you can laugh and cry. Don't look for systemic theology, it's not a textbook. Just let the Lord speak to you from His heart. I know you'll like it.

Blessings,

Joanna Reyburn