The Shack – Wm. Paul Young

I just finished reading the book called The Shack by Wm. Paul Young. If you haven’t heard of it, I’m willing to bet you will (well, you’re reading this at the moment).  The book has been fairly popular over the past year.  If you don’t know, it basically is a fictional story of a man who is invited by God to meet with him in a shack in the mountains where a murderer had killed his youngest daughter, Missy.  Yeah… you can guess that there is some emotion turmoil wrapped up in this.  Anyway, here’s a short take I had on it (it was my first facebook review I’ve ever written, ooOOOoo)

“I thoroughly enjoyed the book.  Some would say that it’s portrayal of the Trinity was questionable and some of the theological ideas he put forth shady, but I thought he did an incredible job at showing (in my opinion) God’s view of and love of humanity.  I think it did well to show the lengths and depths of his love and how far he was willing to go to redeem humanity (on a grand scale but also individually).

I feel like, even with it being a work of fiction, it brings good challenges to the current cultural views of God.  In that, I think it brings balance to the characteristics of God we often over-emphasis in our time and culture.  Such as portraying the Holy, total-otherly nature of God and yet the upclose and intimate kind of relationship God wants with each and every one of us.  And again, balancing the concept of grace that saves us despite our sin and junk, and YET moves us to work through it, hand it over to God, and not stay the same.

Anyway, definitely worth the read if you’re looking for something to help you understand a God you can’t wrap your head around (i.e. relatable but infinitely greater than we can imagine)”

Here’s a couple of the short insights I took away:

-We can’t get stuck in our views of God because that limits who he really is.  While some things are truth about the character of God, we’ve gotta understand that even those we cannot possibly grasp the full extend of.  For example: unconditional, self-giving love.

-Some get caught on the fact that God would send his son to die, not understanding that in the crucifixion it wasn’t just Jesus who suffered.  Again, it’s a great mystery of the faith how God pulled this off (it’s beyond our comprehension, I think), but God gave of himself when Jesus died on the cross, b/c if you believe the Trinitarian concept, Jesus is God (of one substance as some of those wonderful little creeds say).

-God is about verbs not nouns.  This concept Young brought took me a few minutes to grasp, but basically he talks about how religion is concerned with nouns, but God is concerned with verbs.  Nouns are rigid, stiff, stationary while verbs are fluid, active and moving.  He gives examples (through God speaking) expectation in a relationship and expectancy.  One is a set of guidelines that if a friend doesn’t live up to, it judges the relationship, expectancy is different, it doesn’t judge the friend, but it waits eagerly for that relationship.  Anyway, you’ll probably have to read it to understand what’s being said.  It’s basically what Paul goes through in the concept of Grace versus Law, but put in terms more relatable to 21st Century Gentiles.

Anyway, that is all I’ll bore you with, read the book for yourself and in everything you read, I pray that you might always take the time to pause and let God speak to you through it, that’s what makes reading and learning worthwhile – doing it with conscious awareness of the presence of God.  <— my two cents of the day.