Tuesday, 28 July 2009 15:58 | and posted in Book Reviews
Quite simply, I want everyone I know to read this book. Give me an opportunity and I will wax lyrical about how amazing and insightful The Shack is. It'll make you laugh, it will definitely make you cry, but more than that, it will bring to you a fresh revelation of God and his awesome love for you.
The story follows Mackenzie Allen Philips, whose youngest daughter, Missy, was abducted during a family vacation years before. Her body was never found, but evidence conclusively showed that she was brutally murdered in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years on from this terrible event, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to the shack for a weekend.
One of the biggest and (if we're truly honest) unanswered questions in our lives is that of God and suffering. Where is God in a world filled with such unspeakable pain and evil? It is this question that The Shack deals with head on and in a unique way through the fictional story of Mack and his family's horrific pain.
At the shack Mack meets the trinitarian God and comes face to face with Father, Jesus and Holy Spirit. They are not what he expected and he finds his life transformed by this encounter, as may you. Over the course of his interactions with each of them he is able to find (amongst other things I won't spoil for you) a new intimacy with God, whom he had blamed for Missy's death.
The reasons why this book is so good is that firstly, talking about suffering doesn't really work as a theological or philosophical exercise or treatise. You can never really divorce suffering from the emotion and pain that it causes. But in a fictional novel you can tackle both the emotional and the intellectual questions and in a way that all people can hopefully connect with.
Secondly, it's rare to find such a strong trinitarian approach to suffering or even our relationship with God. This book presents us with a very possible picture of how the trinity "works" or "relates".
Lastly, the author, William Paul Young, has obviously experienced a profound revelation of God's love in his own life which enables him in this book to present God in such an intimate way. There's no way you could write a book like this and put those words in God's mouth without a deep and intimate experience of His love! This book leaves you with the desire to talk to God in the same intimate way Mack ends up doing.
You can buy The Shack by William P. Young on Amazon