The Shack
Wm. Paul Young
Hodder and Stoughton 2008
This bestselling novel has also been made into a film. It tells the story of a man whose little girl has been kidnapped and murdered during a camping trip. He receives an invitation to visit God in a shack to talk. God is portrayed in 3 characters, as the interactive Trinity, and one of them is a woman.
It is a beautiful portrayal of unconditional love and participating in God. It wrestles honestly with the question of why there is suffering.
The book changed the way I pray. When I read it, my eldest daughter was just a baby. I remember swinging in the hammock behind our house one dark evening in the tropical heat, reading it by a small light, while my baby slept inside. It sent shivers down my spine, imagining the pain of losing a child. But it gripped me. I could not put it down.
Before I read that book, I used to pray over my baby every night, “Please God, may she grow to love you.” After I finished reading that book my prayer changed to, “May she know she is greatly loved, no matter what.”
It took more years before I could do that for myself, but it was a key moment in my journey away from believing I had to try hard to please God every moment of every day, to the freedom of knowing I am loved just as I am.
Highly recommended.
