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I have just finished reading The Shack by Wm. Paul Young, which I personally recommend to anyone who is struggling with the loss of a loved one, who is struggling with the loss of his faith or even who is a confirmed atheist.
One of the things I hear from people who profess to be non-believers is that if there were a God, why does he allow such suffering in this world.
This book answers that question as well as anything I have ever read on the subject. Young has written a masterful novel that is a page-turner but that also explores deeper spiritual questions with which many of us struggle.Â
Mack Phillips' youngest daughter Missy has been abducted during a family vacation in Oregon and evidence that she has been brutally murdered surfaces in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. There, searchers find her blood-soaked little dress lying on the floor. In spite of a prolonged search of the area, they never recover her body.
Her heartbroken family returns home, holds a funeral with an empty casket, and tries to go on with their lives.  But Mack, who was watching the child just before she disappeared, sinks into a deep depression, which he comes to think of as the "Great Sadness."
Four years later, will still in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, supposedly 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 Mack finds there will change his life forever.
In an interview with World Magazine's Susan Olasky, Young, who is no longer a member of a church, said "(The institutional church) doesn't work for those of us who are hurt and those of us who are damaged. . . .
If God is a loving God and there's grace in this world and it doesn't work for those of us who didn't get dealt a very good hand in the deck, then why are we doing this? . . . Legalism within Christian or religious circles doesn't work very well for people who are good at it. And I wasn't very good at it."
An article in Maclean's magazine in August 2008 indicated that Young is a "Canadian raised from birth by his missionary parents in Dutch New Guinea. When Young reached school age, he was sent back home to a Christian boarding school. While there, he was sexually abused by some of the very people to whom his parents had preached.
Young drifted through life as an adult, buoyed a little by his faith and a lot by his wife, Kim, keeping his secrets and building his shack: 'the place we make to hide all our crap,' he calls it.
Until, at 38, he found himself at the nadir. 'I had a three-month affair with one of my wife's best friends. That was it, that just blew my careful little religious world apart. I either had to get on my knees and deal with my wife's pain and anger or kill myself."
Young had written primarily as a way to create unique gifts for his friends, until his wife repeatedly urged him to write something for their six children in order to put down in one place his perspectives on God and on the inner healing Young had experienced as an adult. The resulting manuscript, that later became The Shack, was intended only for his six kids and for a handful of close friends.
Young initially printed just 15 copies of his book. Two of his close friends encouraged him to have it published and assisted with some editing and rewriting in order to prepare the manuscript for publication.
Rejected by 26 publishers, Young and his friends published the book under the name of their newly created publishing company, Windblown Media in 2007.
The company spent only $200 in advertising; but word-of-mouth referrals eventually drove the book to number one on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list in June 2008.
"The Shack" was the top-selling fiction and audio book of 2008 in America through November 30.
Young considers himself a longtime devotee of C.S. Lewis.
Young credits C.S. Lewis for his interest in the themes of characters
exploring tough questions that often keep them from faith in God.
Young currently resides in Happy Valley, Oregon with his wife. Young has six children ages 17–30, two daughters-in-law and three grandchildren.
Biographical information supplied from:Â https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_P._Young
