The Shack

I'm wondering how many of you out there in my blog world have read The Shack by WM Paul Young. I finished it a few days ago. While I didn't care for the style of writing, I did stay interested enough to finish it. And I can gratefully say I benefited from this new approach to presenting the trinity.

I picked it up not because of everything I had heard about it--because I had heard nothing--but due to one specific quote in the front cover from Eugene Peterson. Peterson writes "When the imagination of a writer and his passion of a theologian cross-fertilize the result is a novel on the order of The Shack. This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress did for his. It's that good!"

This might not grab everyone's attention, but it certainly grabbed mine because my mother was adamant about me reading the Pilgrim's Progress as a child. And before I left home, it had been read front to back at least 3 times. The strange thing to me is that I never thought of the Pilgrim's Progress as some new idea. It seemed obvious that a guy had a path that God wants him to follow, sometimes he strays, and there are consequences that follow. So the idea that the Pilgrim's Progress meant something to a generation never occurred to me.

The Shack definitely challenged me to see and think about the trinity in a whole new perspective. I'm actually looking forward to reading through the book again, except skipping the first 4 chapters which set-up the story in a horrific way. These first pages drug on like a drip of molasses and could have been written with the speed of Forumula 1 without ill effect to the rest of the book.

There were several passages that I found worth remembering. Infertility specifically is a roller coaster ride, especially with IVF. Top that off with adoption issues and I have some real emotions flowing some days. So when I ran across this passage I had to smile:

"Emotions are the colors of the soul; they are spectacular and incredible. When you don't feel, the world becomes dull and colorless."