The Shack by Wm. Paul Young

June Book Club isn’t until the end of the month, but I already finished the book…new record!  The Shack, by Wm. Paul Young isn’t like the books I typically read.

My family wasn’t very religious growing up.  I was raised to believe in God, and I do, but other than attending one week of bible camp each summer from kindergarten to fifth grade and going to church occasionally with friends, I never have really been exposed to structured religion.

The Shack starts out with the main character Mack facing a deep depression, the great sadness, over his youngest daughter Missy’s brutal kidnapping and murder.  It’s about three years after it happened, and him and his family (wife Nan who is deeply religious and their four other children) aren’t doing that well.  Then one snowy, icy day, Mack receives a note telling him to meet God in the Shack – which was the place the police found the evidence of Missy’s murder (her body had never been recovered).

Mack, not sure if it was a prank, the killer seeking him out, or somehow God himself, decides he has to go find out.  I won’t ruin the story that follow for you – but basically Mack meets God, Jeasus and the Holy Spirit and through a long process, finally comes to terms with what happened to Missy, his own bad relationship with his father and Missy’s killer himself.

This is written as a true story.  From the transformation of the forest into a magical and heavenly garden where God appears to Mack as a heavy-set black woman to walking on water across a lake with Jesus, it’s all supposed to be told exactly as Mack remembers it.

I’m not going to lie…I have a big problem beileive all of it.  It’s magical and fantasy-like…I guess maybe I’m more of a realist.  I do believe the underlying themes of the book:  God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit love you and area always with you and turning to them in a time of deep emotional need can really help – just like it can at any other point in time.

It did make me think some about my own life and especially how I judge people (there’s a whole chapter on how Mack meets a judge-type person who I’m not familiar with), and I should pobably work on that.  Overall the book was interesting…I couldn’t really put it down because I did want to find out how everything was resolved.  The book’s ending wraped up a little too neatly for me, and that may be adding to my speculation as to whether the whole story is true or not.

An interesting note about the book, it’s a NY Times best-seller with more than five million copies in print.  The book’s success stemmed primarily from word-of-mouth marketing – the book was launched with only a $200 marketing campaign.  And now, it seems, it’s become somewhat of a phenomenom.