Guest Author - BettyAnn Schmidt

The Shack, William P. Young. Windblown Media. 2007

Beneath a picture of an old, run-down shack on its cover, is a quote from Eugene Peterson: "This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress did for his. It's that good!"

And, indeed, it is that good.

A newspaper article here called it a "publishing phenomenon." As a self-published book, it held Amazon.com's Number 1 Fiction spot for weeks and had sold close to 400,000 copies as of the beginning of April. News editor for the Nashville Tennessean paper, Bob Samietana, adds, "All this for a parable in which God is depicted as an overweight, African-American woman who is constantly at the stove cooking."

What started as a few spiral-bound copies for family ended up with major publishers all offering to take it over, after it had hit the big time in self-publishing. Rather than accept any of the offers, Young and two friends started their own company to print and sell the book on an advertising budget of $300.

ABC News producer, Patrick M. Roddy, states: "With every page, the complicated do's and don't that distort a relationship into a religion were washed away..."

This is a novel of fiction that wraps itself around the great truth of the universe. It answers questions you didn't realize you pondered. It's bitterly sad in its fictional story and funny in its fiction formed from nonfiction.

The story begins in the cold of an Oregon winter, in a day in the life of Mackenzie Allen Phillips. "Mack."

Make has suffered the "Great Sadness" after his youngest daughter, Missy, was abducted during a camping trip. There's evidence she was brutally murdered at an old, wilderness shack. After he receives a strange invitation supposedly from God to return to the shack, Mack goes back to his worst nightmare and is forever changed.

Probably the biggest question this world has is: "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?" This is Mack's question, and the answer is at the heart of this book. The God who Mack encounters will surprise you but at the same time make more sense of who he really is than any other book you've read, and the answer to the question makes me see that it's been there all along, but it's an answer we humans can't find easily on our own.

God, in the form of Elousia, tells us, and Mack, how little we grasp of the big picture and what's wrong with some of our preconceived, man-made notions. And it is such good news.

With the great debate going on now about whether God can be a God of love and a God who punishes, people on both sides need to read this book. A lot of notions are laid to rest. A lot of things are discovered anew. The fall of our world--What exactly we chose and what were the consequences that impact our lives still.

How exactly do we hearthe voice of God? Another big question. Through his word, the Bible, is how I thought I heard it. And I do, but maybe I'm missing something even more. Maybe I don't fully "get" my human nature as I once thought I did.

At one point in my reading, I uncovered my depression in a startling way. It definitely was a turning point. The Shack has the power to transform you in ways like that.

Wynona Judd said reading the book "blew the door wide open" to her soul.

If you read this book for no other reason than to really understand the Trinity, you'd be glad you did.

The myths or realities about God? Well, as we read in The Shack, "Rumors of glory are often hidden inside of what many consider myths and tales."