The Shack

My husband bought this book for me after reading the buzz about it on the internet. I hadn’t heard anything about it, so all I had to go on was the quote on the front cover by 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!” High praise indeed.

The Shack tells the story of a man called Mackenzie Allen Philips whose youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later Mack receives a note, from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.  Reluctantly he does so and walks back into his darkest nightmare but what he finds there changes Mack’s world forever. The book says ‘In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant “The Shack” wrestles with the timeless question, “Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?”‘

To be honest, I struggled to get through the first couple of chapters, but once the story gets going, it’s gripping. Soon the book becomes a well-choreographed dance between a compelling story and some challenging theology. Tears are never far away from the reader’s eyes as Young isn’t shy of expressing the raw emotion of the main character’s grief and anger from a tragic loss.

As the story sped along, I found it to be a very enjoyable and thought-provoking read. I would like to go back and read the story again, as the first time I read it I skimmed over a lot of passages just to find out what happened next! There was a lot of interesting stuff in the book about God that I need to go over again to get my head around. The book challenges our Western preconceived ideas of God and His interaction with people to such an extent that in some places some people may find it offensive.

The book contains fresh, creative and intelligent ways to communicate God’s heart and to cause the reader to open up their heart to God in return. I’m sure every reader will find something stimulating within the book, whether it’s on an intellectual or emotional level, the clever thing about the story is that it reaches both the heart and the mind together.