Featured Article
It started when a friend sent me a link to Kim Gentes kind blog about The Shack. The blog is a worthwhile read by itself:
http://salemhouseofprayer.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/the-real-controversy-about-the-shack-by-kim-gentes/
but what really got my attention was a brilliant comment to the blog by an ‘unbeliever’, followed by an equally insightful response to that comment, both of which are posted below. Enjoy!
My name is Aram and I just finished reading The Shack. I then went online and happened across a bunch of people arguing about it, for what looks like a few years now. People are calling this a heresy, a dangerous book, and warning people not to read it.
Why?
I normally never comment on these things, but being an unbeliever – yes that’s right, I am not a Christian – I thought it might be useful for some of these theology spouting authorities to take a moment and look at what I, not a churchgoer in any way, have gleaned from this little book. And then ask yourself – because I really don’t know much about the Bible – is anything I learned leading me in the wrong direction? Perhaps all the way to this burning lake of fire so many Christians love trying and scare non-Christians into believing by? If this is the case, then I guess you’re right, and based on what you believe people shouldn’t read this book.
For me, I don’t believe fear and rules to be the answer, I never have. This has been the main reason for my avoidance of the church. However, when you preach love and forgiveness, through whatever means conveys it the best, whether fiction or otherwise, well now, my heart begins to open a tad. It makes me actually want to pick up a Bible perhaps and maybe read a little further.
Teach love my Christian friends, because people like me, we don’t respond well to fear tactics. And we definitely don’t get turned on by arrogant church leaders who think they have it all figured out.
Below are 57 new ideas I took away from this little book. Many are direct quotes from the book itself.
1. The different appearances of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit were used to help Mack break his religious conditioning.
2. You don’t get brownie points for doing something through obligation; only if you want to.
3. Life takes a lot of time and a lot of relationship.
4. How free are we really? – family genetics, social influences, personal habits, advertising, propaganda & paradigms etc. Freedom is an incremental process that happens inside a relationship with Jesus Christ.
5. When all you can see is your pain, perhaps then you lose sight of God.
6. Pain has a way of clipping our wings, so we can’t fly. After awhile we forget we were ever created to fly.
7. When Jesus became a man he gave up his own ability to heal people and do miracles. His miracles were accomplished by Jesus’ (a man, a dependent limited human being) trust in the Father God. We are all designed to live like that, out of God’s life and power.
8. God exists in three persons so we, his creation, can also live in love and relationship, just like God does. If God didn’t, we couldn’t. “God cannot act apart from love.”
9. Relationships are never about power, and one way to avoid wanting power is to limit oneself – to serve.
10. Sin is its own punishment, devouring from the inside. It’s not God’s purpose to punish it; it’s God’s joy to cure it.
11. When people choose independence over relationship, we become a danger to each other.
12. If people learned to regard each other’s concerns as significant as their own, there would be no need for hierarchy. God does not relate inside a hierarchy; God wants us to trust him because he will never use or hurt us.
13. When Christians don’t trust God it’s because they don’t know they are loved by him. They think God is not good.
14. Mack says: “I just can’t imagine any final outcome that would justify all this (pain, suffering etc).” Papa replies: “We’re not justifying it. We are redeeming it.”
15. The choice of God to hide so many wonders from man is an act of love that is a gift inside the process of life.
16. For any created being, autonomy is lunacy.
17. When something happens to us, how do we determine whether it is good or bad? By whether we like it or if it causes us pain. This is self-serving and self-centred.
18. We become the judge of good and evil; so when each person’s good and evil clashes with someone else’s, fights, even wars, break out.
19. Eating of the tree tore the universe apart, divorcing the spiritual from the physical. All of us died, expelling the very breath of God.
20. We play God in our independence. The only remedy is to give up the right to decide good and evil and choose to live in God and trust and rest in his goodness.
21. God is light and God is good. Removing ourselves from God will plunge us into darkness. Declaring independence will result in evil because apart from God, you can only draw on yourself. That is death, because you have separated yourself from God, from Life.
22. This concept is difficult for us because the good may be the presence of cancer or the loss of income, or even a life. Sarayu answers: “Don’t you think we care about these people who suffer too? Each of them is the centre of another story that is untold.”
23. About having ‘rights’: “‘Rights’ are where survivors go so they won’t have to work out relationships.”
24. Jesus gave up his rights so his dependent life would open a door that would allow us to live free enough to give up our rights.
25. Each of us is wild, beautiful, and perfectly in process when God is working with a purpose in our hearts. We are an emerging, growing, and alive pattern – a living fractal.
26. We tend to live either in the past or the future; dwelling on the pain and the regret of the past, instead of a quick visit to learn something from it. Or fearing the future, letting our imagination run wild with worry, and forgetting to see the future with Jesus. This happens when: a. we don’t really know we’re loved and b. we don’t believe that God is good.
27. Apart from Jesus’ life, we cannot submit one to another. Jesus’ life is not an example to be copied. Jesus came to live his life in us; so we will see with God’s eyes, hear with his ears, love with his heart, and touch with his hands.
28. Some say love grows, but it is the knowing that grows and love simply expands to contain it. Love is the skin of knowing.
29. We human beings are constantly judging others because we are self-centred.
30. We say: “Predators deserve judgment, their parents, too, for twisting them, and their parents, and on and on, until finally we go right back to Adam, and then, why not judge God? He started it all…isn’t God to blame for our losses? He could have not created, or he could have stopped the killer, but he didn’t.” If we can judge God so easily then, of course, we can judge the world. We must then (e.g.) choose two of our five children to go to heaven and three to go to hell, because that’s what we believe God does. Mack could not choose any one of his children because he loved them no matter what they did. So instead, he begged that he could go to hell for his children. This response is exactly what Jesus did. Mack judged well. He judged his children worthy of love, even if it cost him everything. This is how Jesus loves. ‘And now we know Papa’s heart.”
31. God’s love is so much larger than our sin could ever be.
32. Evil was never a plan of God’s. We must return from our independence, give up being his judge, and know God for who he is.
33. When we receive God’s love and stop judging him we let go of the guilt and despair that had sucked the colours of life out of everything.
34. God never abandons his children. We are never alone. God could no more abandon us than he could abandon himself.
35. “Live loved.”
36. When we leave the light of God and retreat to the darkness all alone, the darkness makes our fears, lies, and regrets bigger in the dark. Sometimes, as a kid, doing this is part of survival, but now we must come to the light.
37. Jesus will travel any road to find his children. But only one road leads back to heaven.
38. Stories about a person willing to exchange their life for another reveal our need and God’s heart.
39. Even though God can work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies, it does not mean God caused it. Where there is suffering, you will find grace in many facets and colours.
40. ‘Love’ bothers to keep trying to touch people and never gives up.
41. Sometimes we hide inside lies that justify who we are and what we do.
42. Ask for forgiveness and let the forgiveness heal you. Take the risk of honesty. Faith does not grow in the house of uncertainty.
43. Our transformation is a miracle greater than raising the dead.
44. All evil flows from independence.
45. God’s purposes are always and only an expression of love. God works life out of death, freedom out of brokenness, and light out of darkness.
46. Emotions are neither good nor bad. They are the colours of the soul. They are spectacular and incredible.
47. The more you live in the truth, the more our emotions will help you see clearly.
48. Trying to keep the law is actually a declaration of independence, a way of keeping control. Keeping the law grants us the power to judge others and feel superior.
49. Responsibility and expectation are dead nouns, full of judgment, guilt, and shame. Our identity becomes wrapped up in performance. The opposite is when God gives us an ability to respond that is free to love and serve in every situation, with God in us; and expectancy is alive and dynamic with no concrete expectation – only the gift of being together.
50. To the degree we live with expectations and responsibilities is the degree we fear and the degree we don’t trust or know God.
51. If God is the centre of everything, then together we can live through everything that happens to us.
52. Forgiveness is big.
53. When bad things happen, what God had to offer us in response is his love, goodness, and relationship with us.
54. God doesn’t do humiliation, guilt, or condemnation. They don’t produce one speck of wholeness or righteousness.
55. Forgiving isn’t about forgetting; it’s about letting go of another person’s throat.
56. Forgiveness does not create a relationship; it simply removes them from your judgment.
57. Because you are important to God, everything you do is important.
Hey aramac77,
Only an unbeliever could have your clarity and insight! Believer’s minds tend to be clouded and controled by their beliefs. Believers can’t think clearly. Every bit of information is evaluated, not for its truth, wisdom, or usefulness, but whether or not it’s consistent with what is already believed. You appear to have derived so much more from The Shack than a lot of believers will be able to. They’ll reject the insight simply because it differs from their paradigm, and they’ll miss the benefits you’ve gained from the book.
Well done! Don’t ever let believers interfere with whatever your walk with God turns out to be.
-rosch99
Recent Articles
The Affective Side of Relationship with God
November 4th, 2010
by Paul
I have recently been in a little conversation and I thought you might enjoy being a part. My friend Drew Marshall, a professing Jesus follower for many years, has seriously put his belief in God on hold, his central question revolving around the lack of communication from God and the absence of any ‘feeling’ about the reality of relationship with God. This sort of question can take us in many directions and the following is only one, but I believe an important one. It is a written conversation between me and a blogger, Mags. She posted on Twitter and I followed the link to her blog (http://www.magsstorey.com/):
Why Drew’s Search for God Scares Me
Posted on October 26, 2010 by Mags
Drew Marshall’s (www.drewmarshall.com) search for God scares me. Terrifies me actually. As it should him too.
Because what if God doesn’t come looking for him?
If the host of the self-titled Drew Marshall radio show doesn’t get a personal message from God, by his self imposed deadline of December 18, the faithful and true will probably conclude Drew was never really looking anyway.
But is that fair?
I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in the world of the spiritually mighty – as for that matter did Drew. Like him, I sat through Sunday schools, youth groups and churches. I raised my hands. I fell to my knees. I honestly told God I wanted to know him, and wanted to be his child. And I meant it.
Yet I also know what Drew means when he says that his Heavenly Father feels like an absentee one. Sending him second-hand missives through others who seem to know him better.
When I interviewed Drew for ChristianWeek, he told me that you’d have to be “pretty thick” to somehow miss it if God was speaking directly to you. And judging by some of the responses I’ve been reading on his Twitter #droggle feed, plenty of people seem to think all blame lies with Drew. Maybe Drew is insincere. Maybe he’s insufficiently educated, or spiritually darkened. Maybe his faith has failed to reach even that minimal mustard seed level.
I’ll admit – that’s pretty much the response I would have had when I was younger. But that was before I really began admit what it’s like to fall on your knees and beg God for an answer. Or run into a church and get spiritually slapped in the face.
What it’s like to hear the echoing, infinite, silence of God. The silence barren Hannah heard for so many years when she went to the temple and sobbed. The silence Israel faced for years in exile. The silence Jesus heard when he asked his Father why he had forsaken him.
Maybe Drew’s faith isn’t “good enough” for God. But is mine? And is anyone’s really?
At the American Christian Fiction Writer’s Conference (ACFW) in September, Bug Man author Tim Downs pointed out the Bilble compared us to spouses who had left our first love.
“How would you win a lover back?” he asked.
Would you say, “Obviously they have forgotten how worthy I am to be praised” and send them a list of your finer attributes?
Would you say, “Obviously they have forgotten the way home” and send them a map?
Or would you woo them gently, in story and poem, unfolding who you are to them?
To me, it was a radical concept. Because I think in the church where I grew up, the presumption would be that if you somehow managed to get yourselves lost, you had to come to heel pretty darn fast before Got smote you down in your sin.
But I’d like to believe that God is more like Tim Down’s jilted lover. That God and Drew will work out something out, that only they need understand.
And that if I ever get too lost to even reach for the phone – God will take the time to find me too.
October 25, 2010
Here is the conversation that followed:
Hey Mag,
Love your thoughtful response. I also think there are things broken in our ‘receptors’ that Papa can’t forcefully heal without violating our side of the relationship; that God can’t cross without being a transgressor or becoming an abuser.
-appreciating you,
Paul
mags says:
Dear Paul,
Thanks so much for dropping by! The Shack touched me quite deeply, and really appreciate the way you created such a powerful image of God’s love and person.
I find your comments about how God can not forcefully heal without violating our boundaries really challenging! Because on the one hand I do completely agree with them. I love that God shows us respect and models healthy boundaries. I love that God knocks, God waits, God whispers… It is because of that respect for our boundaries that those of us who have been abused can feel comfortable being loved by such a gentle God.
And yet, I still struggle with knowing many have a hard time hearing God because our receptors were forcibly broken by others.
We do not always chose broken receptors – and yet because of them we can not hear God or get healed?? That is not fair. It is bad enough to be hurt – how much worse when the actions of others keep us from being able to hear God.
Where is God’s mercy there? How does God reach out to those too broken to know how to even see God’s hand?
I know these are questions you have wrestled with too. And I’m thankful you have.
Wm Paul Young writes:
Thank you for the honesty and the glimpse of some of your heart hurt. My father, for example, participated in destroying my receptors, not just to God, but to love and affirmation in the eyes of others, to any sense of self value, to honor and beauty. In part this is such a revelation of ‘respect’, that God did not ‘stop’ my father, or his father who did it to him, or his…. God submits to what we bring to the table, and then begins to weave possibilities out of the shreds of what should have been so natural, so easy, so normal. But I come a heap of hopelessness, hardly able to raise my gaze, deaf and dumb. Fair? In no way. Fair that I then turn and blame God for my inability to hear, that I have no words to heal myself or that the sensors that should be open to his Presence have been shattered into little bits of darkness. In no way fair. But thankfully, God is not petulant but understanding. So in my life God began to find small sounds that I somehow still had the capacity to hear, and for me it was often inside music, combinations of lyric, melody and harmony that put bits of me back together, let me feel and hear some wonder that lay just beyond my sight, sounds that echoed deep in the precious little that mysteriously was still alive. Then there were the surprises, like the blistering rainstorms that always pushed me into the surprise of joy and a sense of hearing something grand that some encompassed my own skin, drenching my deaf ears in hints of beyond and above. And then we demand that God talk to us in the same ways and manners that damaged us in the first place. Perhaps we hope in the certainty of the pain and its prison that we have known for so long, rather than take the risks in the new and incremental. Perhaps we would rather have God as our advertisement than our friend, our trophy rather than our lover and escape the obvious direction toward the bended knee and the torn asunder but healed heart with its ears that are beginning to pick up the simplest syllables of affection.
Miriel
Okay, I have been rather silent, but that is because I have been home doing…home things. Gavin (3 in August) was spending the night and since my flight was very late I had to wait till the morning to … change his poopy diaper. The last three days have included lots of kids and grand-kids, yard work including buying a load of organic compost (I was told that was redundant), trying to catch up on some emails and such, not writing the blog obviously, attending a track meet with the entire family to watch Matthew and his team, cleaning house because people were coming over…all the normal stuff of life. I actually packed for the trip for Chico, CA before I finished unpacking from the last one.
Sunday was a busy day. I spoke four times and had two book signings all at Lover’s Lane United Methodist Church who hosted the James C and Barbara McCormick Distinguished Speaker Forum and the Tom Shipp Lectures (combined to bring me to Texas). The UMC as a denomination have been among the most receptive to The Shack, partly because there is a deep resonance with its historic Trinitarian theology. Texas hospitality, as has been my consistent experience, was wonderful.
