This sweet brother dropped me the following note, and again, we both feel like the question and response might be helpful to others, so here goes:

Sir: I am finishing reading your book.  Wow!  Let me tell you, I have been a Christian going on 31 years and this is undoubtedly one of the best books I have ever read (and I have read a lot of them).  I, like you, am a seminary grad. I graduated Western Seminary, Portland, OR 1994.  Presently, I am a prison chaplain at the Washington State Pen.  I have one question for you (at least for now).  How did Papa, Jesus and the Holy Spirit affirm to you, or re-affirm, that they are most loving and care intensely for you?  A deep question I’m sure but I deal with a lot of very broken people who say, "there’s no God and if there is, he could care less about me."  I had contact with a missionary pastor who had witness first hand the genocide in Rwanda between the Tutsi and Hutus.  After that experience, he had concluded God is there, but He’s not loving.  He then went on to say that over time God worked with him to convince him otherwise.  I spoke with him briefly to find out how God did that.  He said email him and ask.  I did, but he never answered.  Maybe it got too close to home or brought up too many bad memories.  Anyway there’s my question and some background.  Thank you.  God bless.

I actually didn’t graduate Seminary…ran out of money, but I had a couple years worth (more than enough…grin).
You ask a very cogent question, one deserving a well thought out response that resolves the issue at the heart… good luck with that.

So, I will tell you how it has been for me and you can toss it wherever it fits.

One of the main differences between my journey and the journey that the book character (Mack) experiences, is that I never turned my anger against God.  Many do, but my journey was a little different in that respect.  Now that does not mean that I was at all convinced that he loved me, and I ran the performance wheel most of my life, but for whatever reason, even as a child, I instinctively knew that the issue was the heart of human beings, not the character of God.  As a sexually abused child, the biggest piece of my anger was self-directed anyway and the shame kept me on a tightrope that existed between the tension of perfectionist performance and suicide.  Again, I always believed that the ability of human beings to do terrible things was an affirmation of both the respect God has for his creation and the magnitude of his resident image in each person. It takes a powerfully created being to do the kind of damage that we do.

Now, having said that…there was a 50 year process before I ‘knew’ in my heart that he tenderly, compassionately, overwhelmingly loved me.  To ‘love’ is Papa’s character and the healing process in our lives is to restore the damage incrementally, bit by bit, so that we begin to live in the truth and are not so lost in the lies.  That process, at least for me, almost killed me.  It was brutal, full of blood and terror and loss, until I was dismantled to the point where the only thing left at the edge of the cliff was a single, tiny, solitary seed.  Then the rebuilding, slowly painfully exchanging one lie at a time for the truth.  I will tell you this…there is no part of my being, or my theology that hasn’t been significantly tampered with. One thing that must be stated loud and clear: at no point in the process is Papa perplexed, angry or disappointed in us.  It is a process, and he seems to like process: it seems to be something scheduled for us all.

The Shack, which was a story for my 6 children, was born out of that process.  I could not have written it at the age of 49…I wasn’t quite healed enough.  Even though the story is fiction, the pain is very real, the process is real, the conversations are real and the character of God is real.

Gil, I would love to hear how The Shack impacts prisoners.  You know that whether we are behind bars or not, most human beings are shackled and captive.  Incarceration of the soul is our common experience.  Please contact Brad Cummings at office@windblownmedia.com if you would like to find out about discounts for books and what we might do to help get the book into prisons (something in my heart leaps at the thought of setting captives free).  I think this book was ‘created’ for prisons.  Not much of a stretch to recognize the root connection between Shack and shackle.

(I would like to add that if any of you want to help fund getting books into prisons, also contact Brad at the above email address – you’ll find out how much we have no idea what we are doing).  :)

Paul