Hey guys,

Just been reading The Shack by William Young. Wow! A novel - first thing he ever wrote, no-one-wd-publish-it-so-so-he-published-it-himself routine, has sold a MILLION copies in a YEAR (MUST be a record for any Christian book aside from the Bible), No 1 on NY Times best-sellers for 3 months now. Very moving story exploring the problem of suffering and God’s relation to it all. Also a startlingly novel, somewhat confronting exploration of the person(s) of God/ the Trinity - been quite controversial.

Even more interesting is the author’s story - grew up in the same cannibal tribe that my wife was born into in West Papua (New Guinea), in the first group of missionaries that went in in the 50s. The only person in the world who could speak both English and Dani, he’d translate for the missionaries, and was privy to the conversations where the ppl were discussing whether to kill and eat his parents! (“Don’t worry, if we kill them we won’t kill you, because you are one of us, not one of the ‘ghost people’ ”!) He was sexually abused by them from the age of 4 and then by the older boys at boarding school from when he was six . . . on into a lifetime of shame and torment and suicidality . . . Then over a long time a process of deep healing, until . . . he writes a story for his kids to explain his discoveries of the nature of our God, which his wife insists he has to publish and which explodes into making him a somewhat ‘accidental’ superstar.

Have a look. Its fresh perspective can be very releasing and healing.