The Shack by Wm. Paul Young (#16, Fiction)

The bus ride back to Germany was not spent eating special brownies smuggled in from the Green House but rather reading The Shack, that religious novel about a man who meets God in the shack where police find evidence that his daughter was brutally murdered. Not a typical book I would read, this one also came highly recommended by both Sarah and her sister. And being on vacation, I was game for anything.

I approached this one with a skeptical eye and I am still not sure what I think about some of the viewpoints expressed in it. But I was not immune to the hard hitting emotional nature of the story and found myself blubbering yet again on a bus, trying to hide the fact that I was balling from my fellow passengers. That man with the cane was surely looking at me with scorn as I sniffled through chapter after chapter.

There were some good quotes in this book but I definitely found it to be strangely simple for me. Is religion always this simple? You have these tenets of belief and you believe them and that is that. Is that faith? Believing in something you can't prove, something you can't see but something that you may be able to feel? Faith in God can give us hope, it can make us feel strong when we are going through tough times. I don't know how I would deal with the death of a daughter. The man in this story has to deal with this and he has this experience that in the end allows him to see his daughter and to know that while she died a horrific death far before her time, she was not alone and she is now happy in heaven, waiting for them to meet her in the afterlife. All the father wanted to know was that the daughter was okay. He needed closure and he found it.