It’s been a while, but it was The Shack, by William P. Young, recommended by a friend who had been required to read it in college. She wouldn’t tell me what it was about because she didn’t want me to have any preconceived ideas, but she did say she wasn’t a fan. That’s all she would tell me.
I was completely enthralled and dazzled by it. I’m an agnostic, sometimes an atheist, and I started it hesitantly. It began kind of slow, but I stayed with it. In the first quarter of the book, a man’s 6-year-old girl disappears without a trace, and the way it was written affected me tremendously. I was in tears and had to put the book down for a few days.
As I continued on, I found myself having to put it aside quite often due to the way it presented the Holy Trinity. They were people who the father met, and he asked them big questions, just like you or I would. There were explanations that I had to digest. There was a lot to think about.
Years later I wanted to read it again and my local library didn’t have it at the time. I kept putting it off, meaning to order it online, then forgetting I wanted it. One day I was taking my trash to the dumpster. There in plain sight lay “The Shack”. It was right on top of all of the trash, almost as if someone had laid it there. I quickly picked it up and checked it for bugs, then brought it inside. It’s one more in a relatively large group of serendipitous events in my life – those meant-to-be occurrences.
It affected me like few books ever have. I knew there was a movie out, and it took another few years to get around to seeing it. I finally saw it on Netflix, and it was as good as I had hoped. I still have the book from the trash.