Interview with The Shack author Paul Young | 20 July 2014

how many of you have read this book The Shack how amazing this book is extraordinary it was originally written William Paul Young's wife asked him to write a book for their six children to explain a little bit about what had happened in his life she expected it to be between four and six pages long he produced this in a ring folder 15 copies for family and friends family and friends thought I want my friends to see this and so they started photocopying it eventually in 13 months they sold from a garage over a million copies 26 publishers had turned it down when he sold a million copies they said oh maybe we'll publish it after all since then it has been and this is never happened before or since for 49 consecutive weeks it was the number one bestseller in the New York Times bestseller list it's gone on to sell 20 million copies it's about to be made into a feature film the trailer is out it's going to start Oprah Oprah Winfrey is the main role and so it's an extraordinary extraordinary story written by an extraordinary man and he's here right now would you give them a warm welcome at the gun so well I mean this book in a sense is all about your life and the struggles that you had just tell us a bit about that good evening catching my breath a bit there is no such thing as an ordinary human being and CS Lewis pointed that out and I think he was absolutely right all of us are extraordinary but most of us don't know it and you know you look at our story I think every human being is a story not just has a story I think every human being is one and every story matters I think that's why we have such an affinity with story is because a story has a way of climbing inside of the precious places of our hearts without asking for permission and creative work generally does that it creates more space than it uses up and and I love that about story so when you when you're with someone and you begin to hear their story you're really on holy ground and a lot of respect you're not dealing with just humanity that is created out of the ground but you're dealing with the activity of God and a God who is a burning bush who doesn't require you know the the bush itself to maintain the fire of his affection but his shows up in these holy ground places so my my story is holy ground like your story is in some respects it's on the surface ordinary on in some respects it's not normal well who knows what normal is so I'm uh I grew up inside the pretty fundamental Protestant traditions mmm I was uh I was born in Grand Prairie Alberta in Canada and when I was 10-month thank you for those I was there one time for two weeks I have never been back but they have adopted me as town mascot so I grew up really overseas when I was 10 months old my mother and my father and I packed up everything that we owned and we moved to the highlands of New Guinea where my parents were pioneer missionaries for a Protestant denomination and there's a really incredibly wonderful things about growing up in that kind of world there are some really difficult things about at that time particularly admissions where there was a sense that as a parent you needed to be willing to sacrifice your child on the altar of God's purposes and God's mission and a lot of my generation were dismantled in the name of the gospel and very hard very very great sadnesses New Guinea is uh has eight hundred plus unrelated language groups we were part of a tribal culture that had never seen a white person before which was not a problem until I was six years old and went to boarding school and found out I was one of those and which was a huge disappointment and and created some real identity issues for me because I at that point I lost everything at six years old I lost my tribe I lost my family I lost because I didn't know where I belonged after that and that's part of the struggle that sometimes third culture kids have missionary kids and Army children and and business people that grow up in different cultures and and I had a couple other great sadnesses including a difficult relationship of my own father who came from a broken background and was part of a generation that didn't know they had baggage and wouldn't have known what to do with it if they'd known they had baggage and and he was a very angry young man who didn't have the chip for being a dad and so I learned early and often not to have anything to do with this human being because I it was too dangerous to be anywhere near him and then sexual abuse was a part of my childhood started in the tribal culture and it was often and it was incredibly heart dismantling nothing quite dismantles the human soul like sexual abuse and and my parents didn't know they didn't have an awareness or a sense of it and sometimes it was happening with him 10 15 feet of them and but it was a dominant part of my childhood at six I was sent away to boarding school Christian missionary boarding school and the bit and the first nights the big boys came and molested the little boys and so it just became part of the unraveling part of my heart you know there are things that as children we don't we don't have any control over and as children we don't have the ability to process it so we think that everything around us that goes wrong was our fault and and that part of the question is where where is God when things were stolen from me you know where was it where were my parents and and then as we grow and we create these survival mechanisms and skills and and we have addictions that show up inside our brokenness because we got to have something that eases the pain or fills this emptiness or some way that we can find a way to love ourselves this is one of the attractions of pornography is is we can control a relationship without having one you know there's no risk involved and we can't be rejected and it's it's part of this hugely terrible addiction and and so you know I began to turn around inside the brokenness of my childhood and I began to break things I broke relationships I I betrayed trust I continued to hide the truth about who I was that I thought was the truth about who I was I became a performer because you know when you're a child and everything everything about yourself becomes trying to win the affection approval of those who are around you and if you're come from a religious background that includes God so you're trying to constantly figure out what people want so that you can be that so that you might win some approval infection and then God has a whole list of things that you're told that he needs you and requires you to be in order to win his approval and affection so it all becomes about performance and and those of us who are broken become breakers and so one of our big questions is wearing it where was God when I broke things you know why why didn't he stop me why didn't he stop them and and these are some of the questions that involve are the deepest places of our humanity and I learned to survive I learned to walk the edge between giving up which is definitely an option I went to we came back to Canada about the time I was 10 years old and I went to 13 schools before I graduated high school my father was an itinerant pastor so he would take different churches and we constantly moved and so I would say you know I never ran away from relationships I just heard God called me somewhere else you know it's totally a cop-out and because relationships is what did all this damage to me largely men and and yet relationships are what offered me any sense of possibility of healing my heart so you're caught and and secrets become part of that whole broken place inside our hearts and in January 1994 you got a phone call from your wife that was quite short but quite in one one sentence you know and the Shack is a description of the human soul the heart of a human being and it's the house on the inside that people help us build and a lot of us it's the place where we then store all of our addictions and we hide all of our secrets and it's a place of shame and and my my metaphor was that I took pieces of the shack and drugged them about a hundred yards outside the shack and created a facade a piece of plywood that I could paint as fast as I could pick up people's expectations so I was a performer right I didn't want anybody in the shack because I I was afraid and terrified that they would hate me as much as I did and I couldn't take that risk and I was hoping that if I performed right perfectly long enough that the facade might become a real boy might become the real person and at some point your facades have to come down and it's going to be inside relationship I said earlier in one of the one of the times was I I wish I could say to you that I finally figured out that I was pretty broken so I went and got help I didn't a lot of times some of us were so broken that we have to get caught and I got caught and I married Kim mostly because I felt that this are a long story which I won't get into but it was really in retrospect the kindness of God because this woman paid a huge price for my healing and it wasn't fair to her but she did it and because I drugged all the brokenness into the marriage and she didn't know you know when when you're in sort of the dating relationship which I made very short from the time I asked her to marry me which we hadn't even really dated to the time we got married was 11 days and and some of you will understand this I wouldn't have made it 12 I mean once I asked her that here's I'll tell you a sad little side story that's kind of funny but but I asked her in a group setting because I thought it would be safer men can be such idiots let me tell you just so you in case you didn't know already but but I made these cards and everybody had to read this little card and I'm fairly creative so I had created a very I created the party and it was basically to ask him if she would marry me but I put it inside a card and you were supposed to read your card out loud without pre-reading it and and I palmed hers to the bottom of the stack that I shuffled up so that hers would be the last because I figured once she reads the card it's either going to be you know the evenings over one way or the other and so so when she reads her card she she goes because all I wrote was will you marry me in the card that's it and I wasn't nothing poetic or wonderful and she says William and Kim was here this morning if she was here tonight she would tell you that what went through her mind in that moment was if I say no he will never ask me again but if I say yes I can back out right how brilliant is that so she said yes and as soon as she said yes I became suicidal I am telling you the truth because I now put myself into a situation where I couldn't run away I couldn't just leave and you know when you have a thin layer of perfectionist performance covering up a notion of shame and people come along and they begin tapping through your performance and saying you know what you're not everything that you present yourself as that's when you hear God call you somewhere else and Kim is Kim is from a healthy family not like mine which is a religious family and she right she she's North Dakota Minnesota salt of the earth very expressive these people are genetically enhanced - all talk loudly at the same time and understand each other right I come from a religious family we hide everything we lie about most stuff and we have a we have an order of service when we get together so so I'm suddenly going to be living with a woman who has no qualms about tapping right through this shame let me tell you one of the most profound things that I learned about shame shame destroys your ability to distinguish between a value statement and an observation let me say that again and then explain it shame will destroy your ability to distinguish between a value statement and an observation so when we were first married I would in retrospect ins tongue-in-cheek I would say when we got married Kim would tell me these horrible things she would say horrible things to me like don't mix the colors with the whites right can you imagine that it's laundry right she's talking about doing laundry what did I hear her say I heard her say I don't know why I married such a loser of a human being as you because Shane had destroyed my ability to distinguish between an observation which she was making and a value statement see this is a perfectionist performance mentality I was only good as my last moment of perfection and now I lived with a person who had no qualms about making observations about my imperfections and I did it tapped right into my shame well I'm an adapter I'm a survivor I didn't tell her about all the damage in my Shack I didn't tell her about my addictions I just found a way to adapt and I didn't know how to love but I'd read the books about it and I grew up in the church so you know I had a good idea I thought and I adapted we have six children our youngest is 21 and shortly after he was born January 4th 94 I get a one-sentence phone call from Kim and all she said was I'm waiting for you at your office and I know and my whole facade came crashing down in one sentence because what she knew was I was in a three-month affair with one of her best friends and at that point I had to make a decision whether to face Kim or kill myself this little jump out of this and run away one last time before you hit the bottom kind of place and I don't even know how I I think it was the grace of God that got me across town and pulled into the parking lot into the business office where she was waiting for me she had already torn my office up I mean literally torn it up you have to understand Kim and her five sisters she has five sisters and two brothers her and her five sisters are called the force and for the first four hours after I walk through that door she took me apart and four hours into this I told her if we're going to actually do this I need to tell you every secret I have and naively she would tell you she was so naive I mean her world had come apart and naively she said bring it on and it took me four 10-hour days to tell Kim all my secrets that she didn't know and at the end of those four days Kim was destroyed and she said I will never believe another thing that comes out of your mouth the rest of your life and I believed her but I had hit the bottom I'd stop pointing fingers at my abuse and and hiding behind my addictions and I thought I either have to find some healing or I'm dead if I can't find some healing it's over so I looked in the yellow pages under counseling and I found a therapist I started with the A's worked my way down found agape agape which is the name the word for God's kind of love which is other-centered self-giving agape Youth and Family Services specializing in sexual abuse histories and I called up and I was introduced to a man who became my friend Scott Mitchell and for nine months I mean I sit in front of him the first day and I say to him Scott my life is over and for the first time I'm 38 years old and for the first time in my life I say to another human being can you help me to that point in my life that was the greatest single risk I had ever taken because if the answer is no why would I take the risk of doing this again and one of your questions that you've asked me earlier is can we get past this can we get through brokenness can can we actually be healed from our addictions and I'm here to tell you absolutely yes but it's not easy it's hard work and you can't do it by yourself you have to begin to take the risk of trusting somebody and part of that journey I entered in and I was with Scott for intensely nine months and then we we were friends after that but my healing process where I can mark it was from January 4th 94 to the end of 2004 and at the end of 2004 eleven years of dismantling my soul 11 years of of saying I have no clue who God is eleven years and I tell at the end of those eleven years in 2005 I turned 50 but in those 11 years I worked to the place where I could finally wipe the face of my father completely off the face of God because my view of God largely came through this difficult relationship with my dad and we're all impacted by our histories and our backgrounds the end of 2004 I was one of the healthiest people that I knew I had no secrets and I don't have any secrets in my life there is nothing that Kim doesn't know there's nothing my children don't know there's nothing my friends don't know I have no addictions and I'm not talking just pornography and those kinds of things that just entangle us I'm talking gold chained addictions like doing something to create significance or pleasing God or pleasing my dad and I'm the same person in every situation I'm no different here talking to you do I understand this Shack to understand you know I made 15 copies that did everything I ever wanted this book to do this is all God's sense of humor as far as I'm concerned I don't understand the purposes of God and I don't want to know it took me 50 years to become a child I'm not going back to being an adult it's too much work I like this living inside the grace of a day I like being surprised I like learning how to trust and and Kim took her 11 years to forgive me completely took 11 years for us to heal 11 years of putting one foot in front of the other being consistent doing the work the hard work and she for about four years at the end of this had been saying you know someday because I was a writer my whole life in the sense that anybody is you write stuff for your friends and family and and you give it to him and they love it because they're your friends and family you know poetry and songs and short stories and and she always loved what I wrote and she said you know someday as a gift for our six children would you put in one place how you think because you think outside the box and when it got printed she said I was thinking like four to six pages and I wrote a story on the train to one of my three jobs I had 40 minutes each way and we had nothing we had lost everything in 2004 which was part of the healing process if you have the fear of financial insecurity there's nothing quite like losing everything to help heal you and and Kim was working at the high school bakery and we were living in a rental flat with about 900 square foot of space with six of us and and the joy of God had dropped on us joy had become a constant companion that's what happens when you live inside the grace of a day you don't run away from joy you know we are so geared to be future tripperz that's that's what we do when we can't trust we create imaginations that don't exist and we spend real grace that was given for us for today on things that don't exist and I'd stop becoming a future tripper in 2005 my prayer was I had two prayers left you know for a religious kid that's not bad my two prayers were this pop I don't want to be an old man one day looking back at my life and wondering what would it have been like to take the risk of the actually trusting to take the risk of relationship in community I don't want to be that guy and my second prayer is pop I'm never going to ask you to bless anything that I do but now let me explain that first part I'm a religious kid so give me a dream a vision a word or something I'll turn it into an agenda give me a half a chance right and I my whole life has been like trying to get God to follow me hey I got this great idea for me for you I mean look at what we could do you know and it's all a way to find identity worth value significant security meaning purpose you know in something you can control and and I said you know what I'm done with this I'm never going to ask you again to bless anything that I do but if you have something you're blessing and it would be okay for me to be a part of that and participate I'd be all over it and I don't care if I'm cleaning toilets which was one of my jobs or shining shoes or holding the door open for others I just want to know at the end of the day you did this and I got to participate and you look at the Shack which is a phenomenon which nobody saw coming and it gave people a language to have a conversation about God that was relational not religious and it broke down all these walls and it and it found the precious places of people's heart and in retrospect I see God with God great sense of humor goes well Paul you know this little book you're writing for Christmas for your kids what if I bless that you give it to your kids and then I'll give it to mine and that's what happened to the praise of his glory and this freedom that you've described freedom from addictions what does that look like in practice and how does that happen ah that's a good question well how it happens is like I said painful and incremental and you learn how to forgive yourself which is really the toughest journey it's one thing to forgive others it's another thing to forgive yourself to take your own hands from around your own throat it looks like changing your mind which is the really the biblical word for repentance we have it associated with making more penance for stuff which is not the idea at all it means a radical change of mind and God won't come in there and you know how much how many of us would love extreme soul makeover you know like please God send me to Disneyland and fix me by the time I get back you know or give me a red or a blue pill right this process stuff I hate it right but it's because we are so incredibly crafted as human beings that this is not an easy quick fix and God is not going to become an abuser to heal us you know that that God doesn't heal you because he wants to use you God heals you because he loves you and then he invites you to play this is a God who will never use a human being as a tool because you don't have a relationship with a tool you understand this is a God who loves you and is after you he doesn't need the shock he doesn't need the crossroads he doesn't need a book he doesn't need a movie he doesn't need a song you know all those things are part of what he embraces and submits to because it's part of what we bring to the table and he climbs inside of it and finds a way to get to us to our heart to our affections to our brokenness and begins to heal us so what does this look like it looks like authenticity it looks like where my inner world matches my outer world I didn't know that was possible I have I grew up in a religious environment where the outer world was always kind of a repression of the inner world because what I believed about myself at the core of my being was depravity or some kind of piece of crap and it took a long time for me to begin to understand that Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the father were telling me the truth of my being was that I was a very good creation and a new one that that was the truth of my being and so I could begin to live out of the truth of my being and I found that the way of my being matched it as long as I believed on a piece of crap and I'm a depravity that's it that's the truth of my being how in the world am I supposed to get some kind of performance to match and and keep that under wraps I was I was telling a group and I think this is such a great illustration because it ties into what was a pornography addiction up until 20 years ago and and I said you know the reason that I don't I'm not involved in pornography and I have guards that are on my heart that are on the inside they're not formulas for anybody else but I know I know what what is right for me from the inside out the reason that I am not involved in pornography is because I know the truth of my being and the truth of my being is that I do not abuse women whether it's visually or in images or in any other way I do not do that because the truth of my being is I care for the other I am full the nature of my being is other centered self giving love and I can live out of that if I know that's the truth of my being the way of my being begins to match it if I think the truth of my being is just this brokenness if I think that's the bottom line then guess what the way of my being will be full of brokenness we've got to begin to hear the Holy Spirit tell us what the truth of our being is and then begin to live out of the truth of our being that's our freedom in Jesus and I love is a very key part forgiveness and love are very key parts of the story of the shack and the nature of God that you describe just this in conclusion say how that works out in your life now when I talk about the grace of the day that is really at the heart of how I live it's the only way to deal with this how do you deal with a book that I mean to tell you how nuts this is the shack is in the top 40 bestsellers of all history of all history that's how nuts this is how do you deal with that and you know you don't you stop becoming a future tripper and you learn to live inside the grace of a day and you learn as things occur inside that grace of the day you forgive you let go you ask for forgiveness you understand the difference between apologizing and asking for forgiveness it's huge you know one of the things we wanted to teach our children was how to ask for forgiveness not just apologize apology is just a declaration that I got caught or I you know feel bad for some unnamed reason but asking for forgiveness changes power I take the power and I give it to you will you please forgive me see that's very different than to say I acknowledge I got caught and I feel bad about it you know it's just a statement it doesn't change any power but a lot of times we have to learn to give the other the power in the relationship and asking for forgiveness is one of them it's a very key thing so forgiveness and love what is this love other centered self giving love well it means that this actually matters if I have some view of humanity in which the self gets lost you know some kind of selfless love it's a denial of Who I am if suddenly there is no self there is nothing from which to love that's not God's goal the God's goal was not to empty Jesus so that when you looked at Jesus you just saw the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit's point was to celebrate Jesus Jesus never becomes the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit never becomes the father and yet they're so intertwined and interpenetrated that the only real way to talk about them as one is one there is one God but it's three persons in this dance of other centered self giving love we're created inside that to be Express of that this is why at the heart of our healing is relationship because there is no deeper reality the character in nature of God then relationship other centered self giving love and this is why John who is who writes the last thing that's in your Bible chronologically which is the Gospel of John is the last book we believe ever written that was put into the New Testament and he is asked as an old man who has already seen the dismantling of religious systems even inside the community of faith to write his perspective and he begins with the relationship of the Father Son and Holy Spirit in the beginning was the word and the word was Pross turned toward face to face with the father and the word was the father there is nothing that has been created that was not created in him he begins with relationship and that is the most profound place to begin to understand our relationship with each other with God is Father Son and Holy Spirit with Jesus apart from whom we would not understand or know the nature and character of the father and the reality of being anointed in the Holy Spirit as he is that makes sense to you okay now let me put one little piece on that that for whatever reason is important in this conversation at this time in this community that is gay third this God people sometimes have asked me you know if not the God that I have presented is too good I have people who write me emails and say I'm terrified that I take the risk that God is this good and I'm wrong because they grew up with the God that I did you know Gandalf with a bad attitude God and I believe in a God of fire and fury just so you know but I believe that that fire in fury is one way to look at this relentless affection and love that is pursuing everything in us that keeps us from being free I believe that a hundred percent of this fury is for us not against us and I'm talking about every human being on the planet right the reason that I part of the reason that I believe that I have a daughter Amy who is 26 for about six years Amy has been at war with a micro pituitary adenomas a little brain tumor that's on the back side of her pituitary gland we live in a world that's broken things are falling and did you know that all of you are going to die I don't know if that was a you know sorry to just you know spoiler alert but you know we're all in the process of the deterioration of our of our physical mortalities to take on a physical mortality indeed but this one is falling apart and and we deal with sickness which were not designed for or elements of death that we are not designed for because of this little pituitary adenomas Amy began to entertain a lie that she was damaged goods you know about these lies that come and begin to whisper you're not worthy of being loved yet or because of this you're not worthy of being loved or you proven you're not worthy of being loved you are and I am NOT I'm not smart enough tall enough skinny enough you know beautiful enough I'm not whatever the I am nots and Amy began to believe that she was damaged goods because she had a brain to her and because of that lie she opened herself up to some very damaging relationships she is she is way past that just so you know but let me tell you it was not an easy journey and here's the point I am her father give me the ability to be a flaming fire and go in and eradicate that little piece of tissue that has hurt my daughter and even more so to destroy the lie that hurt my daughter I would do so in a heartbeat not because she has what failed to live up to my expectations no because I love my daughter that is the relentless affection of God God does not desire is simply to cure sin and brokenness his intent is to destroy it oh yarn thank you very much indeed

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Length: 39min 27sec (2367 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 21 2014