Wm. Paul Young

After his daughter's murder, a grieving father confronts God with desperate questions -- and finds unexpected answers -- in this riveting and deeply moving #1 NYT bestseller. When Mackenzie Allen Phillips's youngest daughter Missy is abducted during a family vacation, he remains hopeful that she'll return home. But then, he discovers evidence that she may have been brutally murdered in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later, in this midst of his great sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note that's supposedly from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment, he arrives on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change his life forever.

The Shack

Fred Rivett

Mack never talks much about him, but when he does his face loses emotion like a tide going out, leaving dark and lifeless eyes.

In a world of talkers, Mack is a thinker and doer. He doesn't say much unless you ask him directly, which most folks have learned not to do. When he does speak you wonder if he isn't some sort of alien who sees the landscape of human ideas and experiences differently than everybody else. The thing is, he usually makes uncomfortable sense in a world where most folks would rather just hear what they are used to hearing, which is often not much of anything.

Shortly after that summer that Missy vanished, The Great Sadness had draped itself around Mack's shoulders like some invisible but almost tangibly heavy quilt. The weight of its presence dulled his eyes and stooped his shoulders. Even his efforts to shake it off were exhausting, as if his arms were sewn into its bleak folds of despair and he had somehow become part of it. He ate, worked, loved, dreamed and played in this garment of heaviness, weighed down as if he were wearing a leaden bathrobe—trudging daily through the murky despondency that sucked the color out of everything.

There are times when you choose to believe something that would normally be considered absolutely irrational. It doesn't mean that it is actually irrational, but it surely is not rational. Perhaps there is suprarationality: reason beyond the normal definitions of fact or data-based logic; something that only makes sense if you can see a bigger picture of reality. Maybe that is where faith fits in.

“Life takes a bit of time and a lot of relationship.”

"One last comment," he added, turning back. "I just can't imagine any final outcome that would justify all this.”

"Mackenzie.” Papa rose out of her chair and walked around the table to give him a big squeeze. "We're not justifying it. We are redeeming it"

"Mackenzie, judgment is not about destruction, but about setting things right"

Grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors!"

The Shack quotes

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