CrossAction: Thank you for joining us today…I understand you birthed this book out of “conversations” with God and from encouragement from your wife, she wanted your kids to understand how you thought…Can you talk about that?
Paul: Absolutely, she had been kind of encouraging me for a few years to do this. I’ve always written as gifts and never tried to publish anything and didn’t even think about publishing anything, this was really no different. This was a gift for my children and we didn’t know exactly what this was. Kim was the one who kept pestering me and she said “Look,just write sort of how you think, so the kids can have that in one place.” A couple months ago after all this she said, “I was thinking maybe 4-6 pages” (laughter)…I didn’t want to bore my kids…I actually thought initially of coming up with a book with all the letters in the alphabet starting with A- “antinomianism” you know…all these crazy things… then I thought…that will just bore them to tears. I love stories, I love art, I love music, I love nature, all ways that God can communicate with us, things that are true and in a way that bypasses our grid system, our paradigms, our very intellect and from the neck up, so I wanted a story and it did begin from writing conversations.
I was riding the MAX train from Gresham to downtown Portland and I would just write conversations, anything that was happening with friends or just asking God and saying, “Look,if this question comes up, what would you say to this?” that kind of conversations. That is where it was “birthed out”…the story itself emerged like the petals of a flower around the center of the conversations. I would write, but when I started putting them into the computer in May of 2005, I’m asking questions “Who is this person and what is this loss and what is the manifestation of the trinity?” Those were just things “birthed” around the conversations and it was wonderful. I had one day where I spent 8.5 hours and I wrote 4 complete chapters. I told Kim it was like I stepped out the back of the house into a raging river and it just poured me down the stream for 25 miles. The last of those 4 chapters is 15 (Festival of Friends) and that is in the book virtually untouched by any edit, just the way I wrote it, the day I wrote it.
CrossAction: What was your children’s reaction to the book?
Paul: The kids’ reaction has been all positive. But it has been dependent on their age, and how many of these conversations we talked about. My older kids are going, “What is everybody excited about?” My oldest child says, “Well, it’s partially because we’ve been having these conversations for 10 years” but the younger kids have had different responses. One of my daughters recognized herself in one of the characters which was a really beautiful thing and my youngest son who is 15, he’s sort of an evangelist, he’s looking, he has an eye to look for people that have “Great Sadness” in their life and he’s open to the Spirit just dropping and keen to those nudges and he’s done it a number of times and he’ll come and say, “Dad, I really would like a book, would you sign it for this person in my youth group?” So I get emails from people I don’t know saying, “Your son gave my son or my daughter a copy of The Shack and let me tell you what’s happened as a result.” And those things are to the praise of His Glory.
CrossAction: Can you talk some more about your “conversations”? Who initiated the dialogue between you and God? Because so much of our time with God or our prayer time is spent telling God what He already knows.
Paul: (laughter) Exactly, well, we’ve been taught that way, it’s kind of like quiet time, I’ve never been good at that and I understand that some people are good at it and it’s very valuable…but for me personally I’ve never been good at having any consistent quiet time.
Part of it is because of my personality. Before the healing part of my life I wasn’t good at it,and since the healing in my life has had such a profound effect on transforming my character and person and bringing wholeness to my life, I’m still not good at it (laughter), the only difference now is that I don’t feel bad about not being good at it (laughter) and so when it comes to conversations this is just the way it is for me…to me everything in life is Holy…everything…there is no separation between the spiritual part of my life and the non-spiritual part and I see God in the details of my life I see God everywhere. There is a song that was just released…it’s country and western..and I’m not a big country fan…this song is called “Everything is Holy Now” and it takes me back to the understanding in the OT for example…there were certain things that were Holy and that were inscribed with the term “Holy unto the Lord” and other things weren’t, but the prophets would say, “There is coming a day where everything… (the horses bridles will be inscribed “Holy unto the Lord,” the pots you pee in will be inscribed “Holy unto the Lord,” …where there will be NO separation between that which is the physical world vs. that which is the spiritual world, that they will be integrated together, and we see that in the incarnation first and then in His presence in our hearts, we are people in whom the Spirit dwells, and so we are the only beings in the universe where the spirit indwells the physical.
Cross Action: What was your transition like during those conversations, from all about you to all about Him?
Paul: You know what…let me add this…I don’t think it’s Gods’ desire for it to become all about Him…I actually believe that…a little bit…and I’m not using New Age…but Old Age…in the early church it was called Gnosticism, today we would call it more like Buddhism or Eastern mysticism, it has infiltrated into our understanding of our relationship with God, where we begin to think God is wanting to have Jesus emerge in us so that we as human beings are sort of obliterated; that is we disappear and Jesus can be all in all…and I don’t see that as in terms of God’s intention at all…God created a physical universe because He liked it and that was part of His intention…so what I see is that God is coming to dwell in us…His coming to bring everything that He is and to unite it to everything we are and then heal us from the inside so that we can be everything we were intended to be. And that doesn’t mean we are becoming gods, it does mean that we are becoming whole, because in our wholeness we manifest the character and nature of Christ, in absolute uniqueness ..every one of us then becomes a significant manifestation of the character of God, unlike any other that will ever exist.
On the one hand I totally understand that apart from Him we can do nothing but I don’t use the verse for example, where they say that I must decrease so that He can increase…I don’t believe that is about spirituality ..that’s about John the Baptist recognizing (my time here is done here) I’ve come to do a specific job and it’s winding down and because I’m (John) the one announcing the arrival of the Messiah…He’s here now …and so it’s not about saying, “Well, I’ve got to decrease as a person and disappear and then thereby Jesus can become everything”…No…God only needs one Jesus; He’s got one Son …He doesn’t need a billion of them, and He wants to manifest the life of that Son by the power of the Spirit in the lives of individual unique human beings and all of a sudden our lives become absolutely meaningful because of the Presence.
Cross Action: I’ve heard you use the term “future trip” and that you’re living inside of one day. Was this revelation before or during the book or did it come after?
Paul: It’s part of our frame of reference as believers, we’ve heard it all our lives, we just don’t know how to live there. For me everything being untangled you finally get to the place where you’re a child and children are not thinking about “oh boy…what’s my five year plan here?” (chuckle) I had a little girl who came to my doorstep at Halloween and she was just adorable in her bunny outfit…had to be all of five years old…everything was winding down, later at night…so basically I gave her the rest of the candy I had left and she looks down at her bag…looks up at me and cocks her head to one side and points her finger towards me and says, “I’ll see you again next week.” (laughter) And that’s a child…she’s going (the longest period I can think of is a week)…and there you have it..there is this beautiful element of being in the presence of God…I tell people,“You know, I used to know what God is up to and I used to tell everybody.” I don’t do that any more (laughter) I don’t even know what He’s up to in my life ..how His purposes work, and what He’s about and therefore I can look at things that are seemingly on the surface good or seemingly on the surface not good and I can say you know what, He’s in the details there is nothing that catches Him by surprise…We’re never going to go to “Plan B” He’s God..and that gives me a tremendous amount of freedom to live “in the day”
That really started to become a reality to me in May 2005–in 2005 joy becomes a constant companion and I’m going “what’s with that?” I didn’t even know that was possible…I didn’t pray for it….I was trying to figure out what in the world happened?
CROSSACTION: It sounds like it was slow transition… It wasn’t overnight. It was gradual and then all of a sudden you realized it?
Paul: Exactly! And so now I’m looking around and wondering when joy is going to leave because joy has always left (hardly ever spends the night!) by the next morning things were crappy again (laughter) but here joy is a constant companion and I’m going, “When is the shoe going to drop?” Then 6 months into it I’m starting to have these conversations with my friends going “I’ve got to tell you something, joy is a constant companion and I don’t get it” so in those conversations we began to say “Ok, so what changed?”..I went back and I realized that one of the things that changed was I DECIDED TO JUST STAY INSIDE THE GRACE THAT WAS GIVEN ME FOR ONE DAY! And that became such a huge transformational realization because what I’d spent most of my life doing was taking the grace that was given to me today (the grace allowed for me to hear His voice and sense His presence) and I was spending that grace on trying to get control over imaginations that don’t even exist. I was “future tripping” I would think “what if?”.. “what if?”..I was talking to an incredible young man recently about this and we were talking about all his fears..and he looks at me and says “Almost all my fears are future based…What if I miss this?…What if I miss the will of God? .. What if this is not a good decision?” and I’m thinking “You know what?”.. We don’t have any guarantees that we’re going to be here by tomorrow!
There is this reality that God wants to meet us in and it is right now. The reason future tripping freaks us out is because when we look into that imagination we don’t see God anywhere, we end up being the only god there that tries to hold it together and we know we’re not. Then we become all about control and fear. The reason God is not in those imaginations is because He doesn’t live in anything that’s not real. He lives in us …and He lives in this present, we are in His presence and coupled with the understanding that fear and love are opposites. When fear shows up in my life my first prayer is “what is it about the way You love me that I don’t understand right now?… What is it about your love that I’m not apprehending?.. because I’m afraid”
Fear and love are opposite and perfect love casts out all fear. So future tripping is all fear based…What is the lie we are believing? One: We’re believing He’s not good at some point OR/AND we’re believing He’s not involved…that is… Yes, He’s good but He’s involved in “important” peoples lives or He’s involved but He’s not good..He’s out to hurt me and we have that kind of understanding. So no wonder we want get control because we don’t believe that a God who is love who’s involved is the One that’s involved with me. So that was a huge transition for me!
Look for part two of our interview with Paul Young next week.