The Shack

J. mentioned this book to me at lunch last week, and yesterday had her husband B. drop a copy off for me to read. Since part of her recommendation included a testimony as to how it helped her recover from our youth group's Reign of Terror, I opened it with interest...and a little reluctance.

I tend to take a dim view of books purporting to revolutionize the way the reader will view God. Really, I think. So nothing I've learned along the way matters, and wouldn't matter, until I read THIS BOOK. Riiiight.

But as I read past the frame story and into the meat and bones of The Shack, I found myself trying not to cry so obviously that Mom, sitting across the room, would notice. (She did, anyway. I'm a sniffler.)

The following post is kind of my second-hand gut reaction to the book (the real gut reaction being contained in the pages of my journal), and may or may not follow any of the sequential rules of writing to which I ordinarily adhere; and I won't quote the book much, or say exactly what it said, because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who has yet to read it. And, as I'm still in the process of trying to unravel all the realizations and sudden understandings and lightning bolts that bowled me over the last twenty-four hours, I don't expect all of it to be coherent.

My childhood and adolescence were not especially traumatic; but they were full of a great deal of pain. As a little girl I had to grow up quickly and look after the needs of others, and internalized an idea that I don't matter as much as everyone else does; and so I kept to myself, and learned emotional independence at the age of eleven. From there I learned, to an unconscious extent, not to trust God. I also learned to live in fear, particularly the fear of abandonment; and so I trusted people even less.

In my adolescence I heard, over and over, the repeated message that I am disgusting to God, taxing, a burden on his grace, a wretched, repulsive sinner in the hand of an angry God who might at any moment unleash his wrath upon me for my failures to live up to his expectations and demands. I blog about this over and over and over, I know, but it's been the hardest lie to shake, the lesson I must keep relearning: that God is love, and his love isn't torturous or judgmental.

I've had moments of clarity, and through college came to understand that God does love me...but always, underlying my relationships with people, there has been a terrible fear. I hate depending on people: I think once they really know me, they'll turn away in pitying revulsion at how badly I long for human connection, which I lost at such a young age.

I was thinking about this on the way to my parents' this afternoon, mulling over the source of my fear and mistrust of human relationships, and thought, slowly: ...fear drives and characterizes my relationships with others because I think I will be disgusting to them...taxing to them...a burden. And then I started to cry all over again because if that's how I characterize my relationships with people, it's still how I characterize my relationship with God. And I realized that what I had thought of as God's love, the idea I have developed since those nightmare years, wasn't so much love as a benevolent indifference, a distant kindliness, which is better than frowning hatred and disappointment, but hardly a source of security.

All those things I learned about God are lies. It's going to take time to unlearn them, to reject them fully, but what I can trust God with, I will; and it will continue to grow. It's not about rules or how I measure up -- and therefore in my interactions and relationships with people it's also not about rules or how I, or they, measure up. It's about love, mutual enjoyment, a selfless awareness of the other.

Loving unconditionally means loving without agenda -- without expectations. I have never understood how God can want to love me when I can do nothing to benefit him, when I have nothing to offer him, when he doesn't need me. I realized, reading this book, that he loves me, not because of what I have to offer, but because of who I am. Because of my being, in which he delights -- the being he created to be loved.

As this pertains to my interactions with people: I have always harbored a terrible fear that people won't love me. But if I derive all my identity, security, love and comfort from an all-loving God whose every act is goodness and an expression of that love, and who knows all about me and loves me, not in spite of, but because of my being, then it doesn't matter whether people will love me or not; plenty of people won't. And that understanding frees me to enjoy the people who do, without expectation or demand, only the expectancy of enjoying them for who they are, and what they draw from me. And so my deep-seated need for connection is fully satisfied in God, and my God-given need for human interaction fulfilled exactly because I'm not desperate for, and therefore clutching at it, and rending the whole thing impossible by that desperate clutching.

See, often in the past, I have mentally and silently structured my interactions with people around rigid expectations for them, the fulfillment or unfulfillment of which I used as a barometer to determine how close they were to leaving me -- and if I deemed that barometric reading too close to their leaving, I often opted for a preemptive strike and cut ties with them first, to spare myself what I saw as an inevitable hurt -- which only hurt me more (especially because I have no way of knowing if they would have left me or not). It wasn't a constant; I held out for plenty of people, but my expectation was always that they would, after a time, disappear. I've been learning to shake off that conviction, but it's been long, and difficult, and slow in the process -- fortunately God has been very patient, very deeply knowing of just what I need.

For a long time I've been living, and loving, in a constricted way. But I hadn't thought about there being another way until these last few hours. I have centered most of my way of life around a need for routine, for structure, for security -- but I can't create that for myself; life is unpredictable and uncertain. But the love of God is never uncertain. I can't predict the patterns of my life, can't predict the outcomes of my relationships with people -- and I don't have to be afraid of my inability to predict; if the source of all my everything is the love of God, if I'm living present moment by present moment with and in and through him (in all three of his persons), I can enjoy the freefall. I can have fun.

Life has rarely been fun for me. It's been satisfying, contented at times, full of a deep thrumming joy (come on, let's be honest, it hasn't all been bad -- not nearly! but it has been limited in some striking ways), but seldom fun. I spend a lot of time worrying about things that I can't control or change -- but if I let go the need for control, because all I really need -- the unreserved, tender, complete love of God -- is already within me, and learn to be loved, and thereby to fly...

It's kind of a boundless prospect. I've been on the right track, I think; this book just provided an enormous push to get the swing fully in motion. Now I can begin, consciously, to direct my effort to loosening my grip on, and eventually letting go of, the things I have clutched and clung to for a long time in an effort to build some security for myself (which would mean letting go of having my feet on the ground -- not letting go of the swing, unless the time comes for me to jump off it). I really kind of suck at making my own security. I'm a poor judge of which circumstances are "good" and which are "evil," limited in perspective as I am; and the things I build for myself tend to melt into the oncoming tide. Sandcastles are meant to be played with, not lived in; enjoyed for their very temporality, while what really matters is the beauty of the wind and sand and timeless water.

So yeah...for the first time, I hunger to live in freedom, which comes, ironically, from total dependence on God (I love that this book characterizes independence from God as the sin of Eden, from which all evil flows). I'm excited to see how this begins to change my relationship with God, and my relationship with people, particularly the people I love best. I'm excited to see how this affects my attitude, my perspective, my outlook regarding every circumstance in my life -- how this brings a new ability to live in, and love, the present. I'm excited to break down my own self-constructed walls of my self-constructed prison, and come into a place where I can breathe, laugh, love, respond, forgive...

Yeah. It's a little dizzying, and I have a bit of a headache. But I'm so excited. And I recommend this book.