if you haven’t yet read The Shack by William P. Young, you might want to look away now.

This hugely successful book is the story of Mack (Mackenzie) Philips, whose daughter, Missy, is abducted and killed during a family vacation. In the opening chapters, you discover that Missy’s body was never found. However, the police did find evidence in an abandoned shack to prove that she had been brutally murdered by a notorious serial killer.

Living in the shadow of this Great Sadness, Mack one day receives a strange note, apparently from God, inviting him to return to this shack for a meeting.

What should you do when you come to the door of a house, or cabin in this case, where God might be? Should you knock? Presumably God already knew that Mack was there. Maybe he ought to simply walk in and introduce himself, but that seemed equally absurd. And how should he address him? Should he call him Father, or Almighty One, or perhaps Mr. God, and would it be best if he fell down and worshipped, not that he was really in the mood.

As he tried to establish some inner mental balance, the anger that he thought had so recently died inside him began to emerge. No longer concerned or caring about what to call God and energized by his ire, he walked up to the door. Mack decided to bang loudly and see what happened, but just as he raised his fist to do so, the door flew open, and he was looking directly into the face of a large beaming African-American woman.

So far, so good. The story moves powerfully between the traumatic reality of human sorrow and contingent existence, on the one hand, and the suspicion of a higher being, on the other, who can pull these broken pieces into some kind of meaningful whole. Personally, I loved the element of surprise. Who would have thought that, having knocked on heaven’s door, Mack would find himself standing face to face with ‘God’ in the form of an African-American woman?

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