| Purpose
|
The purpose of these email reflections is to stimulate the God-given longing we all have for that which is truly life-giving, and to encourage sacrificing the lesser, more immediate "satisfactions" for the greater, in all areas of life, so that one may Live and share that Life with others!
|
| Subscribe to "Choosing Life" email reflections |
|
|
|
Contact information
|
Contact Email
Website
Phone: 574.533.2812
|
|
|
|
Hello ,
Where's in your life have you been most devastated? What would it be like if love and life flooded that area and transformed it into a very good place to be?
- Sheldon Swartz
|
The Shack
|
 "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.." - Paul in II Corinthians 3:17
Most of us have places within us that we try to stay away from, often having to do with memories or particular feelings we don't want to feel . . . or possibly are committed not to feel. We may have moved far enough away from them or so consistently avoided them that we may not even be aware they are there. And so they lurk in the dark, sometimes coming up at night through our dreams after we have "lost control" and gone to sleep. Or they may try to surface when something triggers us and we observe that our emotional response is out of proportion to what triggered us.
What would it be like if every place that holds pain for us that we would like to avoid was flooded with love and light? Some of you have read The Shack by William P. Young. The main character in this book of fiction, Mackenzie, is invited through a note in the mail from "Papa" to meet him at "the shack," after several years of experiencing The Great Sadness, brought about by his young daughter being abducted off the beach (when MacKenzie was rescuing his other daughter from the water) by a serial killer and eventually killed, the evidence being her bloody clothes found at a shack deep in the woods.
One weekend, when the rest of his family is going to be away anyway, MacKenzie decides to respond to the invitation and finds his way to the shack, the physical, visible reminder of the most painful thing he had experienced in his life.
That's all I'm going to say about what happened. If you want to hear the author talk about how the story came about visit William Young: A Look Inside 'The Shack' or download an audio of the book for $.7.49 at Download The Shack
or of course you can buy it anywhere. I confess I read this book about a year ago and promptly bought four copies to pass around, it touched me so. Several weeks ago I finished listening to the 8-hour audio version, mostly as I was in my car, driving here and there. The story doesn't touch everyone the same way, and that is surely ok, but spare yourself from hasty assumptions about it until you've read or listened to it. You deserve to experience it yourself!
The message of the story to me is that places of unbearable pain - when one's world stops - when everything changes - don't have to stay places where the only way one can seem to live is to stay away from them. It's a message that one is given life as one enters the pain of those horrible places and experiences a loving God already there, waiting for a kind of reunion that forever transforms the one who enters, that brings that one to deep peace, profound joy, and motivation to live the new life one finds there.
But . . . why would we be surprised? Didn't Jesus demonstrate that the grave, a supposedly bad place - a place we try to stay away from - can become a place of genuine hope and joy? The power of what was bad about it had no power to hold him there. It only gave a place where from apparent death, an ending, life would spring forth. Why would He not want the same for us?
"God, you think backwards. I'm trying to avoid pain. You're continually extending an invitation to me to enter into it. I confess the main reason I don't is because I want to preserve my life. But if someone asked me, 'How's it goin'?' I'd have to say it doesn't seem to be working very well - and I get real tired. For some reason that doesn't make me stop trying. Help me to 'get it' a little better that evil is transformed by love entering it, not by trying to eliminate it, and help me to 'get it' that a part of my heart really wants to open to that love, even if it means going through pain. Amen"
|
|
