My "Good Stuff Entry"

why The Shack is cheese to a good wine.
(by which I am a hypocrite because I like a $3 bottle of champagne and cheddar cheese so this analogy doesn't apply to me, but in the worldly sense of people who have good taste I plunge forward with my now awkward analogy.)

Good wine is something to relish, to enjoy and savor. The Shack isn't that. It's the complementary cheese to the wine. You pop it in your mouth, then chew and swallow, then back to savoring the good stuff. Now, I love cheese. Not the moldy expensive stuff, but good old Wisconsin cheddar. The wine would be fine without the cheese, but oh, isn't comfort food grand?

There are plenty of good books out there, great stuff, the classics. What would my world be today without Tom Sawyer? (Perhaps slightly less racist...) Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, and Ernest Hemingway, are all wonderful authors whose classic works stand out and feel like honey tea to a raspy throat to our respective creative souls. Those books are fine wine. Heck, to make this analogy more spiritual, I'll throw the bible in the mix. The bible is something to pour over multiple times to see what gem you suddenly find entwined with the stuff you know. I'm re-reading Songs of Solomon and I'm falling in love with God all over.

Now, as you people have (no doubt) read in several of my comments, I love the Shack. I will border on boring repetition here, but I want this blog to be the whole version, and not just bit and pieces based on the assumption that you remember all my comments thus far. Someone gave me the book before all the hype so I had an insurmountable advantage over you because I wasn't trying to make it live up to something it's NOT. AND I read it all in a day so I wasn't reading it with a critical eye. Now that I am going back through, I will say that I hold it with a little less esteem, but nonetheless love it. The Shack is just a simply written book of someone attempting to do the impossible and I applaud his effort and putting his soul out there for the buzzards to pick clean. I barely want to publish here, let alone try to compile my heart's thoughts to be read by all!! I think he overreached some and tried to hard to explain stuff that really he could have left alone but on the whole he got a point across that is sending his book to #1 and getting movie deal out of it.

He attempts to bridge the gap of an all-loving God and the sickness of this fallen world and the sins that "shouldn't" happen. Does anyone one of you NOT have family members or dear friends who use this as an excuse for the non-existence of God? The hurt, the suffering we all have experienced in combination with an all-powerful, all-loving God is hard to equate. It's hard to understand. It's plain hard to believe. As my own testimony that I have shared on here, I would say the churched answer of "Well, of course I believe in an all-powerful God" while, deep, deep in the depths of my heart a voice cried out "NO! I don't!" and I would ignore it because it was wrong. Pesky ole Satan trying to make me doubt or something, but what I didn't realize was that was not just Satan, it was what I truly believed. I just denied it like a crime done against someone who won't admit it happened to her because then the ugliness would pour out and everyone would see how dirty that she was. My life wasn't full of anger or bitterness, but perhaps if I hadn't read The Shack and had to deal with my personal demons, my own Great Sadness (sappy reference, I know!) would have developed into that.

I don't want to go into too much personal detail being that I don't know everyone on here and this is again, repetitive, but when the doctors told me that my child had a syndrome that needs to be diagnosed, when they said he'd probably have to have heart surgery and that he was severely developmentally behind, and when they told me that an operation is the only way for my child to not loose his vision in one eye, my deep rooted feelings came up like like a raging volcano and my trust in God was shattered. How could an all-loving God allow this? I could go into the rest of the world but you already know the filth that is there, all around, wanting to devour all that is holy and innocent. I'm not going to go over all that happened within my life that made me finally realize and work through my issues because that is my personal story and it is ongoing.

The Shack was like a salve on my soul, quieting me and making me deal with the hypocrisy within my life. It wasn't the slap in the face books that I quite literally throw across the room in a fit of rebellion, it was the whisper of God within the pages telling me that he IS Love. I'm not going to pour over it and delight in reading it again and again, but it was a tasty morsel that complemented my own search for who He is.