Wm. Paul Young
24 min read ⭑
“My identity is not connected to a piece of work. Even if it’s really beautiful, that’s still not my identity. It’s not connected to a movie or a book or the notoriety and platform that come from such things.”
William Paul Young never planned for The Shack to become a bestselling book or for its film adaptation to make millions at the box office. Rather, he originally wrote it for his six kids, to teach them about the heart of God. But the popular novel about forgiveness and renewal isn’t Paul Young’s only work. He’s also well known for writing Lies We Believe About God, Cross Roads, Eve and The Shack’s upcoming sequel, Return to the Shack, inspired by his friends on death row.
Read our conversation to learn about Paul Young’s past as a missionary kid in former New Guinea, why he never separates the sacred from the secular, and why he prays in the Spirit every chance he gets.
The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
The big question is “What’s my hometown?” I’m a missionary kid, so good luck with that. I was born in Grand Prairie, Alberta. I was there for six days and have never been back. I then grew up in the highlands of New Guinea. Food is great because it’s always about the company you’re with, at least for me. It’s much more valuable because it draws people together. It’s a communion table, regardless of where in the world you are. My favorite food is always connected to my relationships. As far as the culinary part of it, I’m going to go with Asia to start and then my wife Kim’s cooking. Somewhere, they might be neck and neck, depending on whether she’s here or not. I love other cultures and other cultures’ food. There’s always bad food in every culture, too. Seems like we like to create something that doesn’t quite work. But Asian food, to me, has the greatest amount of width and depth to it.
My favorite meals involve the presence of a child, where you sit down and just listen to them. You engage with them in terms of where they are because they’re always present. We have to learn to be present because we’ve lost our capacity to be present. Presence is where God actually lives with us. Sometimes we have a little time if my grandkids ask me to pray. It’s not quite the presence of a meal, but it’s very close. When we pray, which is what you do all the time in all of your non-separated assumptions, we always say, “Holy Spirit or Jesus, who would you like us to be praying for?” We don’t make an assumption. One of my grandkids, who was 4 or 5 at the time, listened, and she said, “Do you have to hold your breath in order to hear Jesus?” I said, “No.” She said, “I do. I can’t hear him talk unless I’m holding my breath. Does he have a speaker in there?”
In the context of a meal, I have a bunch of friends on death row in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve known them now for nine years, and they truly are my friends. They’re the ones who sent me the only card I got after my dad died. When I’m with them, it’s a celebration of relationship. I don’t particularly like the term ministry. It just smacks of superiority and separation. They put together a communion meal. It’s one of the most precious times I’ve ever had in my life. We were sitting in a circle inside death row. When they would pass the bread, they would tell the person they were passing it to how much they loved him and why. I thought, Golly, these are the guys who built the table of reconciliation. They actually built a big table. I think it seats eight or 10, and they crafted it in their little wood shop. It’s got the African symbol for reconciliation in the middle. The agreement on death row is that if you’ve got a problem with each other, you will go sit at the communion table of reconciliation to work it out, and you don’t leave it until you’ve worked it out. If you can’t, then you bring in another one of the inmates. Symbols of meals, symbols of communion, symbols of our love for one another — these transcend our differences.
adam kovacs; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
I’m going to say there is no separation between spiritual and secular activities. Our union is all the time. A quirky one I have is taking out the garbage. I would also include the chance encounter with someone who has shown a kindness. I’ll tell you a recent one. I was in a cafe with a bunch of folks who had become dear to me. A guy walks in with five little girls, nine and under, and I engaged them right away. I’m telling you, there was no separation between sacred and secular at that moment. Every child carries a uniqueness in their embodiment that is still, if that child has not been harmed, full of innocence. There’s a direct connection between righteousness and innocence. If you were to use the word innocence in so many of the Scripture passages, it makes so much more sense. I think the greatest argument against the problem of evil in the world is the presence of a child. There’s a depth, and I think the presence of a child who’s been unharmed speaks to the child within us. How could one ever say that there’s somehow a separation when the presence of the divine is in us all the time? We cannot even exist apart from that union. Everything we put our hands to, our creativity to, our eyes to, our embodiment to — everything is embedded within that union.
The sacred-secular split has done huge amounts of damage and created a rift within us that is horrendous. It shifted everything toward elements that the common person does not naturally engage in. It distributed authority and presence and all that to those who are smart and have the education and things like that. For example, some of your listeners may not know about doctrines, but the institutionalized church creates these little rules that become doctrines, and then they become dogmas. Dogmas are unquestionable. They are assumptions that are made. When they put out there that there was the doctrine of the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture, it stopped the regular person from being able to hear the presence of God for themselves. It shifted it to the institutional structure. That has done untold damage. I grew up among modern evangelical holiness fundamentalists. That’s my background. The damage was that because I couldn’t hear anymore, that role was shifted to the smart people, as if they could hear properly. We established 40,000 denominations of Christianity just because we were hearing something different from somebody else. The argument was, “Well, if we let you hear for yourself, you’re going to get betrayed by what you’re hearing.” But you aren’t. You’re just relying on your mind as if God does not dwell within you, and you’ve separated your mind from your heart. It’s made in an isolationist type of framework. We’re not part of relationships and communities that help each other discern properly. It’s like you are now on an island. For a while, I was asking some of my people — the modern evangelicals are my people, so be careful how you talk about them — I would ask them, if you were stranded on a desert island, would you rather have the Bible or the Holy Spirit? Some of my people struggled with that because they have created such certainty around the presence of words. I love the Scriptures and the New Testament, but they are a signpost toward Jesus. They’re not God. You can’t have a relationship with words on a page. Only the Word who is living and active and dwells in us.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you confront its power?
Because of a long history of tragedy and trauma, I have three kryptonites. One is the hesitance to forgive myself when I have hurt someone, even a little bit. My sensitivity to harm has grown along with my movement toward wholeness. I have a weakness there. Keeping secrets and shading the truth — that would be the biggest kryptonite. Another one is control. I want to manage the lives of the people I love because I slip into an imagination that I actually know better. I want to play the Holy Spirit in their lives without trusting the Holy Spirit in their lives. You can see there’s a cascade in terms of this. I would connect it to future tripping, like creating imaginations that don’t exist. That’s connected to tripping, to control, which is connected to trust. Control is opposed to love.
Here’s how you deal with it. One, you live in the present tense and deal with what is actually in front of you. If it’s to ask for forgiveness, you go. If it’s to check whether you’ve hurt someone, you go. That’s always in the present tense. I don’t think you can deal with any of these globally. You deal with them as they occur. Respond to that, which is the real world in front of you, not some imagined world in which you’re trying to gain control.
Most people I know are control freaks. That’s been my history. It’s because I can’t or don’t trust, or I had a God who wasn’t worthy of trust. I had to become an atheist before I could learn how to trust because of a transition in terms of the character and nature of the one I was trusting. My God, for years, wasn’t worth trusting. I tried. It didn’t work.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
I don’t toil. I respond to that which is in front of me and trust the timing. Trust the ripples. I toiled long enough, so I’m not a big fan. I’ve got a sequel for “The Shack” coming out in October called “Return to the Shack.” It turned out so beautifully, and it happened because of my friends on death row. They were the ones who lit the fire. But even then, my identity is not connected to a piece of work. Even if it’s really beautiful, that’s still not my identity. It’s not connected to a movie or a book or the notoriety and platform that come from such things. It’s all unrighteous wealth. Jesus says he wants us to be shrewder about unrighteous wealth than those of the kingdom of the world because we have an opportunity to play with unrighteous wealth because it’s not an identity or a security — it’s not where our worth is centered. Therefore, we can play with it. I have unrighteous wealth in terms of notoriety. Because of “The Shack,” I’ve been invited into places that I never would have been. But to be invited there does not give me worth and identity and security and meaning and purpose and all that. It’s crap to try to get those things from unrighteous wealth.
Another one we have been working on for five years — and have a few more to go — is unique and large-scale in the world. It’s a play, musical and concert of “The Shack,” and we’re working it out of Germany right now. It’ll be birthed from Germany into the world in the spring of 2029. It’s fantastic. Three-dimensional in the presence. It is so much more powerful than a flat screen. I love movies and flat-screen art, but theater combines the musical theater stage production elements. That’s been an absolute joy. When you learn to work with these things around the centrality of relationship, you’re breaking all the rules. They’re meant to be broken. That’s the freedom of playing with unrighteous wealth. In terms of the work that I’m doing — and it is work, but it’s work from rest, not toward it — the timing of it and whether it even comes to fruition is not the issue. When you learn to live in the present tense, when you trust the ripples, you don’t make your decisions based on outcomes. You make them because they’re the next right thing to do and a response to that which is being nudged in you by the Holy Spirit. Then it becomes a joy. It’s work — whatever you put your hands to do, it with all your strength — but it doesn’t carry the weight of anxiety or fear because there’s no fear in love. Don’t be anxious about tomorrow. Take no thought. You make plans, but you hold them awfully loosely because some little virus might come through town and wipe out your calendar. You say, “Well, when I said yes, it was yes in that moment, and it was the right thing to say yes to, but it’s just not there anymore.” To live this way is so fun.
I constantly run into people who are owned. Even Christians or those who acknowledge themselves as followers of Jesus often think unrighteous wealth is the blessing they’ve been praying for. It’s the freedom and the wholeness. The intention of God is to burn all that away because it’s not love. That would include our identity with some kind of outcome of some kind of performance, whether in the world or not. I’m so glad I didn’t write the show. I couldn’t have. I didn’t until I was 50 years old, because I’d gone through the grinder in terms of dealing with my crap. I knew it wasn’t my identity. Plus, it was so big, you’d be stupid to think that somehow you didn’t just participate, which I did. God didn’t write it by himself, and I sure didn’t. It was participation. The last thing I want is a purpose-driven life. Yuck. I want a Spirit-indwelled, moment-by-moment participatory life. That’s what I want.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
Seeing there’s no secular spiritual divide, even on God’s side, what I put my hands to is already Spirit-infused. It’s not God working from the outside in. It’s God transforming from the inside out. That’s really crucial. A lot of us have lived with a God we’re trying to get involved with from the outside in. Paul’s Damascus Road was when “God, who had set me apart from my mother’s womb, was pleased to reveal himself in me, and now I preach him to the Gentiles.” This is an inside-out work. How do I know? If it is of love’s kind, I know. If it is embraced inside of kindness and gentleness and patience, I know. You know the tree by the fruit, right? So if the fruit is good, then you know it’s a participatory work. If it harms, you know. If it’s ideological, you know it’s not God, because God is not a God of ideology. God is not a God of being right, but of love and relationship. Those are the two trees — one’s death, one’s life.
How do you know when you’re sharing the right word and you sense God’s presence in that moment uniquely?
My goal with “The Shack” was accomplished in 15 copies I made at Office Depot, with six copies for my kids. The extras were because there was a sale. I know what it’s like to be in that flow in the moment, and this has happened to me in daily life, where I could say the word tissue, and it would have been the right word. Your knower knows. You know that you know in that moment. It doesn’t denigrate any of the rest of your life at all. The time to play is the time to play. It doesn’t diminish the time to work. There are lots of times when you just trust it, because your assumption is union. Part of the journey toward wholeness is God removing the sense of presence in order that we don’t begin to idolize it. I think it’s an important time where you actually embed the relationship in your knower and in your assumptions rather than in just experience. Frankly, all of us share the experience of suffering. All of us. We all share the experience where we can’t sense the presence of God. If we’re going to, in an artistic way, gear our comprehending the presence of God through an experience of that moment as if it were the target or the goal, then we’ve created something that’s going to disappoint us. That turns into an expectation in short order. Expectations are prophesied disappointments. In contrast, contentment is in whatever state you find yourself in. Why? Because you know that, one, God is good and trustworthy. Two, you are in union with God. And three, this is real life, regardless of what’s going on around us. I love those moments.
I’ll give you an example. This is not normal in terms of the usual way I live my life. I called a friend of mine. We don’t talk very often. She and her husband, Ann and Butler, are in their 80s, and I called her. They had moved to a new house, which I’d never been in. I know nothing about it. I haven’t seen pictures of it. We had a great conversation catching up. I met Ann and Butler because I was speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast a number of years ago. They asked me last minute, so they didn’t have a room for me, and I was scrambling around trying to find a place to sleep. Ann and Butler said, “We have a floor.” I said, “Great, that’ll work. I’m a missionary kid, so floors work.” Ann now says that the only other man she has ever slept with is Paul Young, because I slept on the floor in her room. That’s the kind of relationship we have. So we’re talking on the phone, and Ann’s puttering around, and I’m saying, “Ann, what are you doing?” She says, “Well, I’m trying to make this thing for Butler, but I need some dry mustard, and I can’t find the dry mustard. Wet mustard works, but I would really love dry mustard.” I said, “Ann, you’re standing at your sink, looking out the window, trying to figure out where dry mustard is. There’s a cupboard to both sides. There’s a cupboard to your left, two cupboards down. Open it up on the second shelf, way at the back corner, you’re gonna find dry mustard.” She went because she knows me and that I’m crazy. So she rummaged around in that cupboard and said, “Paul, there’s no dry mustard.” I said, “Ann, you didn’t look far enough.” She said, “There’s just sauces, like Indian curry sauces.” I said, “You didn’t look far enough. Behind the curry sauces in the corner in the back, there’s a can of dry mustard.” So she went back there. She said, “I found it. There was a full, unopened can of dry mustard back there.”
Now, I’ve never done anything like that. I’ve never tried to do anything like that. It’s just at that moment, my knower knew. I knew that I knew that there was a can of dry mustard there and I was OK being wrong about it, but I knew. What is that? It’s play is what it is.
When I’m in a creative flow, it’s work because I’m exhausted after time disappears for a while. In fact, here’s a funny thing. I’ll lose my voice without speaking. When I am writing, I lose my voice. Kim can tell that I’ve been working on something creative by how much I’ve lost my voice. It’s like I’ve taken my actual voice, and I’ve put it on paper and used it up. Isn’t that wild? We get to participate in it. It’s unique to who we are and what’s going on in our embodiment and all that. Art is one of the most beautiful ways we can play with God or God can play with us. If the assumptions are correct, the activity is free. If God is good all the time and the object of God’s ire is that which keeps the child from being fully alive and fully human, fully free. Never at me. You want to see other-centered, co-suffering, self-giving love? Look at a mother who loves their child well. Look at the cross. Both of those are the same in essence. I’d give my life up for you. I suffer because you suffer. That’s agape love. It’s because love dwells in union with every human being or else they wouldn’t exist. You can see it in kindnesses, and you see it when there is an earthquake or a flood and everybody shows up. In the sharing of suffering, the true emerges. The true has been there the whole time in the normal activities of daily life, but it becomes obvious when they’re suffering.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
To me, it’s the same as if you’d asked me, “What are your hobbies?” I’d say climbing inside the things that my friends like to do because I really don’t have hobbies. My friends like to golf, so count me in. My friends like to go fishing, so count me in. Brad Jersak is a dear friend of mine. He has a brilliant mind and a bigger heart. We were in a group, and somebody asked me that question about spiritual practices. I thought, What are my spiritual practices? Let me think. I don’t think I have any. Bradley said, “Paul, are you kidding? Your spiritual practices are hugging people, being present with them, looking them in the eyes, listening to what they have to say and responding in love. You’ve got so many spiritual practices.” And I realized that if I have a friend who wants to walk a maze or take a hike, I’m in. I will get really beautiful things from entering into whatever it is they’re doing, but I don’t have a habit of doing any of these things. If anything, maybe praying in the Spirit. Maybe that’s a spiritual practice that I do a lot. I think spiritual practices are signposts, like the Bible is. They are signposts to that which is actually already true. Every religion is trying to get to union. The faith of true Christianity, the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, is a declaration that everything starts with union rather than being a journey toward it. You can treat spiritual practices as a journey toward union or an expression of union, and they’re very, very different.
What does praying in the Spirit look like for you on a regular basis?
I call it gobbledygook. Praying in the Spirit is gobbledygook. I don’t come from a charismatic Pentecostal background whatsoever. I don’t even actually believe in the gifts of the Spirit. I believe the Holy Spirit is the gift and all of these things are just manifestations of the Spirit. Because the Spirit indwells us, we have a capacity to function in any of the things that are in any of the lists, and you do it all the time. How many times have you listened to someone and then you’ve said something that you know as you say it, it’s never even entered your mind — or had a word of knowledge, like finding a little canister of dry mustard in the back of a shelf? One of my biggest struggles in my early 20s was, “How can I bow my mind to God? How can I do that?” I knew I was stuck in my head. I knew because of the sexual abuse and all the other crap that my defense mechanism had become primarily intellectual. That was how I survived. That was how I protected myself. It was failing me in terms of my relationship with God and relationships with other people.
So the big question is, “I’ve got my mind. How do I bow my mind?” I ran into 1 Corinthians 13 and 14. I’ve always esteemed Paul the Apostle as brilliant. Because I’m mind-centered, I’m working my way through that whole passage, particularly in 14, where I’m trying to find a way to disallow what he’s saying. He’s talking about praying in tongues, a language that he does not understand. I’ve got languages in my history. I’m a missionary kid, but I understand those languages. I call it gobbledygook because it sounds so pretentious when you talk about the gift of praying in tongues and all that kind of stuff. It really has become something quite divisive. It doesn’t make somebody more spiritual, and it’s not evidence that you are actually indwelled by the Spirit and all of that kind of nonsense. But to take the risk that the Holy Spirit in union with you can pray in a way that your mind is not capable of comprehending. I could be reading something at the same time as praying in the Spirit, and it’s a language. I know languages. I could speak to you parts of four different languages and one of them would be praying in the Spirit, and you wouldn’t be able to tell, except I’m more fluent in praying in the Spirit. But it says that when you do it, you’re building yourself up, and that’s not a negative thing. You’re doing things of the Spirit, and when you’re doing it in a public place, don’t do it unless there’s somebody who can interpret. Because what’s the point? When you’re gathered together, the point is to edify the whole community. But Paul says, “Well, I pray in the Spirit more than you all in the body gathered. I’d rather speak five words with my understanding. So what do I do? Well, I’ll pray in the Spirit, and I’ll pray with my understanding. I’ll sing in the Spirit. I’ll sing with my understanding.” And it really originates from two different places. I have to allow it. I have to participate in the sense of permission.
Praying in the Spirit has been such a central part of my life since my 20s. It’s not an emotional thing. Once in a while, I know who I’m praying for. When it becomes an emotional thing, I don’t know what I’m saying, but Ephesians says that when I pray in the Spirit, I’m praying mysteries and things that only the Spirit knows and my spirit knows. That communication covers all the inability that I have. Paul wrote one of my favorite verses about praying, saying, “We don’t know how to pray as we ought. But the Holy Spirit can pray even with groanings” (see Rom. 8:26). Communicate secret things of the Spirit. I don’t get told anything. Sometimes I just know; my knower knows that I’m praying. So much of this is emotional for me, which is a sign of healing in my life because I had shut that world down. A lot of times when I’m working on something, I can write and pray in the Spirit at the same time because they originate in two different places. That’s what, if you’re going to deny the reality of praying in the Spirit, you’ve got to deal with 1 Corinthians 14. It’s really clear there. You can’t just say, “Well, God gave them the ability to speak a different language.” But your assumption is that they knew what language they were speaking. Yet they didn’t. So praying in the Spirit is a very dear, treasured part of my experience.
I don’t ever try to get people to pray. I don’t, unless I’m asked or if it’s the right situation. It’s such an impediment, and people have been so harmed by that whole conversation that I don’t go there unless I’m invited. I’m not saying that I’m more spiritual as a result. I’m not saying any of that kind of nonsense. I’m simply saying that if you’ve got a nudge to understand, let’s look at it together and see what we can find. It’s precious to me. But so is a hug. And so is crying with someone. And being invited inside someone’s suffering. I get invited onto that kind of holy ground a lot. And praying in the Spirit basically has nothing to do with that in that moment, but I can do it under my breath in any given situation. It reminds me of my union. It reminds me at that moment that I’m not alone, that the Spirit is very aware and that I can relax.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
There are a trio of movies in my 20s that just put me on my butt. “Rollerball,” “Life of Brian” and “Man Friday” with Richard Roundtree and Peter O’Toole. Those three in my early 20s wrecked me because I was struggling with institutional Christianity, and they all portrayed the system so well.
“George MacDonald - The Unspoken Sermons” had a huge impact on me and still does. It’s probably in my top five books. MacDonald was C.S. Lewis’ mentor. He had a huge influence on all the Inklings, Dorothy Sayers, Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Mark Twain and Steinbeck. He’s not a small voice. He wrote like a lot of the good writers of that day did. He wrote crossing any kind of secular or sacred divide, and we’ve kind of lost that now. We don’t have writers who are both fiction and nonfiction writers. Things have become much more cloistered. I think that’s harmed us. We don’t know how to do art without turning it into propaganda. We want to do art with an agenda as if it can stay art, and it can’t. MacDonald wrote all kinds of adult fantasy, and one of them was “Phantastes.” I like “Lilith,” but “Phantastes” was the book that upended C.S. Lewis. He said, “When I read that book, it baptized my imagination, and it took me 18 years for the rest of me to catch up. There wasn’t another book I ever wrote that MacDonald was not in.” A lot of that came from unspoken sermons. There is an edited version by Rolland Hein that I recommend only because it has better English — MacDonald’s was very broke. But what you can do is Google MacDonald’s order of chapters and read Rolland Hein’s edition in that order. MacDonald stood against the sweep of Calvinism that came through Europe. These were unspoken sermons because they didn’t allow him to preach them. But boy, I mean, it’s just revolutionary. It opens up the beautiful gospel in a way that is absolutely remarkable.
I can trace books all the way back to my childhood. You know, I never took a writing class, but I learned to write by reading the classics. I could follow them through. I could get into some of the Eastern books like “Siddhartha,” and I could go into psychology and cosmology. All of them were feeding into how I was thinking about things and had ripple effects that impacted me. Jacques Ellul was a huge writer for me. He was a sociologist and theologian from France and Sorbonne University. In fact, I’m reading again right now “The Politics of God and the Politics of Man,” which is a fantastic book. He has another one called “Anarchy and Christianity.” But when I read him, I tell people that reading Ellul is like wading through wet concrete but finding diamonds everywhere, because he’s not an easy read. I think that’s one of the ways that I have been able to serve the community of faith and part of the world is that I’m a translator. I can take really heavy, difficult stuff and bring them into common language.
Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. Does technology ever help you this way? Has an app ever boosted your spiritual growth? If so, how?
Our creativity is the basis for what emerges, right? So that would include institutional structures that then take on a life and turn on you. Politics, religion and commerce would be three of the big ones. Actually, they’re represented in Revelation as the trinity of evil.
I have a friend who wrote a paper called “The Djinn in the Machine,” which is the spirit in the machine, where if we create something that is temporary, it has the power to become self-serving. It’s like when I’ve called religious institutions human trafficking organizations. I think every family moves at the speed of the slowest. I think the family of humanity would be much healthier if they moved at the speed of the slowest. But we move at the speed of the bottom line or the speed of the mission or the speed of the vision. We marginalize those people who are not dedicated and helpful to that which is promoting the speed of the thing.
Even our relationships are connected to the vision rather than to each other. If you want to know how that works, be part of a community of faith, especially in the larger church, for 20 years and then leave and see who goes with you in terms of relationship.
Regarding technology specifically, the Gutenberg Press was critical in terms of the books that we’ve been talking about. But we weren’t ever made to be used by technology. We were made to employ it for the purposes of love, and when it’s no longer expressing the purposes of love, it’s become something that is not benign anymore. Lewis would be a good one to talk about that. Same with Charles Williams.
What’s one piece of technology that’s helped you love another person?
Zoom. I’ve been able to be face-to-face with someone I could have never been face-to-face with in the middle of their grief, in the middle of their turmoil, in the middle of their losses. I’m looking at them. Yes, it’s not the same as the presence of actual touch, for example, but it’s not nothing. It is considerably more than nothing. This is part of the beauty of the renegade spirit who is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn’t care about the box. He cares about the human beings not only who are in the box but also who created the box. It’s like in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List” in that, when it pans way up and you see this mass of browns and blacks and the colors of their clothing. You see this one little girl in a red dress and coat moving in the opposite direction. It’s such a picture for me of the presence of redemption in the face of evil. I’m not saying the Jewish community sold out. Anyone who adhered to the system of the German worldview at that time had sold out. As a result, they were doing incredible harm, and anybody who knows that history and believes it’s real would acknowledge that’s exactly what happened, and the church was front and center. The institutional structure of the church was front and center. But that little girl is the greatest argument against the problem of evil. We’re surrounded by it. The question is, how do we be in it and not of it?
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
You can expect nothing from me. Expectations are prophesied disappointments. When you learn to live without expectations, everything becomes a gift. As soon as you have one, you’ve drawn a line in the sand beneath which nothing’s acceptable as a gift.
Wm. Paul Young had a lot to say in this interview, but one of the things that stood out most was that God’s desire is to burn away everything that is not of love. Do we find our sense of worth in some external measurement? God wants to burn that away. Do we view the things of the world as a means to an end or as the end goal itself? God wants to burn that away. Do we still think we are in control of our lives? Once again, God wants to burn it away.
This week, let’s ask ourselves: What worldly attitudes, behaviors or thoughts does God want to gently — but surely — strip from our hearts?
William Paul Young was born in Canada and raised among a Stone Age tribe by his missionary parents in the highlands of former New Guinea. He suffered great loss as a child and young adult and now enjoys the “wastefulness of grace” with his family in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of Lies We Believe About God and the New York Times bestsellers The Shack, Cross Roads and Eve.