The Hope and Healing Behind "The Shack"

By Paul Young, Portland, Oregon

As appeared in

One phone call.

No doubt you’ve heard those overnight success stories—the actor getting the breakthrough part, the struggling musician whose song everyone is suddenly talking about.

The book I’ve written, The Shack, has proved to be hugely successful in ways that I couldn’t possibly have imagined.

But the phone call that got it all started was something that threw my ordered world—what I desperately wanted people to believe was ordered—into pain and chaos long before I ever put pen to paper.

I was an insurance agent, supporting my wife, Kim, and our six kids, the picture-perfect husband and provider. Framed family photos on the desk, the kids stretching from ages one to 14.

I took them on camping trips up the Columbia Gorge and told them bedtime stories. I wanted to give them the safe, secure childhood I’d never had and never talked about.

But the terror of my past was rarely far beneath the surface, no matter how hard I tried to hide it. I was always running from half-buried memories, haunted by doubts, doubts that said if anyone really knew who I was deep inside, no one could possibly love that damaged and frightened person.

January 4, 1994, one phone call changed everything. I was just finishing lunch with a friend and Kim was on the line. “Hi, darling,” I said, waiting to hear some detail about the kids’ soccer games or a meeting with a teacher or a question about dinner—was I going to be home late again?

“I’m here in your office,” she said, her voice like cold steel, “and I’m waiting for you.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I know.” Then she hung up. The air was sucked out of the room. I wanted to keep maintaining the fiction of our perfect marriage because it was all I really had in life. I wanted to hide, because hiding and lying were what I knew how to do best. I could appear to be the model Christian dad. I was the son of missionary parents, a Bible school graduate, a former seminary student.

Kim and I had actually met at a church when I had a staff position in charge of the college youth group. She walked into a Friday evening meeting with two of her sisters. One look at her raven hair and dark searching eyes and I changed what I had planned. “Why don’t we split up into groups of two and pray for each other?” I said. Of course, I paired myself with Kim.

She knows, I thought now. I wanted to run away, but that would solve nothing. You can’t run from your own sorry self.

The next thought was ending my life, the ultimate form of self-centered running away.

Perhaps it was a nudge of grace, but I finally decided I had to face Kim, even if the anger in her voice terrified me. All the secrets had to come out, all those things that had happened to me so long ago yet still seemed so much a part of the present, my behaviors and addictions I could never talk about. It was all or nothing.

The trip to the office was one of the longest of my life. I pulled into the parking lot and slunk out of the car. I pushed open the door. The place was a shambles. Files thrown on the floor, drawers open, paperclips and pens dumped on the carpet, the trash can knocked over, memos ripped off my bulletin board.

In the middle of it all sat Kim at my computer. She knew I was having an affair with one of her best friends. All the e-mails between us were there for anyone to find. Was I secretly hoping to get caught? The guilty, they say, seek punishment.

“How could you? How could you betray me like this?” Kim shouted.