By

Bill Cottringer

     After seeing the movie “The Shack” and missing half the dialogue because of a mixture of soft-speaking, near mumbling and my own tone deafness that gets drowned out by background noise, I just had to read the copy my wife Jane resurrected from its resting spot for us both. She was convinced that the movie followed the book very closely and I certainly didn’t want to miss the lost conversations which I had inadvertently missed earlier during the movie, along with a few others in the audience, from their comments afterwards.

     Now after finishing reading the book this morning and carefully capturing and understanding all the important conversations between the lead character Mac and the holy trinity, I realize this was not at all an ordinary, unmeaningful coincidence of me being drawn to seeing the movie, reading the book and then sending it to my old Vietnam Air Force buddy, who I recently reconnected with this past Christmas, finding out he had been in prison in New York since 1988. This was after being convicted of committing two attempted murders as a police officer. He has maintained that our long-distance reunion was some sort of divine intervention and now receiving a copy of “The Shack” and beginning to read it, he is even more convinced of the divine purpose of our renewed relationship. Maybe this is our mutual dormant destiny.

    And now I have a bit of a “confession” to make as a husband,  father, son, friend and published author myself. After finishing the book and putting it in the proper perspective of my own life in “freedom” and that of my military friend’s life, being unfree and locked up, I think I understand at least one of the most important and valuable ideas offered in this book. What is embarrassing in this revelation is that I have tried to articulate this very same idea as a common thread in many of my self-help books, especially “Reality Repair” and “Do What Matters Most.”  However, I have failed to write it in such profoundly simple, crystal clear, and compellingly convincing words as done by Wm. Paul Young, author of “The Shack”. Maybe now I can utter a merged version out-loud.

    Her goes. The particular perspective or paradigm which we use to look at life, people and all the realities that happen is what determines the take-away perceptions we have. These perception in turn build our collective beliefs, expectations, judgments and truths about what is real in our insatiable drive to achieve independence and power and control our destiny. And, it is these perceptions that drive our emotional reactions and subsequent behavior, choices and outcomes. Now here is the dangerous part. If our starting paradigms are incomplete or incorrect or otherwise faulty, then so is all that follows—our perceptions, emotional reactions, behavior and choices, and outcomes. This makes it imperative for us to get the right starting paradigm, in order for us to see reality as it really is and not just how we believe it is from our perceptions and reinforcement from our resulting positive and negative emotions.

     The book, “The Shack” exposes the correct starting paradigm repeatedly and does so effectively in several different versions, so that the truth sticks and settles solidly in our souls. What is the right starting paradigm about life and all that we experience? It goes back to the Garden of Eden, where we first separated the oneness of reality by instant judgment into this and that, good and evil, one side we wanted and liked, and the other side we wanted to avoid because we disliked it. The trouble is that in biting the apple from the wrong tree in Eden, we falsely divided life into two artificial halves and ended up with trying to deal with two imaginary halves that bring all our pain and suffering and confusing conflicts, which can’t be unimagined, at least trying to do so with the independent power drive that rules us.

    The bottom line here is that we are all broken with a heavy monkey on our backs, mainly because of our bad habits of trying to be so independent and prematurely judgmental, without seeing past what we are looking at—an endless series of half-truths. The emptiness we can’t hide from no matter how much effort we put into that endeavor is an inevitable failure that can only be healed and made whole by having an alive relationship with God. That can only happen in relationships with other people, such as with me and my extended family and close circle of friends. So together, my friend in prison in New York and me here in Seattle, will figure out that our relationship is of a divine purpose—to heal each other and make whole again so that we both know the intended joy of living, him free from the prison bars and me from wrong judgments that do nothing but limit living.