Author of The Shack, William Paul Young, joins us on this episode of No Small Endeavor. At age 50, William Paul Young wrote the New York Times Best-selling novel “The Shack.” It went on to sell 25 million copies and was turned into a major motion picture. 11 years prior, Paul’s wife discovered he was having an extra-marital affair. With nothing left to hide, he began a journey toward healing and wholeness: dealing with his being abused as a child, dealing with the toxic “snow covered dung” theology of his inherited religious tradition; and his quest for control of his own image-management and the world around him. Subsequently, he wrote “The Shack” at age 50 for his 6 kids to express to them the nature of what he calls “Divine Love”. Paul shares how love, grace, and healing only happen in the present moment, and share some highly practical life experience that can transform one’s most intimate relationships.
Episode Transcript
Lee Camp
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
Paul Young
Until we learn how to stay present, we're always absent to that which is around us.
Lee Camp
That's William Paul Young, author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Shack, a book which he originally wrote for his kids, and has now sold over 25 million copies. It's loosely based on Paul's own journey of recovery from his own childhood trauma and abuse, his troubled relationship with his father, and his quest for healing,
Paul Young
All the real things are in the present tense. You don't get grace today for things that don't exist. Everything that matters is in the moment, and I think that's what eternal life is.
Lee Camp
All coming right up.
[00:01:00] I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
Our guest today is William Paul Young, author of The New York Times bestselling book, The Shack, which has sold 25 million copies and has been turned into a major motion picture. The premise of the book is a horrifying one - the abduction and murder of a child killed in an old decrepit shack. Years later, the father of the child receives a suspicious letter in the mail, inviting him back to the scene of the crime.
He decides to go back, and there he has an altogether unexpected mystical encounter with Divine Love. Paul Young, the author again, does not hide the fact that the book is autobiographical in at least a sense. Consequently, our conversation yields [00:02:00] an interview I expect I'll want to listen to numerous times.
One, because Paul is so honest. Honest about the way in which his being caught by his wife in an affair began his own long, painful process of facing his own childhood, his own being abused, and the shackles of a destructive theology. The conversation exhibits something I learned early in my academic training in moral theology - namely, that bad theology messes up people's lives.
And yet it also exhibits the way in which good theology can become a genuine source of healing, a true resource of living well, which leads me to a second reason I suspect I'll want to listen to this interview numerous times - because of the highly practical things I learned. Like what Paul calls 'future tripping', letting fear imagine the future, and then going on a trip there in our head [00:03:00] instead of living in the present.
Or, like the expectations we place upon others, such that any good thing that comes from them that falls short of those expectations gets construed as a shortcoming. Alternatively, he says, letting go of expectation means that we may receive all gifts from the other as true, unexpected gift. Or, like the conversation Paul had with one of his grandchildren, and the way in which an imagined conversation with God can fundamentally change the direction of a child's life.
William Paul Young is a Canadian by birth, spent his very young years as sons of missionaries in New Guinea. After returning to Canada, he completed an undergraduate degree in religion as well as completed seminary. In the intervening years, he's authored numerous books, including the mega New York Times Bestseller, The Shack, which has sold over 25 million copies.
Welcome, Paul. [00:04:00] Delighted to have you with us today.
Paul Young
I'm honored to be with you.
Lee Camp
I wanna start kind of counterintuitively, maybe at where I want this interview to end up, and that is starting at your vision of what it means to flourish as a human being. And it seems at least from a number of interviews you've been giving here of late that one of the ways you seem to think about human flourishing is simply resting in and receiving sufficient graces for the day.
Talk, talk to us a little bit about that.
Paul Young
Until we learn how to stay present, we're always absent to that which is around us. All the real things are in the present tense. Joy is in the present tense. Love is in the present tense. You know, we are such control freaks that I think we don't like to stay present, and I call it 'future tripping'.
We create imaginations that don't exist and then we try to figure out all the variables. I have a friend of mine, this is probably a good [00:05:00] example-- Her and her husband are good friends. They know Kim and I, and they know my family. They know, we know their family. So I get a call from the husband and he's like, "Paul you need to talk to my wife."
I'm going, "what's, what's going on?" Well, she went into the doctor, and the doctor, after running through all the symptoms, said, well, we, we think it's one of these four major diseases, like, they're all life-threatening. So he says, "she's been tanking the last couple days. Would you talk to her?" I said, "sure." So I call her up on the phone and uh, we talk our kids for a while and she says, "you know, Paul, why are you actually calling me? This is the middle of the week, middle of the day." I said, "oh, I forgot to tell you. I'm calling you to help you plan your funeral." And she's like, "what?" And then she starts [00:06:00] to laugh and she says, "you talked to my husband, didn't you?" And I said, "yeah, so I thought I'd save you a bunch of time. We can figure out what music you want, who you don't wanna invite."
[both laugh]
And she just laughed. She says, "you know what I've been doing the last couple days?" I said, "I think so." She said, "I've been researching on the internet, all four of these things." And yeah, I said, "yeah, we, we think information will give us control." She said, "that's exactly right." It turned out to be none of them, but she had sort of wasted two whole days of her life trying to figure out how to get back in control.
[Lee laughs]
And 'future tripping' is fear-based imagination. You know, imagination's a beautiful thing, and when it's wedded to love, we get play, we get creativity, we get fun, we get trust. And trust and control are mutually exclusive, and we miss what's going on right around us. We can't see it because we're off in some imagination.
You [00:07:00] don't get grace today for things that don't exist, and most of our 'future tripping' imaginations are fear-based. So I don't know about you, but I've been to my own funeral a bunch of times. I've, I've ended up losing everything and ended up under a bridge in a cardboard box. 'Cause fear will push you to a place where you're alone and you only have your own resources.
Lee Camp
Mm, yeah.
Paul Young
There's nothing there. There's no one there in that imagination, and you just lock up. So you miss everything that's present tense. You think nobody loves you, you think there's no one to trust, you think that you're alone - all of these things. And the reality is, everything that matters is in the moment, and I think that's what eternal life is.
It's the ever-present now, and I don't think it's on a timeline. I think the things that are on a timeline are [00:08:00] fear-based for the most part. You know, even if we want to plan our calendar, let me tell you, I had a full calendar for 2020. All it took was one little tiny virus to absolutely destroy that calendar.
We are not in control. Control's completely a myth. The more head oriented we are, the more variables we come up with, and all the things that are not about this moment are fear-based.
Lee Camp
I love the phrase 'future tripping'. I don't know that I've ever heard that before, but very helpful. One of the things that I think you do that perhaps is counterintuitive or perhaps unexpected, that I see, especially in The Shack, is you hold together, it seems, the ways piety, or what we might call religion might inhibit human flourishing on the one hand, and yet on the other hand, you, you [00:09:00] clearly see theological formulation for thinking about a flourishing human life as central, it seems, to your project and your projects.
And even a theological doctrine many would see as arcane or irrelevant to the practicalities of real life, namely the doctrine of the Trinity. So talk, talk to us a little bit about how you hold those two things together, or sort of, dismissal and or suspicion of certain forms of piety while theology being still central to your vision of what it looks like to live a flourishing life.
Paul Young
Sure. I grew up in a religious environment. I'm a missionary kid and a preacher's kid, so that's the world that I came from and it constantly told me that the truth of my being was that I was, as Martin Luther said, snow covered dung, you know, and I, I call it piece of shit theology. When you grow up that way and then you're in an environment where, you know, I had, I experienced sexual abuse as a small child, both inside the culture, um, that I was [00:10:00] growing up in, and inside boarding school.
And I had a very angry dad who brought to the table everything that he knew how, but his dad had destroyed his capacity to be a father before I ever showed up, but I had no conscious awareness of that. And so, uh, here we are in a very modern world where we're constantly told that the truth of our being is not something good.
You know, whether it's on social media, or the opinion of a stranger, or the opinion of those around us that we would call friends, or the news - everything that is fear-based, that's constantly telling you, you know, you don't have it, there's not enough. It's a scarcity mentality. But I think inside every human being is a deep sense that there's something other, that there's something more, and there is a deep sense that I'm actually [00:11:00] good, or at least I long for it. I long to be a truth teller. I long to be kind. I long to be patient. And you and I have talked about some of the folks in prison that, that we interact with, and I have these great relationships with these guys on death row.
I have never met a human being who, at their deepest core, wanted to be a liar and wanted to be harmful. There is this otherness that is beneath all of our damage. And whe-, where did that come from? And I'm saying, well, it came from being created in the image of Love and it is deeper than anything. And, and as a result of that, I have never met a person who I didn't already know, that there is something deep within them that longs to [00:12:00] come to the surface that is good and kind and loving and true.
And so religion can actually be harmful to that reality. But so can everything around us telling us the truth of our being. And the, the integration is when the ways of our being, how we live our life, the choices we make, actually begin to express the actual truth of our being. Right? If the truth of my being is that I want to be a truth teller, then the way of my being is becoming a truth teller.
Same with not hiding behind secrets, right? Which is truth-telling. Which is what my religious background would call, uh--
Lee Camp
confession.
Paul Young
Confession, there it is. Confession is telling the truth, right?
Lee Camp
Yeah.
Paul Young
Repentance is changing. It's not [00:13:00] just being sad about the harm you've caused, but actually changing. So when I did The Shack I, I wrote it for our six kids.
I didn't write it for the world. I had no identity, and still don't, as being a published author, even though now I'm a published author. But I wrote it for my kids, trying to express the Divine, the love that exists. And I come from a background where Trinitarian theology was a core belief, but it wasn't, it wasn't understood very well.
It was, if you looked up the theological dictionary or whatever, it was on page 800 and it was a paragraph, right? But if, if God is three persons comprising one being, then I've got something that tells me that relationship is the core of being human. And in monotheism, in where there's only one God who is not relational, that God cannot [00:14:00] be love.
Love cannot be the essence of the divine nature. And that's a real big deal, because that would've meant that you, you need the other. And there are other major religions that, that cannot talk about God as love simply because God at some point was alone, and that means that God needed the creation in order to be loving - you have to have another, because love must be expressed, and that would mean creation is needed for God to be love. And within the Trinitarian point of view, God has always been love because there's been three persons in this great dance of relationship and that matters to me at the core. And so The Shack is not so much a religious book, but it is a very human book.
And I think that's why it did what it did and surprised everybody, [00:15:00] especially me.
Lee Camp
Before we leave the question, conversation about the Trinity, I would assume you heard from lots of folks when you represent God the Father as a Black woman whose name is Papa, at least for a large part of the book. How did you see the response that you got to that as speaking to what has become of Christian piety or Christian practice?
Paul Young
Metaphor is one of the only ways that we can begin to grasp, even intuitively, the nature and character of Divine Love.
You know, when Jesus says, "I am, I am the bread, I am the light of the world," those are [00:16:00] metaphors trying to reach beyond our capacity to rationally grasp the nature of God. And there's something about a metaphor that is truer than words. So we get stuck inside metaphors as if they are factual, like God the Father, and we see, you know, coming from the West, we see a, a bearded white guy. And it's like, no, no. Metaphor is metaphor. So what I did is tangled up the metaphors.
Lee Camp
Hmm.
Paul Young
And for God to be a large Black woman is a metaphor. And, uh, for people who are literalistic, like, you know, my people, Western evangelical, they had a problem with that because they're looking at one thing that they've literalized - an image - and think the metaphor is the reality, and I'm tangling up their metaphors with something else.[00:17:00]
Lee Camp
You're listening to No Small Endeavor, and our conversation with William Paul Young, New York Times bestselling author of the book, The Shack. I do love hearing from you. You can tell me what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or provide feedback about today's episode by emailing me at feedback@nosmallendeavor.com.
Coming up, Paul and I discuss how his own trauma, failure, and healing led him to write The Shack.
You mentioned the word trauma a moment ago, but in many ways what you do in The Shack is take us on a journey into a most horrific [00:18:00] trauma, and then invite us along the way of so many of the questions that arise naturally. Uh, the anger, the hostility, the resentment, the pain coming out of a trauma. But how do you think about what you do in The Shack as simply helping us take seriously the traumas of which we - most, most all of us have some form of, right? And, or let me ask it a second way. In what ways is what you do with trauma, a sort of autobiographical grappling of your own, with trauma?
Paul Young
To approach it the latter way, I did that on purpose. I wanted the person in trouble to be a white guy - to be me - and I wanted the response of love to be multicultural, to be varied, you know, and so Mackenzie Allen Phillips, his name spells 'MAP', I mean [00:19:00] the, the initials are 'map' and um, they are an embodiment of my history, but I didn't wanna directly deal with my own losses. And so Melissa Ann Phillips also spells ‘MAP’, which is the little five-year-old girl that was abducted, which is about the greatest area of human loss possible. You know, because the deepest resonance of our own hearts is our own children, if we've got any health in our hearts at all. And so she then represents the child in me that was broken. I mean, it took me until I was 50 years old to be able to find that child again.
And for Mackenzie, is me trying to grapple with my own chip on my shoulder, in one sense, against my religious upbringing. But again, the reaching through the [00:20:00] religious forms and into the truth that lay behind them. Because in my deconstruction process I didn't want to throw everything out that was actually true, that resonated deeply in my heart, and so it was more reformational for me, to break that, but it took a long time and it required dealing with the losses and suffering through those losses, and it required facing my own brokenness and the ways that the choices I made didn't match what I longed for.
Lee Camp
You indicated a moment ago that you were 50 I think you said, when you began to see some of the things that you are articulating in The Shack. How, how old were you when you wrote the book?
Paul Young
That's the year I turned 50.
Lee Camp
And so, what were some of the precipitating factors that led you to want to express these things, or get insight into this new way of thinking [00:21:00] about relationship, love, theology, what it means to live life?
Paul Young
Yeah, precipitating factors. How about the absolute failure of my life?
Right, where everything crashed and burned. And it was brought to an apex when Kim caught me in a three month affair with one of her best friends. And that was 11 years before I wrote The Shack. And that started a journey, because it so lifted the blindness of my continuous attempt to self-promote and self-protect. Which for me is fear-based persona, right? We create a false identity and then we try to self-promote and self-protect. I mean, you can tell when someone is caught in the rut of a false identity because that's what they do. They [00:22:00] don't know who they are at the core of their being, and so they create something they can present. And that's how I spent my whole life, is self-promoting and self-protecting, and adultery brought me to the place where, I mean, it's, it was almost instantaneously when, when I got the phone call from Kim and she says, "I'm waiting at your office, and I know.
"Lee Camp
Hmm.
Paul Young
It was such a lifting of blindness that I knew I had one of two choices in that moment, cause I was so tired of trying to keep the persona going. You know, you become hyper-vigilant, and these are survival skills that go way back to, to being a child who was not protected. And it was clear in that moment that I would either start to find a way to change or I would kill myself. And, uh, suicide was [00:23:00] always a distant friend. It always offered a last way to run away.
And I, I'd run my whole life. And part of the gift of being married, even though I had very little capacity to love very well, was that it put me into a situation where it wasn't easy to run away. You know, part of my persona was that, uh, I was a good person who wouldn't run away.
[both laugh]
And now, and now, now I was stuck, for better words, inside of a relationship which was very difficult to run away from.
Well, that started a journey for me, and Kim, thankfully, was not a meek, mild person. Her and her five sisters are called 'the force'.
[both laugh]
And may the force be with you. And um, it took Kim and I, it took Kim 11 years before she could say she trusted me. That was the [00:24:00] journey of reconciliation, but it was hellish.
We made a decision right from the beginning that we would not keep the adultery a new secret, because secrets have been killing me my whole life. And there was so much that Kim did not know, and right from the beginning it was like - okay, am I desperate enough to tell the truth, to move in the direction of being a truth teller?
The first person I had to tell was her dad, who lived with us for 17 years, and, uh, frankly, I wanted him to beat the hell outta me like my, my dad used to do because I had survival skills for that, but I had none [00:25:00] for...kindness. And I saw, I saw my words break his heart, but he never said a mean thing to me. I don't have survival skills for that.
I pulled the Yellow Pages off the shelf. I, I looked under 'C's for counseling. I started with the 'A's and went down, and found Agape Youth and Family Services. And 'agape' is a word in the Greek for love. Not infatuation, kind of romantic love, but love that is other-centered, self-giving, co-suffering. That's the word that is used for God is love in the New Testament, 'agape'.
And I thought maybe, if I could begin to understand what that is, maybe there's a way forward. So I made an appointment and I ended up with Scott, who became my therapist. And, uh, this is the first time in my [00:26:00] life I said to another human being, "can you help me?" And he said, "yeah, I can, but it's gonna take a year and a half."
And I said, "I'm in." He, he laughed. He said, "Paul, everyone who sits in that chair, dealing with the same thing, they always say they're in. But after a couple months, you know, they'll feel more in control and they'll feel better about themselves and they'll bail out right before the really hard stuff." But I had really hit the bottom, and so everything, everything was on the table, including my religious history, including the damage it had done and the beautiful things it had brought to me, and I was confused about which was which, and, uh, it brought to the table the damage of my childhood, as well as opened up my remembrance of the beautiful things of [00:27:00] my childhood. But there was no integration, except after those 11 years, the year I turned 50, I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I'm like one of the healthiest people I know. I don't have any secrets. I have no addictions left.
I'm the same person in every situation, which never had happened before, right? And I thought, my gosh, this must be what it's like to be a child, right? Because it's always present tense. And, uh, the process of staying in the moment began with absolute desperation and a lack of emotional capacity to deal with anything other than what was in the moment, 'cause it was so hard.
And working my way through that, I began to find a place that was calm, and contentment that existed, and joy that became a [00:28:00] constant companion, right, which had never happened. Happiness is built on chance, right? That's what the Old English word means, 'hap' - chance, luck. But joy is independent of circumstance.
Lee Camp
Mm-hmm.
Paul Young
And as I began going through this, joy became a, a constant companion because I, I stopped running away. I started staying in the present where there's joy and goodness and kindness, and so, precipitating factors? Complete and utter failure. But one of the beautiful things about that was that I hit the bottom.
I stopped running and I finally, for the first time, had a place that I could stand on, something that was solid. But man, I would never wanna go through that again. But I'm grateful every day for that process. [00:29:00]
Lee Camp
Thank you very much for sharing that.
I'm fascinated with the way you said you needed to process both the pain and the beauty of your childhood. Would you expound on that a bit more for us?
Paul Young
You know, let me use my dad as an example. I have my history - you know, we, we tend to take photographs in our past, and we create an album, right? And when that person or a situation comes up, we go back to the photographs and, and we go like, see, they did it again, right? And what I began to realize is that when you have photographs of the past, everybody in that photograph is stuck in time, [00:30:00] including me. And so, you know, it's like, oh yeah, they did this. When my dad, when I had any kind of interaction with him, I'd go back to that album and I'd say, yep. And I, what I did is I froze him in time.
He had no capacity to change because everything was run through those, that history and then the expectations, or the hope, or whatever that he would change. But those expectations, he was unaware of, and it was like creating a minefield in which I laid the mines down and moved him around every time. He'd walk on that minefield, and sure enough, he'd step on one of my mines, one of my expectations, and blow things up, and I'd point the finger at him and that would draw me back to the photograph. But I, I needed a way to justify the existence of that memory. And so the thing about it was I had another photograph I kept locked up in a cabinet inside my heart, and it was the [00:31:00] moments when things were good.
There were the moments when there was a kindness, but, but it contradicted the photographs that I maintained my bitterness and my fury on. And so I didn't want, I didn't wanna look at those, and they got dusty and old and, and I had to do this with my childhood. I had to go back and have-- I have memories of, there were things that my dad did that were kind and good and right, and offset some of the terror and the losses.
And um, the biggest thing, was that I had to let my dad finally become something greater than being my dad. And that was to be a human being. And to do that, I had to let go of my expectations and, uh, that he become that which I thought I needed him to be.
And I had this interaction with Divine Love, however you wanna do it. I [00:32:00] have a very conversational relationship with God, and on, on my dad's 80th birthday, he stepped on one of my mines, you know, that I didn't know were my mines - he just didn't live up to one of my expectations and blew stuff up. And so I'm pissed off and I go for a walk, and I can sense the presence of God next to me.
And I, I feel an arm around my shoulder, you know, and it's, we have this little conversation and, and I hear Love say, "you know, you know Paul, your dad hasn't known how to be a father for 60 years. He's not suddenly gonna figure it out."
[Lee laughs]
And I went, "yeah, I know that. I know that." And then I hear in the inside voice, I hear, "if it's okay with you, would you let me be all that and more?"
And it broke me down. For a couple reasons. I realized that I was the one who created the [00:33:00] minefields based on my expectations. And expectations are just disappointments waiting to happen, right? If you learn to live without expectations, everything becomes a gift. But when you live with expectations, nothing below them is acceptable.
When I let my dad go to being a human being, father is just a subset of being a human being, cause not everybody's a father. When I let him become a human being, suddenly the expectations were gone. Isn't it crazy? We're able to, in a sense, love a stranger in a more pure way than to love those who are right around us. We're entangled with those folks
And it changed my relationship with my father. He died this summer, in May. And [00:34:00] about two months before he died, we had a phone conversation, cause my dad didn't know how to call me, so I always called him - and just five minutes into the conversation he said, "Paul, I need to tell you something." Which, historically, I mean, every time he said that there was some great tragedies, like when my brother was killed or my five-year-old niece was killed.
And um, he said, "This is really important." I said, "Dad?" He goes, "I want you to hear this, that I'm really, really, really proud of you. I'm proud of the man you've become, I'm proud of the husband you are, I'm proud of the father and grandfather you are. I'm proud of the way that you've touched the world, and I really, really love you."
And see, I had no expectations for that at all. So it was this phenomenal gift, right, and it's the, the last major conversation I had with my dad before he passed. [00:35:00] And again, how, how is it that we get stuck and we need, we need those photographs because they justify our anger and justify our bitterness, and they keep us from forgiving.
Because when you take the frames off of those things, people are allowed to become more than where you stuck them. And when you let them become human beings, suddenly the whole world opens up to a possibility of a relationship that didn't exist as long as you maintained the frames of your expectations.
Lee Camp
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. Those notes include links to [00:36:00] resources mentioned in this episode, and a PDF of my complete and extensive interview notes, including material not found in this episode. We're going to take a short break, but coming right up more from Paul about learning to give and receive grace in the present moment.
One of the things I think comes out so beautifully in The Shack, namely the acceptance of our own humanity and the humanity of others, which seems to be, as that unfolds in The Shack and as it unfolds in your conversation just now, it's a very liberating, uh, freeing, sort of simple acceptance of our humanity.
But will you talk just a little bit more about how that has played out in your thought or your [00:37:00] life?
Paul Young
Lemme put it this way. So, um, when I got home from my dad's burial, he didn't want anything fancy, he - there was nine of us that were around the casket as it was dropped into the ground. Um, when I got home there was this card, right?
And people don't often send cards, you know, it's emails and - which are great - emails and messages and things like that, but to get a physical card with handwriting on it, and it's, it's full of little notes from guys that I know, like, "I'm sending my condolences and my love to you and your family. My prayers are that you remain strong and at peace, and you remain under the wings of the Most High."
"Dear Paul, with love, my heart and prayers are with you and your family. Please be strong and courageous. First Thessalonians 4:13-18." That's from KB. The first one was from Nicholas. "Paul, I'm so sorry to hear about your father. Please know [00:38:00] that you and your family are in our hearts and prayers. Sending good thoughts and love from our hearts."
"Brother Paul, my heart goes out to you and your family. Continue to be strong and hold on, my brother. May love comfort you and console your soul. Take care, my prayers are with you. Stand, my brother, stand." And that's Pervis. "Sending my condolences to you and your family."
How about this one. "Paul, dude! Sorry to hear about your dad! One of the things that helped me with Maggie's passing several weeks ago was the thought of their now comfort." That's Donald. "Paul, my heart is with you and your family in your time of grief. Remember, it is in our times of sorrow that God holds us the closest. Love, your friend Harold."
"It is my prayer that God will comfort your family during this difficult time." That's David. And there are all of these signatures from these guys. All these guys are on death row in Tennessee. [00:39:00] You know some of these guys, and they have become my friends. But when we think of death row, we want to create a category of inhumanity. We want them to become just a bunch of guys who are known for the worst day of their life.
When I read something like that and then I say, "this card, all these signatures are from guys on death row," suddenly it blows apart our paradigm of what it means to be human or the category we've created for a human on death row. And that's what's happening.
Lee Camp
Well, you've brought us kind of full circle to where we started, which was precisely where I was hoping we would end up. And so, let me ask kind of two closing questions on the way [00:40:00] out, that are both related to, sort of, practices for living in the moment or practices for trying to lean into this kind of life you've been describing.
So the first question is, you use the language, I think maybe, of friendship, some in The Shack, but it's not a, it's not a language that gets in there a lot as I, as I recollect. But it seems to me that friendship in its most rigorous, beautiful form is one way of talking about what you're-- I see you describing. So one, I would just ask you a little bit of commentary about friendship and the practice of friendship and how that has played into your life.
And then second, what are other sort of simple practices that you would suggest for folks day by day to kinda lean into the sort of life that you're describing. So first, let's go back to friendship.
Paul Young
There are few friends that you have in your life where it's easy. They're easy friendships in the sense that [00:41:00] you always pick up where you left off. There's not a lot of catching up and no, there's no expectations. And those friendships are, they are really gold. And, you know, I have a friend, Scott, he's the first man in my life who said to me, "I don't care how badly you screw up, I'm not leaving." And, uh, there's nothing that he and I can't talk about.
You know, some of us have been burned so badly that we slowly step into these relationships, and it's such a gift to us when those relationships become real. Here, here is, here is something that you can ask a friend. You can ask a friend, "So how are you?" And you can ask them, "So how are we?" And then you can say, "Is there anything that I can do?" Right? That's a friendship. [00:42:00]
Lee Camp
That's a very helpful question to consider as a regular part of friendship.
Paul Young
It is, because it gets past the surface stuff and into something that actually matters, and with friendships that are deep and sustaining, those kinds of questions are significant. That's a good set of three questions that I can ask Kim, for example, because my relationship with Kim is the best it's ever been, and to say, "How are you? How are we?" and, "Anything I can do?" I think that's one of the practices. I think learning how to listen before trying to solve.
Lee Camp
Mm.
Paul Young
Rephrasing what a friend has said in a way that they would say, oh man, I wish I'd asked it that way, or said that, said it that way. And then going like, all right. Even in a [00:43:00] conversation that's difficult, it is like, "alright, this is what I hear you say. Let me tell you what I love about what you're saying, and here's something that I, that I really get from what you're saying. Here's what you're saying, here's what I really get from what you're saying, and here's what I, I, I don't understand and I need help with." I mean, just those kinds of questions inside of friendships, and to say--
Okay, how about this one? "What's the hardest thing you're dealing with in your life right now?" Because that pushes through everything and it's like, alright. What you find out is, am I willing to answer that question? That's like, yeah, with this person, I'm willing to answer that question. And then you've got somebody who's a friend.
And I think, here, here's another thing. Having a conversation [00:44:00] with Divine Love, something as simple as, "So who do you say that I am? What name do you call me by?"
You know, I, I have a grandchild, grandson, and, uh, he's been having an issue with, um, sneaking screen time outside, outside the boundary, right, of what is set up for him.
And it just, it happened naturally in terms of my conversation with him. But I said, "alright, do you think you're a liar?" And he said, "yeah," and you can see the shame, and hear the shame in that response. And I said, "I don't think you're a liar. I think you're a truth teller who forgot he's a truth teller." I said, "you know, every human being has a safe place inside their soul, inside their heart, and you can go into that safe place."
Here's the thing. Imagination is this powerful, beautiful [00:45:00] part of who we. And I think that Divine Love, I think that God dwells in us as complete people, not like having an apartment in your left toe, right? It's in our imagination, in our thinking, in our creativity, in our bodies, even in our darkness - the things that we're confused about.
I think God dwells in all of us and is working to redeem all of us. And so we can hear the voice in our imaginations, we can hear it in our logic. We can hear the voice in our creativity and in our bodies, right? Great book - Body Keeps The Score. But these kinds of things are, are ways to interact and communicate with Love.
So I said to him, "there is a safe place inside of you." And I walked him through that imagery and I said, "you don't have to tell me what it looks like. I have friends who, it's on a surfboard in the middle of the ocean. And [00:46:00] there can be more than one. I have, it's on a mountaintop or it's, it's in a favorite chair or it's in a rainstorm, right?" And I said, "this is the easiest place for you to talk to God. And I, I want you to ask God, 'tell me who you think I am. Tell me what, what name you would call me by.'" And I just let him sit there and suddenly he's got a smile. And I said, "so what did, what did God say?" "God said, I'm a truth teller." And so after that, when everything around him is telling him shame-based stuff, he knows he's a truth teller.
When he makes a mistake, he knows he's a truth teller, and that begins to draw him to something solid within himself. So that's a practice, right?
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yeah.
I've been talking to Paul Young, author of The Shack. Paul, thank you for [00:47:00] your generosity with us today, and thanks, thank you for the kindness of sharing with us, and thank you for your good work in the world.
Paul Young
You know what, it's, it's an honor and a two-way street. Even when I do a lot of the talking, I often hear things that I need to hear today.
Lee Camp
Thank you.
Paul Young
And so it becomes a gift. So thank you, and thank you for, for the invitation. I so appreciate that.
Lee Camp
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with William Paul Young, author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Shack.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion, and the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a [00:48:00] global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Alright, thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Cariad Harmon, and Tim Lauer. Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.