"Mon": I like The Shack

The trouble I have writing about this is that there’s a good chance you –the reader- haven’t read this book. So it’s tough to tell you what I thought was cool about it without either A-influencing you’re future opinion, or B-telling you too much and ruining the experience for you. A isn’t really a huge concern because let’s be honest I don’t have that kind of influence over you…..yet. So that leaves me to discuss my “like” for this book and future books, movies, music, etc leaving out the best parts so that you can enjoy them also if you so choose. So keep that in mind while I describe why I liked this book

First let me give you a brief overview of the plot of the book. Mack is a family man that had something terrible happen to one of his family members. He sorta kinda blames God for that. He gets a note from God to meet him at the scene of the terrible thing- the Shack. The rest of the book is Mack talking to God about their misunderstanding.

Mack as a character is supremely relatable. Even though I haven’t ever had anything terrible happen to me, there are always the day to day “disasters” of car trouble, bad grades or even sad world events that allow me to glimpse the frustrations he has with understanding God’s will in this world. He’s also a typical guy (like myself) who has trouble getting things out there on the table and avoids serious conversation and questions with jokes or deflecting answers. That unity the reader is allowed to create with Mack just makes this book all the better.

The Author W.M. Paul Young --who was apparently raised in a stone age tribe by his missionary parents— has a couple of pretty cool goals with the book; as near as I could tell anyways. He wants to shake your mental picture of the Trinity to open your mind to re-considering the box you’ve put them in. He also wants to reveal the unfairness and ridiculousness of us sometimes judging God and his decisions.

The most effective way to get people thinking outside of their normal presuppositions is to shock them. Young does that by portraying the God the Father, Jesus, and The Holy Spirit as a large black woman, a giggly middle-eastern man, and a mysterious asian woman respectively. At first this will make you super uncomfortable. Well it made me uncomfortable anyway. But hopefully you’ll soon realize that he’s not defining the trinity this way, Young is just trying to shake you out of that Grey-haired older man God, Handsome White man Jesus, and magical foofoo dust Holy Spirit stereotype that you’ve created. Personally I realized that I really don’t consider The Holy Spirit as a sentient being so much as a force such as gravity or magnetism. Something I’ll definitely explore more in my quiet times.

The conversations between Mack and God’s different iterations are definitely the highlight of this book. It took a ton of guts for an author to write lines for the character of God, and although it may seem borderline blasphemous, in reality Young is just doing his best to apply what God has said before in the Bible to a real life situation. Mack will bring a problem to God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit (which Young emphasizes are all one being) and they then proceeds to try and work through the problem. The results are amazing, ideas or questions I’ve had and probably you’ve had such as “why does God allow evil?” or “How could a great God care about me?” are laid out and talked through. Sometimes they come to an answer, and sometimes appropriately enough God has to tell Mack that “Mack doesn’t have the capability to fully understand his complex works”. A lot like the end of the book of Job.

I did have one major gripe with the book. The cover of the book really does a lot of disservice to the book, primarily because it sets such a high bar. The cover is inundated with quotes from critics and celebrities proclaiming The Shack as the Pilgrim’s Progress for our generation. I mean the book was good, but Pilgrim’s Progress is incredible. It’s akin to crowning up and coming basketball players as “The Next Jordan”, or new movies as “This Year’s Citizen Kane”. The fact that there is a comparison already disproves the idea. Nobody said Jordan was the next Wilt Chamberlain or Pilgrim’s Progress was the next Confessions, because to be that good means there is no comparison. So it’s obviously no Pilgrim’s Progress, but the book is still good.

One final disclaimer. This book is a work of christian fiction, and as such should not be read to learn theology. As proof there is never any direct quotes from scripture to back up any of the responses or explanations from the God characters. Fictional books have a wonderful role, but education is not it.

So this was not one of those here’s a problem and here’s a bunch of anecdotes and scripture to fix it books. It’s not going to fix anything. What it does do however is potentially get you really excited about the personality and attributes of our amazing God. Then you can get back to your Bible and hopefully strive after God even harder than before. So even though it’s no Pigrim’s Progress, I have to say that I enjoyed and appreciated the message behind The Shack.

Thur: I miss my Nana and Tata

First of all, Merry Christmas. I hope this has been a special day for you and your family thus far. Christmas has always been a big festivity in my family. Holidays overall were always observed or celebrated whole heartedly. It’s one of the things I love about my family. Whenever I’ve tried to figure out exactly where this passion for holidays or celebrations comes from, I always arrive at the same answer, my Nana and Tata.

Nana and Tata loved Christmas. Their house was always crazy busy and loud on Christmas day, with relatives and friends stopping by all day to see them, maybe exchange presents and have a tamale. They enjoyed participating in every aspect of the Christmas celebration, their house was always beautifully decorated for Christmas. They always had a real Christmas tree that was decorated by their grandkids or great grandkids. The tree was always overseeing lots of presents too, I’m not sure how they did it every year but they made sure to buy at least one gift for everyone in their family, and usually more than one for the kids. One year they even got all the kids new bikes, something we all talk about this day. Before opening presents though Nana would always make sure that we read the story of Christ’s birth as a family, so everyone would remember the reason for the gifts and celebration. Afterwards people would just spend time at their house. They cultivated such a festive atmosphere of happiness and love leaving their house to continue the circuit of houses that needed to be visited was always incredibly hard. It was something I will always look back on with amazement and gratitude to them for sharing that outlook with the rest of the family.
That was just the kind of people they were though. My Nana was an incredibly generous person with everything she owned. She was the type of woman who never let anyone leave the house without making sure that they had enough food to take home to last them a week. The food never lasted that long though because inevitably people couldn’t help but polish it off in what would probably be considered an unhealthily short period of time :). My Tata was a hard worker who took pride in his home. He enjoyed having people over and teaching them about the things that need to be valued, family, diligence, and God. He might not have sat them down and explained these things in so many words, but he set an example that was impossible to ignore.

So really I miss them throughout the year. Whenever I drive past their part of town, see a western movie on television, work on a car or yard, or make something in the kitchen I think of them. At Christmas though I miss them a lot more, the void they left is just so much larger this time of year. I’m happy about that. I’m glad it hurts every Christmas that they’re not here, because it reminds me how important they were in my and many other people’s life. It’s a pain I value beyond description and hope I never lose. That is, at least until I see them again.

Tue: I would change Christmas

Oh yea, this sounds like a terrible idea, but hear me out. Christmas in the U.S. is without a doubt, the most popular holiday. And why shouldn’t it be? It combines some of the greatest elements from other holidays into a celebration that dominates the last 3 months of every year. You have the gift giving of Birthdays, the food of Thanksgiving, the significance of Easter, and at times the romance of Valentine’s Day. Even though Christmas has become an unparalled success as far as holidays go, I have a few things that I would like to see …….adjusted, to make the Christmas experience a little more potent and not such a mind blowing, scattered, extravaganza.

Ask 5 people what Christmas means to them and chances are you’ll get 6 different answers (there’s always that one person who can’t choose one answer and hedges the bet with a second). That tells me something, the idea of Christmas has somehow become unfocused. It’s easy to see why though; So many ideas have been shoe-horned into Christmas that people can no longer keep all the stories and traditions straight. So Christmas needs to cut some of the fat, starting with Santa and Co. I like Santa, and he’s welcome to set up his own holiday and you know what, he already has. It’s called St. Nicholas day and it's celebrated on December 6th. I’m all for that, celebrating the idea of charity and generosity with some gift giving early in December while keeping the Santa tradition alive. It would allow me to participate with fewer reservations in all the traditions that Santa is tied up in, as I wouldn’t have to worry about diverting my attention from the more important celebration of the birth of Christ.

Over the years some new holidays have also popped up in the same time frame as Christmas as alternatives. That’s fine with me, I can understand that not everyone has the same feelings about the birth of Christ and it would be unwise to make everyone act like they cared if they didn’t. The only problem I have with those alternative holidays is that they decided that one day was not good enough. To adequately celebrate Kwanzaa takes a full week, and Hanukkah takes 8 days! So I figure we bump Christmas up to a 9 day celebration, one day for every month that Mary carried the child. Every day could also focus on a different part of the lead up to His birth with some of the highlights being: the Angel telling Mary about the plan, Joseph marrying Mary, Mary visiting Elizabeth. There could also be a proper well thought out tradition to be practiced on each of these that corresponds with the story. It would take some time to settle on those and they need to be meaningful and appropriate, so I leave that to wiser folks then I.

Christmas also seems to have issues separating itself from Thanksgiving in some aspects. I’m not sure why exactly, but many Americans have decided that Thanksgiving is really just Christmas with no presents and more football. They eat the same foods, get together with the family, and really just create the same vibe. I think it’s really the food that needs to change. Thanksgiving has a valid claim on the Turkey that’s been established through years of Americana lore, so this new Christmas needs a traditional food also. I think that this should be solved on a family by family basis, with a universal avoidance of Turkey, and Ham to avoid infringing on the Pilgrims. My family, and I think most families with some portion of Hispanic heritage eat tamales and menudo at Christmas time. But like I said, discuss it with your family, decide what your flagship meal is and go with that, be it Lasagna, Sushi, Crepes, whatever. Just move away from the turkey, give Christmas a little more originality.

Finally if we’re being totally honest, the birth of Christ is a great thing to celebrate, but really should not eclipse the celebration of what he did on the cross. Good Friday, and Resurrection Sunday should really take precedent over Christmas. After all, the Bible only discusses the birth of Christ for 2 chapters but talks about his death and resurrection directly for at least 9, and indirectly for….well, the rest of the Bible really. I think we should put more effort into the celebration of those events, but the specifics of those changes will have to be saved for a future Tuesday.

Like I said earlier, I enjoy Christmas; I just think it’s become on some levels a mess of a holiday that tries to celebrate too many unrelated things. Those things are too important to be sharing the spotlight with each other, so it’s about time we gave them all a proper stage so they can impact us more effectively every year. Really isn’t that the point of holidays anyway? They are a time that is set aside to maximize the impact of an idea or event, not a time set aside cause we really enjoy setting it aside each year. Hopefully Christmas never becomes that, it’s too important to become that; you can’t let it become that.

Wednesday: I hate "Christian" T-shirts

It’s hard to describe how much these shirts bug me.

First of all, I’m not really sure how effective T-shirts are at communicating the idea of Christianity. I mean, sure they could spark a conversation if the shirt is poignant enough. Most times though you just see these shirts worn by Christians in the middle of doing something stupid. Ok, maybe that’s an unfair generalization, but when you see someone wearing these shirts doing something good you don’t remember the shirt, you remember the action. When you see someone wearing this shirt doing something stupid, you remember that shirt and it just confirms all the beliefs you had about ‘how hypocritical those Christians are”. Because like it or not, posting a reminder on your chest about how different you are from them, and then proceeding to inevitably fail at consistently being remarkably different (and it will be inevitable, otherwise there is no need for God’s grace) doesn’t make a great witness.

Also, isn’t there some kind of copyright infringement going on here? Wouldn’t it be horrible as a company that makes Christian products to be dragged into court accused of stealing other people’s ideas for profit? I get it, the slogans or logos or whatever ARE different, but just slightly different. It’s still more than possible for Steve Jobs, or Rupert Murdoch (Apple, and Myspace respectively) to get upset about their brands being used in the same context as religion, and deciding to make things ugly. Why even risk it?

Finally, the shirts seem a bit half-hearted. Like someone wanted to be different, but not too different. Like they wanted to be secret different. If you’re going to be different go for it, make it memorable. Go with the shirt with an unmistakable image on it, or scripture, or anything other than something that basically amounts to lame camouflage for your beliefs.

I think possibly the shirts are really just a symptom of something that bugs me a lot when looking at churches and Christians today. They so badly want to try and integrate the “cool” things into church so that people will feel more comfortable. So they sell shirts that barely announce that the wearer is a Christian, they write books about how to find the Gospel when watching whatever the popular movie of the month is, and they decorate their churches with pictures like this and this. This goes against everything I've learned in business school, but I would suggest that we shouldn’t look to what’s going on in the world for how best to reach people. Because whatever is out in the world has failed them and maybe they finally realized that. They’re looking for something different, something original, the thing that they’ve been missing that explains everything. I just think when they finally get lead to it and it’s dressed up to look like a starbucks cup, well it’s a lot harder to take seriously.