Paul Young knows how hard it is to change. How you struggle, how you suffer, how you pray, how you try to understand what other people see that you can’t see, how lost you feel. He changed himself and made that the subject of his phenomenal bestseller The Shack. He’s got a new novel out now called Cross Roads, and although the characters, at least the human characters, are different, the message is the same: You can change. Through your relationships with the ones you love and through the love of God.
The author came by the office the other day and we spent an hour talking about our kids, our families, music, prayer, friends we have in common (turns out that he worked with my best friend from college when they were both interns at Fellowship House in D.C.).
His own personal story is haunting. The son of missionaries, raised in Papua New Guinea, he was sent off to boarding school at a very young age and abused sexually. He spent years hiding from himself. His marriage nearly collapsed from his infidelities. Over 10 years, 10 years of rigorous therapy, 10 years of exhaustive prayer, he remade himself. He is still married to the same woman. He is the loving father of six wonderful kids. And he has a rock-solid relationship with God, “Papa” as he calls him.
“We who build such houses of cards often knock them down with our own breath,” he says. “The risks of relationship and trust are terrifying. God will not heal us apart from our participation nor apart from relationships. But neither will God yank from our hands the very skills we adopted that kept us alive, but will wait until we are ready to let them go ourselves.”
Cross Roads is as absorbing as The Shack. The love of God, the playfulness of God, the transformation that comes when we finally give up, fills every page. Paul Young writes from the heart about what he knows personally. “God does not heal us because he wants to use us,” he says. “God heals us because God loves us and then invites us to play.”
