William Paul Young on a childhood without safety, a life undone, and a love that did not let go
The author of the bestseller The Shack knows the depths of emotional and physical insecurity just as well as he knows the secure anchor of God’s love. In this interview, he talks about the sequel, his friends on death row in Tennessee, and how he lies down beside Jesus on the floor of a fishing boat in the midst of life’s storms.
Paul, you’ve come a long way to feel truly secure in life. Are there still things or people that make you feel insecure?
There are moments, especially when I’m very tired or sick—but they’ve become less frequent. I used to be a deeply insecure person. As the firstborn son of a violent preacher and missionary, perfectionism was practically instilled in me from birth. I constantly lived from the outside in, driven by self-protection and self-promotion. That’s how you build a false identity that then has to be constantly protected.
It wasn’t until the facade of my life completely crumbled that I learned, with a lot of help, to feel comfortable in my own skin. Today, I don’t need to make a name for myself or protect myself because I’m at peace with myself. After many struggles, I’ve learned to live from within, from the security of my identity as a child of God.
You grew up in the jungles of former New Guinea—as the only white child among the Dani, an indigenous tribe living far from modern civilization. Did you feel safe as a child?
On the contrary—my childhood was marked by constant danger. There were the snakes that haunted my nights; the elderly medicine women, whose beatings with sticks I feared; and then the sexual abuse I experienced starting at age five, first within the tribe and later at boarding school. Until I entered boarding school at age six, I hadn’t even realized that I was white and not originally one of the Dani. Returning to Canada when I was ten brought another period of profound insecurity, as I felt deeply alienated from Western culture.
Was God, at least, a source of security for you?
Not for a long time, because my image of God mirrored that of my own father—a hot-tempered man whose beatings I feared every day. When, in the tradition of my evangelical upbringing, I was told that Jesus went to the cross and allowed himself to be tortured to death in the most brutal way to protect us from the wrath of a holy God, I thought to myself, “No, thank you!” How could I ever feel safe in the presence of such a monster—a God who, in the Old Testament, seemed to give instructions to kill newborns and orchestrate the genocide of entire peoples? This God was even more dangerous than my violent father. Only in Jesus did I find refuge, for as long as I can remember. Even today, the image of lying down next to him on the floor of a fishing boat in the midst of a storm is a source of inner peace for me.
What ultimately led you to reconcile with God as Father?
It was a long process in which I first had to unlearn many things—above all, the lie that Jesus, through his work of redemption, protects me, so to speak, from God the Father. That’s why God doesn’t appear in The Shack as a white Gandalf-like figure with a long beard. At the beginning of the inner journey of Mack, the main character who is also me, God appears in female form. Mack’s wounds from his father haven’t yet healed enough for him to trust a heavenly Father.
What was crucial for my current view of God was discovering how central the Trinity is in Scripture. I finally understood that Jesus wasn’t protecting me from the Father, but rather showing me what the Father is truly like. Since before the world began, God has lived in communion with Themselves—for communion is, after all, a prerequisite for love—and has drawn me into this loving dance of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is mutual self-giving and trust, but also compassion for the one you love.
How did the lack of any sense of security in your youth affect your later life as a husband and father?
In a terrible way, as you can surely imagine. I brought my addictions, my fear, my selfish need for control, and my perfectionism into my marriage; I expected far too much of my children, and in doing so, caused a great deal of harm. And yet… as broken as I was, and as deeply as I carried my wounds into my family, I can now see the work of the Holy Spirit in my life even during that time. God is able to bring about beauty in the midst of our brokenness, without being the cause of that brokenness. I am infinitely grateful for this miracle. I couldn’t see it back then, but I was already living it to some extent.
Anyone who knows you today would find it hard to imagine that you ever treated others in a hurtful and unloving way.
That’s because the Holy Spirit is a redeeming genius! The healing and deep joy that define my life today are actually inexplicable given my past. After the birth of our sixth child, my wife Kim caught me having an affair with her best friend, and our world completely fell apart. I had no more excuses, no way out. I had hit rock bottom and had only two choices: either take my own life or cling to the hope that even for someone like me, there was a path to change.
In that moment of deepest despair, I called the first therapist I found in the phone book and began the hard work of reconciling with myself and my family. The novel, which I finished writing eleven years after my affair, marked a kind of culmination of this journey of healing.
How would you describe your life today?
It’s a life I could never have earned, or even imagined. My fear of an angry, punishing God never produced even a trace of genuine repentance in me. It was only my bottomless despair that finally drove me into the arms of a loving God and into a completely new life. Today, I no longer have any addictions. No secrets. Joy is my constant companion, and I’ve learned to live fully in the moment. I no longer define myself by things like success or achievement, and my life is no longer focused on goals. It’s a daily miracle—I often say that the wholeness I experience today lies on “the grace side of impossibility.”
Over time, I also came to understand that God hadn’t healed me in order to “use” me. His work in me was motivated solely by love. He never looked at me with anger or disappointment. Instead, with His all-consuming love, He offered time and again to burn away the lovelessness from my life. His anger was directed at the lies that kept me from being free and carefree. And with my consent, He destroyed these lies piece by piece. Such work never happens without our consent, for God’s nature is not that of a judge, but that of a caring physician.
Your first novel was about Mack’s encounter with the Triune God during a weekend at the place where he experienced his greatest pain. What is your newly released novel, about?
(laughs) I never planned to publish any novel, let alone write a sequel to it! Still, over time, these questions have occupied my mind: Can an experience like the one Mack had—a profound encounter with God—truly change a whole life? And is such a change lasting?
But it wasn’t until I befriended men on death row in Nashville, Tennessee, that I knew I wanted to write a sequel to The Shack. I imagined that the killer of Mack’s daughter, Missy, could very well be waiting for his execution in the cell next to my friends’ cells. What would it do to Mack if he had to look into the eyes of his daughter’s killer?
The first book focused on the story of Mack—of me—trying to break out of the prison of his grief and despair. The new book deals with the everyday life to which Mack returns, and how the encounter with God affects his relationships with those around him.
For some Christians, it’s hard to accept the idea that God loves even serial killers. Do you understand this reluctance to accept “boundless grace”?
Unconsciously, many of us feel a kind of self-righteous indignation when we think about the sins of others. We categorize sins as forgivable and unforgivable, thereby condemning others and forgetting that every person is a creation of God.
Another hurdle is the fear that someone might simply “get away” with a sin. Everything will come to light one day—yet, even then, only love can change a violent world.
Some Christian circles accuse you of being a universalist. Is that true?
No. Universalism, like all “-isms,” views the world through the lens of dogma rather than relationship. Universalism assumes that salvation can be attained even without the work of Jesus. I, on the other hand, am convinced that our salvation is based on the incarnation, suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ.
But I also believe that this work of Jesus already includes all people from the very beginning. The New Testament is full of descriptions of this all-encompassing work, this unconditional acceptance, this belonging. The early church was convinced that Christ’s work was complete—forever and for everyone.
So is it really true that nothing can separate anyone from the love of God?
Exactly. Of course, we can turn away from it, ignore it, rebel against it… and our daily lives will feel “godless” as a result. That’s what the letter to the Philippians means when it says we are to work out our salvation: we learn to align our actions, words, and feelings with the truth of our being in Christ. But no matter how well or poorly we succeed in this, we are part of the Triune Family, from which nothing and no one can ever separate us.
What would you say to readers who struggle with this theology?
I encourage them to ask themselves: What kind of image of God do I long for deep within? Is it even possible that I could wish for God to be more loving and merciful than He actually is? I believe that the more generous our image of God is, the more our outward lives reflect it. The Bible calls this metamorphosis—when the way we live, think, and feel begins to correspond to the redeemed truth of our being.
William Paul Young is the author of five books and host of a podcast. He lives with his wife, Kim, in the U.S. state of Oregon and loves lying in the grass with one of his 17 grandchildren and spotting shapes in the cumulus clouds. His novel The Shack has sold over 25 million copies and been translated into over 40 languages.
This article was recently published in a shortened version in the Swiss magazine “Amen” (in German).
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