Wm. Paul Young

Jesus, thank you so much for everything that you are.

And you are the one reason that we are here today.

You're the one reason that we're together.

You're the one reason that we're part of this incredible family.

You've adopted us into your family.

And Father God, we love you so much.

We just ask that you speak to us this morning, speak right into our hearts.

Share with us whatever it is you have for us, and we ask all this in your name.

Amen.

Well, like I said a few moments ago, we're so excited to have Paul Young with us.

You might know Paul is the author of a book called The Shack, which has helped millions of people know God and removed a lot of barriers that people may have had to understanding God's love for them.

He's with us this morning.

He's part of our family, though, this morning.

He's been here for a few days.

All those of us have talked to him, we love him.

And so if you just welcome Paul with us, he's going to share with us this morning.

Paul, you can come on out.

You're so obedient, thank you.

He talks about me as if I'm not going to be part of your family when I leave.

It's kind of like he gets one shot to be part of the family, and uh we'll see what he does with it.

I do have family here.

Um Dee and Uncle Jim, are you here somewhere?

Boy, they went to IHOP.

Okay.

Priorities, you know?

So um I knew they were trying to get here.

It's an elderly couple like their Aunt D and Uncle Jim, because uh they were um the second couple of missionaries onto the station that my parents built in the highlands of New Guinea.

And if you're a missionary kid, everybody is an aunt and uncle.

You know, and so family exists already there.

Family is an interesting thing.

And uh one of those paradigm shifts for a lot of us, I think, is when we begin to realize that you will not meet one person on the planet that is not part of the family of God.

And if you don't believe that, read Mars Hill Address by Paul the Apostle in Acts.

Just if you want to check it out.

Some people have a disagreement with that, but but that's because they don't know who they are.

And um and a lot of people don't know they're part of the family because they don't know who they are and who they belong to.

And that's part of the journey that we're in.

I um Kim and I, Kim and I have been married for almost 35 years.

Uh we have six children.

Uh let's see, we have the scientist, we have the film producer, we have the businessman engineer, we have the makeup specialist, we have the poet baby whisperer, and we have the explorer.

Okay, those are our six kids.

And um, we have seven grandbabies who are six and under.

Um and uh it uh it looks like we may have one on the way.

So that would make eight, rounding the total of us, including our married children's spouses, to twenty so far.

Now, those seven so far are from two of our six children.

Yeah.

My wife comes from a very large family, Minnesota, North Dakota stock, salt of the earth people migrated west.

She has five sisters and two brothers.

Kim and her five sisters are referred to as the force.

They have large families if you count Kim's sisters, brothers, their spouses, kids, and grandkids, we're approaching our hundred and seventy some.

We know how to do one thing really well.

And let me tell you, we have a good time doing it.

Which when I was a kid growing up would send you straight to hell.

I've learned a lot about family.

I didn't know a lot about it growing up because we had a little bit of actually a lot of brokenness inside my world.

Missionary kid, preacher's kid, firstborn, performance-oriented, evangelical, Protestant, fundamental.

Never about being loving, it was always about being right.

And um, and you know the people who don't like the Shack or Crossroads and are mad about it, most of whom haven't read it?

My people.

Those are my people.

So you be careful how you talk about them.

The funny thing is that when they're all upset and stuff, and uh, and you know, you almost never talk to the person you're actually angry about because you you know you don't want to be embarrassed about being wrong.

So, you know, you talk to other people about how angry you are about it.

And the thing I love about being angry about stuff, it means you're involved.

People who are ambivalent just don't care, and there's really no conversation there.

But if somebody's really angry about something, they're invested, right?

So when somebody comes to me and they're upset about stuff, I know, see, I've lived long enough and I've gone through enough damage in the process of healing in my own heart that I know that they're not coming to tell me about me.

Because I know about me, and there's no way they could know about me, right?

So they're coming to tell me in the only language they know how about them.

Right?

And everybody comes with what they got in that moment.

If they're giving me their anger or their whatever, they're giving me what they have.

And if I'm not at risk in that conversation, I can hear them because I am face to face with a being who will never cease to exist that I will be in relationship with forever.

And they may not know my heart, they may be hidden inside all of their religious stuff, they may be hidden inside their brokenness.

I don't know.

I'm not here to judge them, I'm here to be with them.

And if they want to give me their anger and they want to give me their I'm in.

Right?

Families, and we're supposed to be a family.

That's uh, you know, the church, the community of faith, all that.

It's a family inside a larger family.

Isn't it true that a family has no place for platform or notoriety?

Isn't that true?

A healthy family.

Okay?

I don't understand this being part of a phenomenon.

I'm not up here because I'm all that and a bag of chips.

I'm I'm way cooler than you know.

But that's because I've heard God tell me that about who I am, right?

And my significance doesn't come from what I do, it comes from who I am, which gives me the freedom to clean toilets and change diapers and go fishing and play with my grandchildren and go to a movie, right?

These things are part of my humanity, but the truth of my being is way deeper than that.

And until God begins to tell you who you are, you will wait for somebody else to tell you who you are.

And that's a hard road.

It takes a long time.

Children know who they are until somebody tells them otherwise.

Children know how to trust until someone tells them it's dangerous.

Children live inside the day, their whole reality is squeezed down to what's right in front of them.

I love having grandchildren.

I think there's a there's a difference between grandchildren and children, and a lot of people say it's because you can give them back most of the time.

My theory is is that uh our kids, our own children, were probably just as incredible and cool, but we didn't know it at the time.

Right?

We were so busy trying to do it right that we forgot to pay attention to who they were.

And um, and so when it comes, hopefully your kids beat the snot out of your self-centeredness, you know, and and by the time you get to your grandbabies, it's like, wow, this is really about you.

Our seventh grandchild, who's actually not the youngest, second youngest, but seventh grandchild, arrived into our extended family uh via Andrew and Courtney.

He's the engineer businessman, and um they adopted her from Uganda, from Ginja, outside of Kampala.

And uh Maisie is now just two and a half.

She came last August and uh turned two at the end of December.

Maisie comes from um a pretty broken situation.

Um her mom was just fifteen when she gave birth to Maisie.

Um Maisie's aunt, her mom's sister, aunt, sorry, um, died in childbirth at 13, both impregnated by their father.

Exactly.

See?

There is some really dark stuff within our humanity, really expressions of brokenness.

And one a couple of those really dark expressions is that in certain parts of the world, if you impregnate your daughter, they will be protected from evil spirits.

Another one is that if you have sex with a virgin, it will protect you from AIDS.

Really dark stuff.

So Maisie was a throwaway child, ended up in a little house on the outside of Kampala, and uh and Andrew and Courtney connected up with her.

Andrew went over there for eight weeks getting her out of the legal situation there.

It just took some time.

Went over there, her uh he and Courtney went over there for three weeks, and then it took eight weeks.

Second youngest grandchild, and uh youngest in her family.

She has three uh biological siblings.

Elle, who is six, Houston Parker, who is five, Elle's almost seven, Houston Parker, who's five, and Ivy, who is three.

We're riding in the car one day, um, waiting for Andrew to bring back Maisie from Uganda.

And Elle says to me, who is almost seven, so this was last year when she was almost six, she said, Gramps, because that's who I am.

Gramps.

When Maisie's been here for a while, will she turn white?

And I said, you are being so politically incorrect.

No.

I said, no.

You know, being a black person myself, not a big deal.

Seriously, I didn't know I was white till I went to boarding school when I was six.

It was a huge disappointment.

And um, but I said no.

She said, Do you mean that uh she's always going to be brown?

I said, yeah.

She went, oh, hmm.

Good.

This family needs more brown babies.

If you treat me with kindness and generosity, I will appreciate it.

I will be incredibly thankful, I will be grateful, but if you love on my children, I will be yours forever.

And I believe that kind of reality originates in the heart of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The way we love our children, if we have any health at all, reflects this kind of other-centered self-giving love that exists in the three persons of the oneness of God.

Having persons within the oneness of God is absolutely essential because a God who is only one, only one, alone, does not love by nature.

But inside a relationship, God has always loved by nature.

There has always been other-centered self-giving.

I want to talk to you about two little things.

I'll give you an illustration.

I was uh I have a friend, and some of you may have heard this story, but I have a I actually have a couple friends.

And uh, but I have a friend who uh his name is Jim Henderson, and um he's a very creative guy.

He is uh, he and I are working on this little stage production thing that's called Where is God When?

You know, where is God when things were stolen from me, especially as a child?

And where is God when I then turned around and broke things?

And then where is God when I had to learn to let things go?

Right?

And now Jim is a he's he is an ex-pastor who doesn't like church.

And when I'm when I say that, I'm talking about the organizational institutional system, which is not the church, right?

It's the parachurch organization.

Now we confused it somewhere along the line and we baptized a thing, a matrix, and called it the church, which has been confusing to a whole bunch of us.

The church is a person, it's people, always will be, always was intended to be.

It's a community of relationships, right?

The matrix, the institutional system, has no life apart from the people who uh have uh created it and then expanded it or extended it, right?

Rocks have more life than institutional systems, right?

You take the people out of a rock and it's still a rock.

You take the people out of an institutional system and it disappears.

Right?

So some of us who grew up inside the institutional parachurch system were very confused about it because people identified that system as the church.

And and then you couldn't you couldn't play with it.

Right?

You couldn't say, really, that makes no sense at all.

Why are we doing it this way?

Right?

You couldn't do that.

Because to do that was to be an affront against God who built the thing, which wasn't actually true.

People did this.

Right?

So Jim doesn't like church much, the institutional part of this thing, and I can understand that.

Um, institutional religious systems, by the way, have done a lot of really good things in the world.

In terms of health, in terms of education, in terms of science, in terms of, yeah, just a lot of institutions, you know, they're a product of human beings who ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

So it's kind of a two-edged sword.

So um, so Jim, he he's he he paints houses and he does, he plays jazz, and he's, you know, he's my age.

And um and one day he is on uh he's on the internet and he's on eBay.

You know eBay, you know, um auction site?

And he finds that an atheist is selling his soul.

Right?

An atheist had gone on on eBay and was selling his soul.

So Jim bought it.

Five hundred and four dollars.

Hey, it's a recession.

Nobody knew exactly what the market for atheist souls were, but you know, and uh he buys this atheist soul, and the atheist said that for every 10 bucks somebody paid for his soul, he'd go spend an hour in church.

Well, I told you Tim doesn't like you know the institutional church that much.

Through this relationship with Hemet, he meets another atheist named Matt Casper.

Matt Casper um uh is a uh he's an atheist, right?

And um, they build a relationship, and Matt decides to take up Hemet's challenge about this hour for every 10 bucks.

So Jim and Matt went all over the United States.

They went to Willow Creek, they went to an Episcopal Church, they went to a Catholic church, they went to Pentecostal, they went to the snake handling church, they went to all this stuff, right?

And they wrote a book together called Jim and Casper Go to Church, which you can get at your Christian bookstore.

And um so I was doing Jim got me involved in this writer's conference.

Now, you have to understand how weird this is.

People think after the shack that I actually know what I'm doing.

Right?

They think like, oh, what a great idea and execution, right, of a book.

I have no idea.

But now that it's kind of a success, suddenly I know everything about everything.

Right?

That's what celebrities are, people who know everything about everything.

And it's it's the funniest thing ever.

And um, my girls are very clear about this.

They said, Dad, you have so ruined the idea of celebrity for us.

The other thing they like to say is when people introduce me and things like that, they'll just nudge me and go, Really, you're not that cool, really.

So I meet Jim, uh I go down to with Jim to this writer's conference in which I'm speaking at, and uh Matt Casper comes to meet me because he knows I'm Jim's friend.

And he introduces himself this way.

Well, Paul, you know that I'm an unbeliever.

I said, No, you're not.

Yeah, I am.

No.

He goes, I am so.

Like I, you know, I've totally offended him.

And um, and I said, You're not.

He goes, What do you mean?

I said, let me tell you.

Belief is an activity, not a category.

And frankly, you know, the religious ones of us, we kind of created those categories so we could figure out who was out.

And uh, and let me tell you a secret.

Most of us are somewhere between belief and unbelief still.

But none of us have been able to find the believe a meter, you know, that little thing with the arrow that tells you when you've believed enough, right?

And so it's it's kind of like the dark secret that nobody will talk about because we just pretend we believe enough and hope things work out well.

So I said, you know, it's an activity.

He goes, What are you talking about?

I said, Oh, okay.

Well, let me ask you this way.

Tell me something that you believe in.

Really?

He says, Nobody ever asked me what I believe in.

I said, Well, I want to know.

Because I I don't think you're an unbeliever.

I think you believe in something.

What do you believe in?

He thinks for a second, he says, Ah.

I'll tell you what.

And this is a consistent response whenever this question has come up.

He says, I believe in the way that I love my sons.

He has two boys.

I believe in the way that I love my children.

I said, Oh.

What kind of love is this?

Tell me about this kind of love.

He said, Paul, I did not know I had the capacity to love like this until I had my own children.

I did not know it was inside of me.

And suddenly he said, and these are the words he used.

I would step in front of a bullet for my kids.

No questions asked.

When they're sick, I would exchange places with them.

No questions asked.

I don't want them to hurt.

I want them to become everything that they were intended to be.

I said, so um could you describe this kind of love, because it's obviously not romanticist or something, could you describe it as other-centered self-giving?

He said, that's exactly it.

That is exactly our understanding of what agape love is.

Other-centered self-giving.

But he's an atheist.

But let me tell you, he was created in Christ.

Because everything was created in Christ.

And the love of God has been shed abroad in his hearts.

And it says, if you being twisted up know how to agape your children, how much more the Father?

Every time you begin to leave the old view of God who has dominated you with fear and condemnation, you have to move through atheism to find out who God is.

You have to say no to that God.

I don't believe in that one anymore.

And all of us are in that shift and move as the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to the truth of not only who God is, but who we are.

And the truth is most clear in the face and person of Jesus.

I get invited to be in these interviews with the Brits.

Now you gotta understand, seven years ago I was cleaning toilets and shipping out soldering tips.

How goofy is this, right?

God has a sense of humor.

I made 15 copies of a little story I wrote for my six kids for Christmas, and it did everything I wanted it to do, and now I'm inside some kind of a tsunami.

And God knows I don't surf, right?

So I get invited into these interviews, and they say, um, because the Brits, you know, they love the fact that they've got a lot of writers in their midst, and uh, some of them are the new atheists, Richard Dawkins and Hitchens and all these guys.

So they'll they'll ask me what I think of them, and I'll tell them, well, I I agree with them, which surprises them because they know I'm the Jesus guy, right?

And they'll go, I what do you mean you agree with them?

And I say, look, I I don't believe that the God that they don't think exists exists either.

Serious, right?

A lot of us are in this journey from pleasing a deity to learning how to trust God.

And let me tell you, pleasing a deity is a lot easier for a lot of us.

That's why religion is so seductive.

Um, if you're trying to please God, you don't really need to know who God is.

It doesn't really matter.

What you need to know is what it takes to please the God.

So it really doesn't matter who the God is, if you know the right things to do to please the God.

Right?

So if it's Allah, it doesn't really matter who Allah is, because what you need to know is that there are five pillars, right?

If if you're inside of a Buddhist frame of reference, it's eight steps of enlightenment.

Or whatever the number is in your particular denomination of Buddhism.

If you're a Christian, it's 1,400,314 rules of Protestant evangelicalism.

Right?

Because it doesn't matter who the God really is, because you know that he's kind of a little bit ticked off.

And that's the image we have.

We have a God who needs to be appeased, and I gotta do stuff in order to appease this God, and so it's about pleasing God.

Who God is is not the thing.

How good you're doing at your performance to please this God, that becomes the centerpiece of everything.

And guess who will step into that space and tell you what you need to do to please God?

Religion.

And at some point, we get so tired of this and the inconsistencies of all these different religious systems trying to appease some deity somewhere that we bail out.

You do understand that atheism is halfway between Jesus and religion.

Because they're saying, I don't believe that.

I don't believe that there is a deity out there that requires child sacrifice.

I don't believe there's a deity out there who crafts a little circle, says, Well, I'm gonna pick a little tiny group of people, and and and everybody else, I'm sorry, death wins.

Religion was always the ones that were furthest away, right?

In Jesus' world, they were the ones who had the most distance to go.

And here, religion was creating a circle, and they put Jesus outside of it.

And Jesus built a circle and said, nah, you're in it.

The only time you'll find God in a box is because he wants to be where we are.

I have this conversation with Matt Casper for about two hours.

And man, he he went off.

He went off on the beauty of life, on the fact that there are things that are just wrong.

At the end they say, Matt, so far you believe in love, not just any kind of love, but you believe in other-centered self-giving love, and you believe in life, and you believe in truth.

And you've been trying to convince me you're an unbeliever.

At the end of the night, he hugs me, and Jim Jim, who's standing next to us, says, That is the greatest compliment I've ever heard Matt Casper give another human being.

And all he said to me, he put his arm around me, hug me, and he says, I'm just thrilled to know you exist.

Because he believes in me now.

Just because we don't know we're part of a family doesn't mean we're not in it.

We don't know.

A lot of things we don't know.

I was uh uh about 10 days ago, 10 of the 19 of us, and you know, we got the one maybe on the way for the 20th, but um, ten of the nineteen of us went to a gathering up in British Columbia.

And my folks are in British Columbia.

Um I was born in Grand Prairie, Alberta.

I'm a Canadian.

Sorry about that.

And uh we're always sorry about everything.

So uh and um so we had this gathering, and it was a gathering of what were the three qualifications?

High impact, humble, and fun.

Right?

And we were able to manage to get like 176 such people at this thing, which is a surprise to everybody, uh especially when you know you were there.

And uh uh but my uh I have my kids, a bunch of them, come to this thing, and our scientist son, who's um he is working on his PhD in statistics, graduated from Caltech and Honors Physics, his wife graduated from Caltech and Honors Geochemistry and Chemistry.

He scored a perfect SAT, he scored a perfect GRE, right?

Smart boy, right?

And he is going, you know, about two days into this gathering, and we're having a um it's it's for fun, but it it's got many creatives, as they call them, people who are, you know, in the arts or um, you know, all these people.

And it wasn't about notoriety and it wasn't about platform, it's just about let's give you a chance to have conversation with people who are facing the same kind of crosses that you are.

Because let me tell you, notoriety, platform, money, all those kinds of things is a different kind of pressure.

I mean, if you have if you have the pressure of abuse and abandonment and poverty and all of those things, it's like taking the bottle and crushing it.

That's a that's a pressure that's gonna try to squeeze the life right out of you.

But if you've got these other things, notoriety, platform, all this kind of stuff, that's like putting air into the bottle, it expands it from the inside, and any flaw in that bottle will blow out.

That tells you that success, as defined by the world, a lot of times will reveal crap in you that failure never would.

And you can see it.

And and it was a chance to be together with people whose crap had come to the surface or they were working their way through it, or whatever.

So we're in the middle of this conversation, and and about two days into this, out of four days, Chad says to Michelle, and Chad is 33, almost 34 years old, and Chad says, you know, I don't belong here.

I don't belong here.

Because he's very focused human being.

He works hard at the relational side because it's not part of his natural genetic bent, because he's got such an uh this phenomenal ability to focus.

And he's a you'd never know how smart he is being around him until you know you decided to talk about physics or light or you know, statistical deep data mining or something.

And because he's very kind and he's a good father, and but he's saying, you know, I just don't belong here.

And those were his words.

And he and he was just feeling like, look at these people, they're having an impact in the world, uh they're fun to be with, which Chad didn't identify himself that way, which is not true.

And um but he's saying, I just don't belong here.

Now you know the Holy Spirit at least well enough to know that uh she has a sense of humor, right?

So Old Testament, Genesis 1, verse 2, ruach.

Genesis 1:2

The Holy Spirit is introduced and it's feminine.

And the verbs are all feminine, right?

It doesn't mean the Holy Spirit is any more a woman than it means that God the Father is a man.

All maternity, all paternity originate in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Right?

All of it.

You know, God's not like 51% male and 49% female.

Right?

So so I have no problem referring to the Holy Spirit as she any more than I have any problem referring to God the Father as he.

But I'm not defining the essential nature of who they are, right?

So, one thing about the Holy Spirit, uh, a couple things.

One is she has a great sense of humor, because persons do, and relationship is a lot funny.

I mean, it's funny, and uh and laughter is a part of relationship, it wasn't part of the fall.

It's like, oh, we sinned, let's laugh about it.

You know, it wasn't like that.

It was laughter was a part of the relationship from the very beginning, and um and the Holy Spirit is also really good at Holy Spirit loves to make the other look good.

Right?

She's the light that that makes you look amazing.

How many times have you been in a conversation where you're talking to somebody, and out of your mouth is coming stuff that you have never even thought about, right?

And if you if you had that, if you had any kind of a thought in that moment, you would go, oh my gosh, this person's gonna think I'm absolutely brilliant.

You know, and coming from my religious shame-based background, I should feel bad about that.

Holy Spirit's going, no, I love this.

Right?

I love making you look brilliant.

The Holy Spirit is like that.

My friend Bob, who organized this gathering up there, loves to play.

He's he's my age, he is a big child.

Which, frankly, a lot of our healing process is to move from being an adult to being a child.

Right?

And a lot of us who never had childhoods, we don't even know what that's like until we get healed enough to become children.

And then we realize being an adult sucked.

It was like the worst, right?

It was, yeah?

It had so much responsibility, and you had to control the whole universe, and expectations were off the chart, and being a child, this is like way easier.

So they had this breakfast, and and uh the day after Chad was having those little conversations, and in that breakfast, at the end of breakfast, and and you sat in this big dining hall, and young life people were there helping uh serve and all this stuff, and and they said at the end of breakfast, you know, somebody has been pranking us.

That is, underneath every plate is a different statement, and this is from God to you.

And we're sitting randomly, right?

We sat different place every meal in this room, but under every plate was a note to us, to that, whoever was sitting there, right?

And we didn't know that they were there until we were finished eating.

And Chad pulls out his from under his plate, a seat that he sat randomly at, and he opens it up and it says, You belong here.

And it changed him.

It changed him.

The night before when the a bunch of the young younger people, which is in their 30s and 20s now, the bunch of kids, they were down looking at luminescence, you know that stuff that makes the light fly out inside the water.

And um, and they got into a conversation, and and another young man said to the group, said, You know what?

If you didn't hear it, there was this really nice music right in that interlude.

It was like perfect timing, right?

Side story.

My wife is Minnesota, North Dakota, right?

These people are genetically enhanced to all talk loudly at the same time and understand each other.

Right?

You betcha, right?

You sure?

So they're not quiet.

I'm from a religious family, we hide everything, lie about most stuff.

And and uh we had this uh wedding at in uh we lived for 17 years in a town called Boring, Oregon.

Serious.

Name of the town is Boring, Oregon, and uh after I wrote the shack, we moved to Happy Valley.

That is a true story.

We got a rental in Happy Valley.

So after so, and but there's one town in between Boring and Happy Valley.

This is just too funny.

You can never make this up.

To get from Boring to Happy Valley, you have to go through one town: Damascus.

It's the truth.

So we were going to this wedding, and it was, you know, in Oregon, you don't have a lot of like real traditional weddings, and and uh we we call a traditional wedding one in which they they have this moment of s awkward silence where they say, Does anybody here have any reason why these two shouldn't, you know, be um what do they say, having sex legally, or I don't know what they say.

But but um they say, uh, is anybody here?

And they have this little awkward silence, right?

And um and they don't normally do that in Oregon because you'd be there all night, and you know.

So um during this service, they had that awkward silence, and this is the sense of humor of the Holy Spirit.

Not only did my phone go off, it went off during the awkward silence.

And it not only went off, it went straight to speaker.

And we couldn't even reduplicate this.

So one of Kim's sisters comes out in this awkward silence in a booming voice.

Hey Paul, are you still in that silly wedding or what?

So this young man tells Chad, you know what?

I don't believe that there is a category called creatives.

I think every single human being is creative.

Because they're not only made in the image of God, the Holy Spirit has been poured out on all flesh, which means Elton John can sing a song coming from a totally different place in terms of his wherever he's at between belief and unbelief, and it will touch you at the deepest places of your soul.

Right?

Because he's participating in the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whether he knows it or not, and he's breathing Christological air because he's created in Christ.

Not anything that has come into being has come into being apart from him.

Jesus.

Creation is created in him, for him, by him, through him, is sustained and held together in him.

That's why there's no separation.

There's no separation between God and you.

Nothing can separate you from the love of God.

Are you kidding?

And if you look at that list in the last two verses of Romans 8, it includes any created thing, anything future, anything present.

It's a pretty inclusive list.

That also changed Chad because he didn't feel like he was very creative.

I can prove to you you are a creative human being.

I can prove to you right now.

Who has never had a fear-based imagination of things that were going to go wrong that didn't actually exist?

Well, at least we got that settled.

Think about how creative that is.

I mean, you've got to create a whole scenario in your head.

How many of you have been to your own funerals?

How many of you have had your kids in every kind of conceivable accident and mishap known to man?

How many of you have imagined what it would be like to be naked in the middle of school?

How many of you have been stopped by every cop you think there is on the road?

Right?

How many of you have gotten fired weekly?

How many of you have imagined a conversation with someone and figured out exactly how it was going to play out so you avoid them?

And you're telling me you're not creative?

If I could tell you one thing, I'm going to.

So, and this is how we'll kind of wrap this up.

2005, 2004, we lost everything.

We lost the house we'd lived in for 17 years, we lost our cars, we lost everything.

Financially went totally sideways.

It was part of our healing process, part of my healing process, because the big, the big remaining big fear in my 11-year journey that matches uh the weekend for Mackenzie in the shack, that 11-year process, the the big last thing was the fear of financial insecurity.

And there is nothing that will heal you of the fear of financial insecurity than losing everything.

The kindness of God, right?

I thought the kindness of God was to find you money.

But he was really trying to heal my heart.

And I'm learning how to trust, which is the big journey, right?

And I finally, it took me 50 years, but I'd begun to trust that not only did he know I existed, but he was especially fond of me.

So I'm inside this thing and um and we lose everything.

So I'm working three jobs.

We're living in a little rental house on the corner of 12th Street.

In Gresham, Oregon.

Kim gets a job at the high school bakery two and a half blocks away.

We have six of us living in about 900 square feet.

And the joy of God dropped on us like a ton of bricks.

You know, one of the things we learned in this process was that the opposite of more is enough.

The opposite of more is enough.

And we had enough of everything that mattered.

Now we had nothing physically or financially.

I wrote the shack because I had nothing to give my children for Christmas.

Joy shows up.

Now I didn't think Joy would show up.

Not only showed up, became a constant companion.

Joy had never spent the night.

I had a room for joy, but by the next morning she was gone.

And I'm thinking, what is this?

So I wait for a day.

Joy is still a constant companion.

I'm cleaning toilets, I'm shipping, receiving, I'm a hotel night clerk, I'm doing food processing, whatever it took.

And Joy was a constant companion.

And I don't tell anybody because I'm afraid that'll be the shoe that drops that, you know, she's gone.

Six months I don't say anything to anybody.

I just live inside this, like, what?

Six months I have a conversation with a friend, we're at breakfast, it's Thad and me and Joy.

And I'm going, Thad.

And I explain this dilemma I'm in about the presence and constant companionship of joy.

And he goes, Well, Paul, what happened at the beginning of the year?

Duh, that's a good question.

And I think back and suddenly I realize, oh my goodness.

You know what happened?

In my process of healing, all the broken parts, I mean major reconstruction.

There's always finished work to do.

But the major reconstruction had gotten to the place where finally I had become a child.

And when I became a child, I began to live inside only one day's worth of grace.

Jesus is clear.

You only get grace for one day.

Sufficient to the day is the grace thereof.

And I had spent my entire life spending real grace on things that didn't exist.

I would create imaginations that were based in my desperation to control.

Because that's what we do.

We either participate in the creativity of the Holy Spirit to make things that are beautiful and good and right and exposing and all these things.

Or we partner with fear to create imaginations that don't exist, and then we drag those imaginations into today.

And then we rule our environment and our relationships so that the things we're afraid of don't happen.

And we wonder why there is no joy, no peace.

That's because we're not even present.

I didn't know he was good all the time.

And you can't trust someone that you don't know is good all the time, and you can't trust someone that you don't know loves you.

And when a child learns that there is nobody safe in their world, they will go to control and staying safe in any way that they know how.

And it took me 50 years to become a child.

And I it was such a part of a process that I didn't even realize until six months down the road what had happened.

It was the next step in this journey.

And finally I was done future tripping.

I call it future tripping.

Right?

I'm done future tripping.

I'm done creating imaginations.

And let me tell you, it is the default mechanism all the time because we so desperately need control, and we're not going to take the risk of trusting anybody, especially if they're invisible.

And my journey of trust had gotten to the place that allowed me to live inside the grace of a day like a child.

Because I wasn't a child when I was little.

So I was taking the grace that was given me to face what I was facing in this one day, and I was spending real grace on things that didn't even exist.

In the present, in the presence of God, there's fullness of joy.

People say, how do you deal with this sudden phenomenon that you're kind of swept up inside of?

Some call it, what's the big theological word?

Uh providence.

I call it sense of humor.

So I'm caught up, and this is a God who loves participation, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it, but I don't need it.

And they say, How do you keep grounded in that?

And I say, one, you don't know who I'm married to, the force.

And uh the woman who saved my life, seriously.

And I say, and I've learned how to stay inside the grace of one day.

All I've got is between, I think it's between now and the time I go to sleep, because I don't know if it's a Jewish thing where it's like six to six, or I don't know, but I'm thinking it's when I go to sleep and I wake up, you know.

This is what I've got.

This is the world.

You know what?

I won't, I don't even know if I'll be alive by tomorrow.

Some cell tonight could go sideways.

We're all dying.

You know?

So let's be here.

Let's live inside the grace of a day.

But you can't do that unless you know that there's somebody in your world that you can trust.

Otherwise, you've got to scramble and find every agenda and fix everything and control everything so that the things you're afraid of don't actually happen.

And that is no way for a child to live.

You're not designed for that.

There's a God who is your father, who has always been for you, always will be for you.

And if you want to know what he looks like, look at Jesus.

Because when you see Jesus, you see the father.

And if you know to any degree what it's like to love your child with other-centered self-giving love, how much more.

Where do you think that originates?

It originates in the way the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, and the Father loves you who is created in the Son.

You are the center of his affection.

And you know what?

He is good all the time.

There is no darkness in him, nor shadow of turning.

And we say death to the mythological G-O-D in the corner.

And let us enter into the dance of the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in which we have all been included and we're learning to recognize and participate in to the praise of His glory.

Thank you for your kindness.