William Paul Young
Wm Paul Young, author of the novels, The Shack, Cross Roads, and Eve, and non-fiction Lies We Believe about God, was born a Canadian and raised among a stone-age tribe by his missionary parents in the highlands of what was Netherlands New Guinea (now West Papua). He suffered great loss as a child and young adult, and now enjoys the “wastefulness of grace” with his growing family in the Pacific Northwest.
Facts never tell real stories. The journey has been both incredible and unbearable, a desperate grasping after grace and wholeness, the pain of trying to adjust to different cultures, of life losses that seemed too staggering to bear, of living with an underlying volume of shame so deep that it constantly threatened any sense of sanity, of dreams not only destroyed but obliterated by personal failure, of hope so tenuous that only the trigger seemed to offer a solution. A few facts also do not speak to the potency of love and forgiveness, the arduous road of reconciliation, the surprises of grace and community, of transformational healing and the unexpected emergence of joy.