The Shack

Content Warning: The entry “Making Sense of Suffering” references violence against a child.

The theme that drives the narrative of The Shack is the quest to make sense of suffering. The backstory to Mack’s weekend at the cabin is a story of immense suffering, in which his young, innocent daughter Missy is abducted and brutally murdered. The way in which this happens—while Mack is saving his other children from danger—makes it seem like an especially cruel twist of fate. Reflecting on the terror and pain of Missy’s experience and his own unspeakable grief, Mack is left to wonder if there is any meaning behind it all and how a loving and powerful God could possibly let such a tragedy happen. Mack expresses these doubts throughout most of the narrative, all the way up to his encounter with Sophia (divine wisdom) in Chapter 11, where he angrily reflects on Missy’s death and concludes that God cannot really be a God of love: “I don’t believe that God loves all of his children very well!” (156).

The Shack explores this theme through three main avenues. First, it considers the ways that God’s sovereignty interacts with human choices. God does not plan tragedies to happen but nevertheless can work through them. As Papa explains, “Mack, just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies” (185). Further, although God could theoretically impose the divine will on anyone and everything, thus stopping humans from committing atrocities like Missy’s murder, The Shack suggests that such an approach would end up precluding the greater goals toward which God’s purposes run. God invites people to a voluntary relationship of love, and for that goal to be possible, God must allow people to make free choices, even if some of their choices tend toward evil instead of good.

Second, The Shack makes sense of suffering by reminding readers that in the traditional Christian conception of reality, there is far more to the story of any tragedy than what humans can now discern. In Mack’s case, his experience at the shack shows him that Missy is free and happy, living in a heavenly existence in Jesus’s presence, and further, that Missy’s own perspective on her death is richer and more complex than Mack assumed. He learns that Jesus and Sarayu were with Missy throughout her abduction, and that far from experiencing only terror and pain, Missy felt the comfort of their presence there. While not diminishing the seriousness or pain of what happened, the promise of eternal life in the love of God resets the context for how people think about tragedy.

Third, The Shack portrays God’s reaction to suffering not as distant, unmoved, or neglectful, but as radically invested in each human’s story. Papa shares in Mack’s sorrow over what happened to Missy and addresses it head-on, making use of that story of suffering to bring healing to Mack’s heart. The strongest reminder of God’s interaction with human suffering comes in the book’s reminders of Jesus’s death on the cross, the scars of which the members of the Trinity bear on their bodies. God is portrayed as caring so much about human suffering as to enter into it, redeeming it from the inside out.