 Just arriving. Some of you, this is old hat, we've talked before. But I'm Kim Abernathy. I'm the president and CEO of ChildSafe. Before we get started, I'm going to introduce Judge Wolf and then our wonderful speaker, Paul Young. But I did want to, and like I said, you guys that were here this morning, just listen, bear with me. I want to thank all my staff. And I definitely want to thank Clarissa Zamora, Clarissa, come out here so we can clap for you again. She's a director of education and outreach for y'all that are new to the, and she has done this conference. She's a one girl show. And so she's done all this. I have other fabulous staff that have helped her, but we couldn't do it without Clarissa. So thank you so much, Clarissa. Before we get to Mr. Young's program, I would like to introduce Bear County Judge Nelson Wolf and his beautiful wife, Tracy. As Paul Young just said, he has married up for sure, which luckily most of our husbands have. But Judge Wolf and Tracy have been huge supporters of our work. And they are true champions for children in this community. And they have been working at this a long time. And we appreciate the work that they do. And he truly has a partner with Tracy who has helped him through all this. The judge has done wonderful things for the community and for children. But one of the really cool things that he's doing that's new and it's the first in the nation and that's a bibliotheca that will be opening. When is it going to open, Judge? September. And it is the first digital library in the United States. And he's bringing literature to the children on the South Side and those kids that can't get to it as easy as some of us. So we're very excited about that. He's also been a big champion for children's sports and their health in this community and worked in that area for a long time, bringing that stuff to San Antonio and Bear County. I just want to thank him again and thank them both for the work that they do and here he is, Judge Nelson Wolfe. Well, thank you, Kim. And thanks for the great work that Child Safe does. And for all of you here today that are trying to make the world safe for children and the great work that's been done. 11 years now that I've served in this office and after serving as mayor, we really see at the courthouse the tragedies that occur across this community. And what we try to do to help save them, Tracy's starting of the Children's Court. Judge Specia, who's now moved up to Child Protective Services and running that. Tremendous work we've done at the county. Money that we put up for adoptions. Everybody across the community, all the volunteers, have done a marvelous job in trying to save children and to get them in a safe environment. But it's a job that you can never let up on. And we're committed to continue to put additional resources into helping children across our community. It's really an honor for me today, though, to be introducing William Paul Young. We had a chance to visit a little bit. But what an extraordinary person to be going through life and thinking that maybe there's not another avenue toward life. And all of a sudden, the world tremendously changes for him. And the world also changes for a number of people, some 10 million, I believe, that it read his book, The Shack, and what it's meant to them in terms of their spirituality, in terms of their faith, in terms of their hope for a better life and a transition to another life. He found out how's the best way to be a successful author. And the best way is to have 26 publishers turn down your book. If they turned it down, he self-published 15 of them. And it just took off. And social media, the word got out, spread across not only just the United States, but across the world, and has had a great impact. And now his new book, Coming Out, is off to a tremendous start also. But he was born in Alberta, Canada. But that was not the story of his life. The story of his life was when his missionary parents took him to New Guinea and to see the changes that occur in a stone age world and to see some of the harsh elements of life. And then for him to come back and marry and have six children, and I think he's up to seven grandkids, or new one coming on the way, I believe, and to really work in over a six-month period, come up with this great, great, great story of faith and spirituality. He's living in Oregon now, but it's so interesting when you look at the shack or you read the shack and you see an African-American woman acting as God, Papa, and a Middle Eastern Jew as Jesus Christ, and an Asian woman as the spirit, and how they all interact, and how we're all partners in that interaction, and how we gain faith and spirituality from that extraordinary thought, extraordinary way to present to people how they can find within themselves a real meaning to life and a meaning afterwards. So with that, please welcome William Paul Young. Thank you. Thank you, Nelson. Almost sounds like I knew what I was doing. I mean, you have to understand how crazy this whole thing is, because the 15 copies I made wasn't, well, I guess, it's self-publishing. It was at Office Depot, serious with a little spiral bound thing and the plastic cover. And six went to the kids, because that's what I did it for. I wrote it for our children. Our youngest just turned 20. The new grandbaby, by the way, is Andrew and Courtney, Andrew, our son, number three son, and he is with his wife on their way to Uganda to pick up Maisie, who is a year and a half old. Who is the offspring of Incest in Uganda? There is this really diabolical idea in some parts of humanity, where they believe if they don't impregnate their daughters, they open them up to the evil spirits. So it's a horrible thing. And I wanted to thank you. Kim sends her greeting. I'm married up. There's no question about it. She and her five sisters are called the force. So she has two brothers too, but they're not part of the force. And may the force be with you. That's the truth. But Kim sends her greetings and my kids, and we really appreciate in ways you don't even begin to understand what you do. Some of you are familiar with the Duggee Center. I was on their, I think, original board when they first started working with children protection and grief process. We are part of Portal Leadership Foundation that is trying to end the waiting list for adoption and for children who are waiting for foster care in Oregon. There's just a lot of things that we're involved in. I just spoke at MK Safety Net, which is an organization that has created to help missionary kids and third culture kids deal with sexual abuse in boarding schools, which is part of my story. We have spoke at the Children's Aid Society on their 100th anniversary. And so there's a lot of folks out there that have a real heart for this. And I wanted to say something very specifically. If you look around, this community, this group, as normal, is largely women. And you know what? I never know what's going to be tender. Women saved my life, and most of the damage in this world was caused by men. Just saying. Not all of it, but most of it. And one of the questions, and you know that I'm a person who absolutely believes that there is a God who is good all the time, who climbs into the middle of our great sadnesses and begins to build something with our participation that is living out of stuff that was dead. And one of my questions theologically was, so if God isn't either male or female, which is traditional orthodox theology, why the choice to become male? And the answer is, because that's where the most damage is. Through one male sin enters the world. And the history of religion has always been God and the woman against the enemy and the man. And we could talk about that a long time. This is 25 years of work for me on that particular thing. So when I was writing something that Kim asked me to do, and I've written, it was interesting this morning, the comment about reading books to escape. That was me. I was a voracious reader, because it was the way to get out of my world. And then I started writing as a way to begin to express the inside world and get it out. So I've always written the idea of being a published author never crossed my mind. And so Kim had been asking me, because I'd written poetry and songs and short stories and things for friends and family. And Kim said, so would you someday as a gift for our children just put in one place how you think, because you think outside the box? And part of that, part of the reason that I think outside the box is I'm a third culture kid. We moved to the Highlands of New Guinea when I was 10 months old. That's my whole formative childhood was in the Highlands of New Guinea until I went to boarding school when I was six and found out I was white, which was a huge disappointment. I'm still a little disappointed about it, I gotta tell you. But you know, my father was part of the mission's generation at the time that thought if you did God's work, then God would take care of the kids. And he didn't know how to be a father. He'd come out of a huge damaged history himself. He's part of a large family of children. And they were on the coast of British Columbia. And their big secret was, I mean, they had a lot of dysfunction. But their big secret that they tried to hide from everybody was that they were illegal aliens that had slipped across the border from the US. Isn't that funny? It's kind of funny. So my father was orphaned when he was 12, I think. And children's services at that time came in and basically farmed out because they had no papers. They farmed the kids all over the US and Canada. And they became farm laborers. The kids lived in the barns and watched the families through the windows. So my dad came out of that with this Damascus Road experience with Jesus that changed his direction. But there were parts of his heart that it didn't touch for a long time. And so he came out of that religious and angry, which fit the God that I grew up with, the white guy that's religious and angry and distant and disapproving, and the one that Jesus came to save us from. And that's what our theology was, that Jesus is on your side, but he's protecting you from God the Father. Well, I was the firstborn son. And I didn't have anybody to protect me from my father. And he was an angry young man. So I learned often that I didn't belong to him. And it pierced me to the core. You add to that, prior to a five years old, the tribal culture that I grew up in. My first language, right? Donnie, when I was five years old, Wycliffe came in to translate the language. And I was the informant because I was the only one in the world that could speak the dialect and English. And I'd been around their conversations, the tribal conversations, about whether they were going to kill my parents or not. And I didn't feel any danger because I was already so disconnected. And then inside the tribal culture, about five, first sexual abuse happened. And then it was a lot. And then at six, I go to boarding school. And the first nights, the big boys come, unless the little boys. So it became just a part of the fabric of my world. And when Shane becomes the underlying motivation of your life, you become a performer. You listen to some of these stories like this morning, and children have this absolute remarkable ability to find a way to survive. And the tendency is to look at these stories and say, well, at least I didn't experience that. Don't minimize your own pain. Don't do that. It's a nice way to kind of escape having to deal with it, but it's not true. You can put 10 children in front of the exact same abuse, and you'll have 10 lives go 10 totally different directions. And if the four in my family, there's four. My youngest brother was killed when he was 18. And in my family, if those four wrote a history of our family, you'd have four very different stories, right? It's just because the uniqueness of the human individual is at the center of all that we're talking about, how they deal with it, how they process it, what they do to work through it, all of that's important. And I wrote the shack to try to communicate to my kids, let me tell you about the God who actually showed up and healed my heart. Because the one that I believed in never showed up. And all I did was feel worse about myself. And I used the shack as a metaphor. I mean, you can read it as just a story, but the metaphor is that we all have a house on the inside that people help us build. You know, and for a lot of us, it wasn't, we didn't get good help. And it's a shack. It's pretty shattered. And you become dissociative. What you do is you hide all your garbage in the shack. That's where you put all your secrets and you store all your addictions there and you never want to invite anybody there. And for us, especially those of us who are religious, and I'm a Protestant fundamental evangelical, we create facades that we hope will one day become a real person if we just do it right. Not just right, perfectly. We have this unbelievable perfectionism that covers up an ocean of shame, thin layer, and bam, anybody that pokes a hole through that up comes flight or fight. I'm five foot six. I've lost every fight I've been in. But let me tell you, I can take down a 300-pound man with the right words. I can hide knives inside words. And that becomes a defensive mechanism. Of course, I'm religious, so I didn't ever run from relationships. I just heard God call me somewhere else. Some of you know what I'm talking about. And we have this facade that we present to the world and we become different things to different people because the basic overriding question is what do you need me to be to you? What do you want me to be? I think I can do that. Give me one more chance. I'll be good, which was my cry against my dad. It was the only defense I had. And I don't know why I did it, but it never worked. I'll be good. I'll be good. So the shack becomes this story for my kids saying, and they know my history and stuff. They know where I come from. And it was a way to say, look, I'm putting in one place how I think about the character of God, about who I am as a person, about God's view of humanity, which I think is a very high view. I don't think in our world, we have a very low view of humanity. And we can get sucked that way, especially if we're involved in some of the damages that we see. But I don't believe that about what's at the core and the root of what a human being is. It may be very lost inside that mess, but it's still there. There's still at least a rumor of glory there. And you've got to work on that stuff. The McKenzie's weekend in the shack, I was saying earlier at the table, represents 11 years for me. 11 years, right? When my facade came down, and I had to begin to deal with my stuff. So the first time in my life, I was allowed to be angry. You know, anger is a good response to things that are wrong, right? Anger is the right response to things that are wrong. And it can empower us to do amazingly beautiful things. It can also empower us to do very destructive things. But it is a right response to things that are wrong. But when you've shut down as a human being, you can't pick and choose the emotions that you want to save. You shut them all down or not. And your breadth of emotional experience begins to shrink smaller and smaller. And everything becomes about being safe. I had all the survival mechanisms and skills, right? I know how to stay safe. I hope that's my hearing aid. I don't have a hearing aid. So I know about hypervigilance. I know about watching the doors. I know about keeping track of all the conversations. The problem is I married into a North Dakota Minnesota family. These folks are genetically enhanced to all talk loudly at the same time and understand each other. You betcha. So I come from a religious family. We hide everything, lie about most stuff, you know? Have to have a order of service when we get together, you know? So I'm telling you the truth. When we first had little family gatherings, which were like 60 people, I would disappear for 15 minutes every hour hyperventilating in the back room because I just couldn't track, right? And it scared me. And of course, Kim knew nothing about my stuff, right? I don't know how I did it. And maybe it's the grace of God or something because I got past not only her craft detector, which is very acute, I got past her mom's. And so I end up in this real, and she saved my life. Kim saved my life. There's no question. So I write this story. And I make the 15 copies, and I give it to the kids. I'm working three jobs. Kim's working at the high school bakery two blocks away because I had to get to the train. And so we moved to this little rental house on the corner of 12th Street in Gresham. And six to the kids, Kim gets a copy. I gave two to cousins in Canada. And then the rest I just gave to my friends. And I went back to work. Literally, it did not cross my mind once to publish this. That's not my world. And so it would have been just what it is, except my friends kept giving it away. And their friends kept giving it away. Now, the funny thing was that on the first one that I did at Office Depot, it says The Shack by Mackenzie Allen Phillips with William P. Young. And there are two jokes for my kids because my kids like riddles and jokes and stuff. And one, you know, Mackenzie's me, right? A writer from Nashville who didn't know anything about me wrote me an email and said, I don't know who you are after she read the book. So I don't know who you are. But my sense is that Missy, Mackenzie's daughter, represents something murdered in you as a child, probably your innocence. And Mackenzie is you as the adult trying to deal with it. And I showed that to Kim. She says, boy, that's exactly right. So it said, Mackenzie by Mackenzie Allen Phillips, which was fine until my friends gave it to their friends who gave it to their friends who didn't know me and wanted to fly to Portland to have lunch with Mackenzie. Yeah. And then the William thing, which stuck for a long time. I'm one of four generations of Williams, none of who go by William. My name, middle name is Paul. And I've gone by Paul since I was born. And so we have four middle name men. So Gavin, my grandchild, is the firstborn of a firstborn of a firstborn of Williams. And my dad is William. And so it stuck, which was great, because people would call me when the book actually got printed later. And they would say, have you read this book by this William Young? He thinks like you. That's good. So the book comes out, and it starts this, we live in a world where the average book sells between 3,000 and 5,000 copies in its entire lifetime. 4%, less than 4% of all books. And this includes textbooks, and manuscripts, and computer manuals. Less than 4% of all printed literature ever makes it to 100,000 copies. So when 26 publishers turned it down, which didn't bother me, because I had no expectations for this thing to begin with. It was no disappointment. The two things you need to know is the first 15 copies did everything I ever wanted the shack to do. And everything that mattered to me was in place before I wrote it. I was working three jobs, but I was finally in the place where I had become an integrated human being, not this disintegrated different thing in every situation. I finally was at a place where I had no secrets left. I finally had no addictions. Not just the porn stuff and all that that tends to come with this kind of territory, but also to pleasing God, or pleasing my dad, or doing some great significant thing. I'm not addicted to any of those things either. And I'm finally at a place where everything that mattered to me, and we had nothing in 2005 when I wrote the story, it was the only thing I had to give my kids for Christmas. And we had enough. The opposite of more is enough. And we had enough. And it was a great time, not having any of the material stuff. We'd lost the house we'd lived in for 17 years. We'd lost our cars, all business stuff that went sideways. And we had enough. And so the book hasn't added anything to me. I feel absolutely thrilled to participate in something I don't even begin to understand. And I don't want to. It took me 50 years to become a child. I'm not going back to being an adult. There was way too much work. I like this. And what you're doing matters. I want to tell you a couple stories. And the first one, when the book came out, we don't actually know if my father's read it. They both are still living. My mom's 86. My dad's 84, almost 84. And about eight months ago, we were up there. And Kim, she turns to my dad. I'm sitting at the little table. He's standing next to me. And she's 10 feet away in the kitchen. She looks, so Henry, did you actually read this book? OK. Come on out, elephant. And my dad, it's great, classic. He turns his back at me, folds his arms. He says, yeah, well. And I'm right there. You know, when you read an author like this, you need to look at it through a proper lens of theology. Now, that didn't hurt me. Because at this point in my life, I've worked through the forgiveness things. And God has really put his arm around me and said, you know, your dad, he hasn't known how to be a father for 60 years. He's not going to suddenly know. You know, there's a chip that's not there. And on my dad's 80th birthday, I really had let him go. Not only the expectation, but even an expectancy of this side of the grave, resolving some of these things. He does not know how to go and open that door. Because if he does, he's got to deal with all the mass of stuff that he collected over the years. And I think he's just too afraid. So we're very cordial. We have great relationship at a fairly surface level. And that's good. That's not a bad thing. It is what it is. And I'm OK with that. Because I've got a God in my life who said that he would be everything that a father was supposed to be. So I'm good with that. My mom, she tried to read it. They have this southern saying. In Oregon, we call it the southern curse. Because you're allowed to say whatever you want as long as you add it. Bless their heart. He's such an idiot. Bless his heart. So my mom bless her heart. She tried to read the shack. Now, as Nelson already mentioned, there comes a point in the book where Papa comes through the door. And it's God the Father. And Papa is a large, black, African-American woman. Who's persona, by the way? I built on a woman named Renee Greenwich who is a large, black, African-American woman. And she and I were friends. She passed a couple years ago. And when she was growing up, she was abused while she had to play hymns. And there's this connection sometimes between the damage in our hearts and this religious environment that is so incredibly difficult to work our way out of. And Renee, she was in her care facility. And I was visiting her about a year before she died. And I was there a fair bit. And she says, Paul, how come you and I were always friends? But I said, that's easy. Were we the only two black people in that white church? She says, you're right. Well, my mom gets to Papa come through the door. She shuts the book, calls my sister, Debbie. Your brother is a heretic. This is my mom. And she was thinking, he's a heretic. What I've been hearing is true. And she got stuck. She couldn't get further than that page. She was stuck right on that page. Here's how she got unstuck. And I'm telling you this story for a couple reasons. One is I'm telling you that what you do for one matters. This is about one. And you have no idea how the kindness and the grace and the extension of mercy that you show to the one is going to ripple not just through their life, but into the lives of many, many, many others you have no clue about. And you won't know until sometime. When my mother was 18 years old, she was a single woman and she entered nurses training. You'll find in my books that nurses kind of constantly show up and they're sort of superheroes. There's a reason. And my mother was a nurse. My mother-in-law was a nurse. Our number four child to get married is marrying a nurse. If you read Crossroads, there's a couple nurses up at Dornbecher where I spent some time. Those are their real first names. They asked me if I'd use their real first names if I ever wrote a book about that circumstance. And those are their real nicknames too. And it's kind of fun. When you write, you get to do all kinds of cool stuff. So my mom, she went and 18 years old, goes in a nurses training. This is 1946. Now in 1946, you had God, the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and doctors. I'm serious. It was like a holy profession. They wore white, so you knew they were holy. And they were all men. You never heard of a woman doctor at the time. And when you walked in a chart room, everybody had to stand up. When you walked, stepped on the path, everybody had to vacate until the doctor went by. Now my mom comes from a German Baptist family. So she's already quiet, meek, and mild, and submissive. And so she goes as an 18-year-old into nurses training with Ruby. Ruby is her sister. And this is 1946. There's no NICU. There's no neonatal. At best, there's those little chicken incubators that they used to have. And that was kind of neonatal care. There was a family in the city of Victoria. This is Victoria, British Columbia. And there's a, if you've ever been there, my uncle built the wax museum that's up there. And in the family, I mean, in the city, there's a family named Mun, M-U-N-N. And Mr. Mun is Reverend Mun. He is the senior pastor of the Anglican Church. And he and his wife are in their late 20s. They had had, they had been trying to have a baby. And they'd had five late, second trimester, early third trimester miscarriages in a row. They decided to try one more time. And she was six and a half months pregnant. Now this is when you can feel the baby kicking. I mean, the presence is there, right? So they're all on kind of pins and needles anyway. She's six and a half months pregnant. She comes into the training hospital bleeding. My mother had been there for three months. She'd just gotten her little cap. And she said she looked cooler, but she didn't know anything, right? And in comes Mrs. Mun. They call the doctor, the head of OB. He comes rushing in, examin' sir says we're gonna have to take the baby. So he grabs the head nurse to assist. And he grabs a student nurse to assist, to learn and to do the cleanup. My mom. So at 18 years old, single woman, she has pulled into an emergency C-section in which the doctor delivers a one pound baby boy. You know anything about preemies, boys struggle a lot more to stay alive than girls do. And this is a one pound baby boy in 1946. Right, and one pound, that's a stick of butter, right? Serious, that's a stick of butter. I have a picture of Houston Parker who's our third grandchild. And he was born four pounds and a half an ounce, premature, emergency C-section. And I have a picture of his entire fist like this, with plenty of room to spare inside my son's wedding band. Okay, this is one pound. The doctor delivers this one pound baby boy, puts him in a kidney tray, hands him to my mother and says, it's not viable dispose of it. Which in 1946 meant incinerator. Which I've learned was a fairly common practice. The doctor goes back to finish the operation. My mother's looking at this little baby boy in this kidney tray and he's still breathing. And she doesn't know what to do. So she walks into the service area trying to figure out what am I gonna do? Because she couldn't put a little breathing baby boy in the incinerator, and yet you never countermand that a doctor. So she comes up with a plan and she finds a washcloth, wraps this little baby boy in the washcloth, puts him back in the kidney tray, walks back in the operating room and puts him on top of the sterilization unit because it's the only warm place in the room. The doctor, having no clue, finishes the operation and leaves. The head nurse takes Mrs. Munn to post-op, leaving my mother to do the cleanup, which is what she does. Baby was delivered at 8.30 p.m., May the 30th, 1946. At 9.30 the doctor meets with the parents. I'm so sorry. You had a son, he was not viable. So they're grieving the loss of the sixth child. And if you've been through that, you know, this is a real human being we're talking about here, right? So the doctor goes home. My mom has cleaned up the operating room and is now sitting in the operating room holding this little baby boy, just waiting for him to die, because that's her plan, right? Once he dies, I'll obey the doctor. 10.30, 11.30, 12.30, 1.30 in the morning. My mother says to herself, well, I should probably tell somebody about this. So she calls that head nurse. The head nurse's response, oh, we are in so much trouble. She has to call the doctor. The doctor comes in from home, furious, livid, rips into my mom. How dare her, right? Because of her insubordination, she has placed him in the hospital in a situation now. And he rips into her and says, you created this problem, you're responsible for it, but don't you dare say anything to the parents. So my mother takes this little tiny baby boy up to the nursery and they begin feeding with an eyedropper and as often happens over the next two days, he lost weight. He lost four ounces, one quarter of his body weight. What's the doctor thinking? I mean, nobody's saying anything to the parents who are grieving, right? The doctor's thinking, well, the baby's gonna die and then it's all done. We won't have to deal with it. Nobody will, you know, code of silence, all of that, right? The baby starts to pick up weight and the doctor realizes he's gotta tell the parents. So he goes to the parents and he says, you know, I spoke too soon. We thought that, you know, when your son was delivered, that he would expire immediately, but due to the miracles of modern medicine, we've been able to, you know, keep him alive and, but don't have, we just didn't want you to have high hopes, but, you know, and if he survives, he will probably have brain damage and MS and all these complications and all this stuff and they are the real, they have a son. And two weeks later, Mrs. Munn went home. Two months later, little tiny Harold went home to his parents and two years later, my mother gets an invitation to his second birthday. Now, meanwhile, the parents had started asking the doctor in the hospital, so what really happened here? This is like, you know, there's this, and there's this code of silence. They can't get any answers. My mother gets an invitation, not because they know what she did, they have no clue. They get it, she gets an invitation because she helped take care of Harold and she helped take care of Mrs. Munn and so she gets an invite and she goes because she wants to see how Harold's doing because she hasn't heard. And he says, there he is, a little bit skinny, but other than that, it looks perfectly normal. She says nothing. That year, she graduated. She moved to Central Canada, went to Bible school where she met my dad. They get married, they spend a year in Alberta. I'm born. When I'm 10 months old, the three of us travel to the other side of the world where I grow up. We came back to Canada when I was around 10. My dad was then an itinerant minister. I went to 13 schools before I graduated high school and so I know how to leave, you know? I already knew how to leave. So I'm graduating high school in Terrace, BC which is up near Prince Rupert, up near Alaska. And my mother's working at the hospital. On this one particular day, she happens to read an Anglican newsletter. Now, you gotta understand, Palestine Evangelical Fundamental, Anglicans are almost not Christian so I don't know why she was reading an Anglican newsletter. But it had an obituary in it for Bishop Munn who had passed away. And my mother happened to be working with an Anglican nurse and said, did you happen to know Bishop Munn? And this gal says, yeah, really quite well. My mom's still not sure. Did he have any children? Yes, one son. Do you know where that son is? The gal says, you know, I sort of lost track of him. Kind of a remarkable boy, you know? He graduated college when he was like 15. And last I heard, she says, he's a missionary teacher in West Africa. My mother still says nothing, not for 10 more years. 10 more years. I'm 27 years old. Kim and I are married in Oregon. We have a couple kids. My mother reads another obituary, you know? You get to an age where you're looking to see if you're still alive, you know? So my mother reads this obituary, and this time it's for the doctor who got mad at her. That's the first time my mother told us about Harold Munn. Harold, they named him Harold. Harold Munn. We didn't know about him. My mother had kept this coat of silence for all these years. Almost 30 years, well, 30 years. And because I'm born in 55, then Harold was born in 46. So she tells us, right? So now we're going, okay, now what? She doesn't do anything. She doesn't know what to do. But now the doctors did. He's gonna come back, right? So it's like open season. So she decides to track down Harold, and she found him. Harold Munn was now the senior pastor of the Anglican church just down the road from where his father passed her to 1946. And my mother stews for six months because she wants to tell Harold the truth about his birth, but she doesn't know how to tell him without looking like she's looking for credit, right? So she writes him a letter, which I own now. Thank you, Harold. But she writes him a letter and wraps it inside the Christmas story. The coming of a son. And he writes back and says, we need to talk. So Harold and his wife meet my mom and dad. And my mom tells Harold the real story. And Harold's blown away. He said, we always knew there was this mystery about the way that I was born, and nobody could tell us. And both his parents had passed, meanwhile. So as you could imagine, my mom and Harold have become quite close. One day my mom's talking to Harold and says, Harold, I have this son. And he wrote this book. And I'm having a problem with it. And Harold says, well, Bernice, why don't you let me read it and I'll tell you what I think. Oh, would you do that? Harold Munn reads the shack, sends me an email. Dear Paul, I read your book. I love everything about your book, but I think I know what your mom's struggling with. It's the imagery that you use for God the Father. Let me see if I can do something about that. And Harold blind copies me on an email to my mom. Dear Bernice, I read Paul's book. You need to know that I love this book. But I think you're struggling with how he portrays God the Father. Let me tell you why what he did is so important to me. And he lays it out. We know God is neither male nor female. All of maleness and all of femaleness is derived from the nature and the character of God. And he says, you know, in addition to that, there's all kinds of masculine imagery, even in the scriptures, and there's all kinds of feminine imagery. God is a woman who loses a coin. God is a nursing mother bouncing her baby on her hip. That's Isaiah. There is the word Ruach for spirit, starting in Genesis chapter one verse two is feminine and the verbs are feminine. You know, this guy's translated it, so it ended up masculine, but, you know, I told you, we're damaged. So, and he says, you know, and God is a fortress and God is a rock. You know, God's not a rock, right? And a shield and a strong tower. All this imagery was never intended to define God. It's to help us understand elements of the character and nature of God. And here, my mom saves a little tiny baby in 1946. Decades later, that becomes the man who's able to build a bridge that my mom can walk across for her own son. My mom loves the shack, doesn't understand it, but Harold loves it, and my mom loves it. She saves a little tiny one-pound baby boy in 1946. I think there's a God who's good all the time and evolved in the details of our lives, but respects human being so much that he won't make their choices for them. And respectfully, in a room full of human agendas, takes a basin of water and begins to wash their feet. Remember, Jesus said, I don't do anything unless I see the Father do it. And this is a God of relationship where there is no deeper reality than the relationship. This is not a solitary God who's a narcissist. I grew up with that God. When it comes to that God, I'm an atheist. This is a God of relationship who comes to us, who climbs inside our greatest, deepest, most painful creation called the cross. That didn't originate in God. There's no darkness in God. We made that up, but it's the darkest we could get, and that's where Jesus goes. And how he begins to unravel the damage that's in us, you have to understand this little child that you're relating to is a universe that's expanding. There is an intricacy, there is a depth, there is a beauty, there is a magnificence, there's a brokenness that is so unique to that person, unique to that child, and you're not there by accident either. And you know this, if you come from the kind of background that I do, we've got all kinds of defenses against the fist or against physical damage and abuse. We've created ways to disappear. We know how to do that, but kindness or grace or forgiveness, the only thing we can do is run, because we don't have any defenses to things that are part of light and grace and goodness. And inside that weaving, and I don't care what kind of faith belief you have or not, I believe the Holy Spirit was poured out on all flesh, that includes you, and that you're participating and the affection that you feel for these children does not originate in you. God has shared the affection of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit for that child with you, and you are participating in something that you have no idea how glorious it is. Even in the messy parts of it, last story, I have a friend named Dan Polk lives up in Maryland. Actually, I have a lot of friends. Dan Polk is younger than me. We have a, in my group of friends, we have this kind of motto. If you like someone, you give them your time and money, but if you love them, you give them your friends. And Scott Clausner gave me Dan Polk a bunch of years ago. And Dan comes from a varied background. He's a singer-songwriter, but he's an investment banker. Talk about schizophrenic, right? So he is very, very unbelievably good at being a human connector. And he, on the side, would flip houses, where you buy a house that's kind of run down, and then he'd use that as a way to teach young men carpentry skills, right? And then there would be an opportunity for them, and they'd be able to talk through some of their stuff and all that, and it was a beautifully healing kind of thing that he did. Well, he lost his finished contractor. That is, Dan, he can do it. He can do pretty much anything, and he can do the finished work, but he had no time to do it, and he lost his finished contractor, and he's, he happened to be talking to his realtor one day about it, and the realtor that finds these houses. And the realtor says, hey, there's this new kid that just moved into town. He's in his 20s. Young guy, he's got a great reputation as a finished contractor already. And why, and Danny says, well, give me his name. So he, the realtor found out who it was and gave it to Danny. Danny calls him up, and he says, I'm working on this job for my parents, actually. It was a remodel job. And he says, why don't you just come over and give me a bid? So the kid shows up. Danny, while he's talking to this, oh, this young man begins to do measurements, to do the bid work. And I call on the phone. I call from Portland. So he's in Maryland. I call from Portland. And so Danny's talking to me. And we're talking about a trip that I'm making to North Carolina because I'm speaking at seven cities over 10 days in North Carolina. And we're working on logistics for it. 50 minutes into this conversation, we're done. And this, when he hangs up the phone, or clicks it off, this young man says to Danny, was that William P. Young you were talking to on the phone? Like the guy who wrote the shack? Danny goes, yeah? He said, you know, my father-in-law went to school with him in New Guinea. What? He says, yeah. Danny, now Danny, this is Danny. You want to talk to him? He says, sure. So Danny calls me back, explains what happened. Hey, you know how I'm doing these houses things? And I, you know, I took this job but I lost my finished contractor. And so I got to hold my realtor and he gave me this guy. And he happened to be here, overheard our conversation. And he says his father-in-law went to school with you in New Guinea. I went, what? What's his father-in-law's name? What's your father-in-law's name? Joe Smith. I said, I said, Joe Smith? Joe Smith that went to boarding school in Sentani? He says, the Joe Smith that went to boarding school? Yeah, yeah, here, here, talk to him. So I'm talking to Joe Smith's son-in-law. And nice kid, like him a lot, right? Instant, open, warm, all this. I say goodbye to him. Danny takes the phone. I said, Danny, Joe Smith was my primary sexual abuser in boarding school, right? Just like that. Danny, air gets sucked out of the room, you know? And I said, please, don't say anything because I forgave him a long time ago. And he didn't. Well, two weeks later, I'm in Orlando doing something and I get an email from Joe Smith. See, I didn't know, but he was back in the States before going back overseas and he happened to spend the night at his son-in-law's house, who happened to say to him, you will not believe who I talked to on the phone. Paul Young, you know the guy that wrote the shack? I get an email, we need to talk. So I'm in Orlando walking into this breakfast about this many people and I'm doing Q and R. It's questions and responses because I'm a Canadian and figure it out. So first question. And oh, on the way into breakfast, I call him because he left his number, right? And he picked up and I'm going, Joe, and he says, I'm in Atlanta traffic with my wife, we're on our way to New Orleans and I'm scared for my life so can I call you tonight because I'm halfway through the shack? Okay, okay, right? I hadn't seen him for 30 some years and the last I'd heard about him when he was confronted about some of this stuff, his response was boys will be boys. So I go into this breakfast. Now I've gone through a whole lot of healing, right? A lot. I'm in this breakfast and the first question is, so somebody indicated there was sexual abuse in boarding school, have you dealt with, I mean, has that any come? I'm, total mess, right? I'm telling them about this conversation with Danny that I'm gonna be talking to Joe and they're praying for me and we're all bawling and that night I get on the phone and I call them, say, you know, Joe, I don't know if this matters to you, I don't know if this is important to you. I don't know if you even care about this, but it's really important to me that I know that you know I forgave you a long time ago when he said, yeah, that's important to me too. And we began talking for about 45 minutes and we started going through all the abuse stuff. He was older, he was a peer-on-peer situation for him, but it was a devastating place to begin with. This is back when, you know, you just shipped your kids off and thought it'd be okay. People didn't know what they were doing. I mean, this was a place where 11, 12-year-old girls were required to wear diapers during the day and sit in high chairs because they're wet their beds at night because they were so traumatized. Joe himself, you know, there was a day where he's required to lay on the concrete slab and all of the rest of us kids were required to kick him as hard as we could to prove to him what a piece of craft he was. We had a rotting wall in our room because they'd lock us in and we didn't have anywhere to go to the bathroom, you know? And the sexual abuse was just a kind of a spillover from that. At the end of the conversation, he says, can I see you? I need to see your face. I said, I don't know, man, my schedule is just so nuts. But it worked out when I landed in North Carolina for this trip that Danny and I had been talking about. He drove down from Atlanta. We sat across the table from each other at a restaurant and finished it. I mean, how often does that happen? He said, I just needed to see your face. And I'm thinking, you know, I don't understand how God works inside the confluence of our 7 billion choices that are going on all the time, but I'm finding that God is fighting the way inside that world and absorbs and is present inside the mess we bring to the table. This is a God who's good all the time, who loves us with a relentless affection that is so powerful we can't change it. So God by who by nature loves. I didn't know that growing up. Grace is the relentless affection independent of performance. Because you know what, if it's about performance, there's a whole bunch of us that are too broken to do it. We can't compete. And you know, when you're facing that child, it's not about their performance, it's about who they are. It's who they are that actually matters. And that's true about you. Jesus leaves the 99 to go find one. You're the one. I'm the one. Thank you for what you do. Thank you to especially you women who are so clear about the affection that God has for others. Who teach us about what it is to be relational human beings. Who help us heal. Thank you. Thank you child safe. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you Nelson. Thank you the board. Thank you for your participation in law enforcement. At some point we've got to start believing that life is bigger than death. Because we live in a world that's just been swimming in death and we're afraid of the event of death. That's not what's really going on here. It's the life has entered into it and dwells within you in the middle of the death that is around us and the choices you make, the kindness, the extension, the hug makes a difference to the entire cosmos. You are participant. Thank you. That's all I can say is wow. Thank you. We still have some time. We have some books over here from the shack and the crossroads. We still have time before you get to your session. They start at 1.45. Let's all just kind of take a deep breath. I learned that from Michele. Michele Ramone always says take a deep breath. So let's take a deep breath and let's just kind of process all this. And slowly if you want to stand up and just make your way to your session, enjoy the exhibitors that are out there. Thank you. Thank you.