Healing Through Your Story with William Paul Young

Hey, there.

Welcome to the Collide Podcast.

I’m Willow Weston, and I am so glad you hopped on today.

I love hanging out with you and learning and growing and hearing stories of how God is running into people’s lives and he’s bringing healing and hope and rescue and purpose.

And we’ve had so many guests over the years.

This is our ninth season, and I mean, heck, we’ve had gold medal Olympians, we’ve had actresses, we’ve had therapists and life coaches and a variety of stories.

And today I get to hand you an interview that I had recently with William Paul Young, author of the Shack.

That book has sold over 20 million copies, and he’s coming out with a sequel.

It’s been turned into a movie and all sorts of things.

And in this interview, William shares about how this book came to be.

And he wasn’t even trying to write this book for a public audience and just this crazy story of how this has all unfolded unexpectedly.

And he also, on this interview, gets really vulnerable and personal about his own shack, returning back to the place of some of his own pain and meeting God there.

So take a listen, Paul.

It’s so fun to have you on the podcast.

We have sort of a random personal connection where your relative is one of my daughter’s close buddies on a cheer team.

So it’s fun to make this connection.

But I have a million things I want to ask you about your calling, your life as an author, and you’re best known for authoring the Shack.

I did some digging on you.

It looks like you barely sold any books the first year.

Only a million.

William Paul Young
00:02:07.730 – 00:03:03.050
I didn’t know anything about the publishing industry at all.

And, you know, because I made 15 copies at office Depot that did everything I wanted the book to do, and we had a sale going on, and.

And it was a Christmas present for my kids.

And that is.

That is all.

It was simply a Christmas present for my kids.

And because of the sale, I got 15 copies.

We have six kids, and so they each got a copy at Christmas, and then I had extras, so I gave them to my friends, and my friends started giving to their friends, and we had to make 15 more copies at Office Depot.

And that started a whole chain reaction.

And, you know, like I said, I didn’t know anything about publishing.

I never intended to be a published author.

And.

And so it’s still as crazy silly as it’s ever been.

But.

Willow Weston
00:03:03.130 – 00:03:09.770
I love hearing you laugh, just you laughing about it.

It’s like you’re almost still stupefied by it, like how did this happen?

William Paul Young
00:03:10.090 – 00:03:14.650
Well, that’s our motto around here is who would have thought?

And.

Willow Weston
00:03:14.730 – 00:03:15.210
Yeah,.

William Paul Young
00:03:15.370 – 00:03:16.570
I know it’s.

Willow Weston
00:03:16.570 – 00:03:27.610
You’ve sold over 22 million now.

I mean, can you invite us back into your original motive on why you put pen to paper and started writing the story in the first place?

William Paul Young
00:03:27.850 – 00:07:07.320
Yeah.

So Kim and I went through a 11 year healing journey and I’m the one that blew up the world.

A missionary kid, preacher’s kid, sexual abuse history, very angry father, all the abandonment stuff, being sent to boarding school, all that stuff, you know, and it showed up in our marriage and almost destroyed it.

But we worked it out.

But it took 11 years for me to fully be aware that she trusted me and had every reason to.

And so she’s the one that would say every once in a while, you know, someday as a gift for our kids, would you just write something that puts in one place how you think, because you think outside the box.

And I didn’t feel whole.

I didn’t feel whole enough.

I didn’t feel healthy enough to do it until the year I turned 50.

And.

She later said, you know, she was thinking four to six pages, but she had never made that clear to me.

She thought four to six pages is what she wanted me to do.

And so I finally, the year I turned 50, finally felt healthy enough as a human being.

It was a kind of a major realization.

Like my gosh, I’m like one of the healthiest people that I know.

I don’t have any secrets, I don’t have any addictions.

I’m the same person in every situation, which I didn’t know was a possibility.

Joy is a constant companion.

I know what it’s like now to be a child, which is very helpful around my grandkids.

We have a lot of grandkids.

And I thought, you know, what, going to do what Kim asked me to do.

And so I was working three jobs at the time and on my way to one of them was downtown.

So I took the Max train from out in Gresham, Oregon, downtown.

And I probably wrote most of the novel on the train, got it done by Christmas, made the 15 copies at Office Depot, gave six copies to my kids and I wrote it.

It’s.

It’s somewhat autobiographical, but it’s a story which I think story is a lot of times way more powerful than non fiction is because it just opens up space for people to hear for themselves.

If it’s not propaganda, which unfortunately a lot of Christian writing is propaganda, and especially if they try to do fiction and you know, gave it to the kids, gave the extras to my friends, went back to work that was, did everything I wanted it to do.

Then like I said, my friend started giving it away.

That started a chain reaction that ended up.

Here’s how goofy this is.

The average novel sells between three and five thousand copies in its entire existence.

Less than 50%.

Let’s see, how’s this work?

Less.

Less than one half of 1% of all novels makes it to 50,000.

And I didn’t know that stuff, you know, so.

So we got it ready.

That whole.

There’s a whole story to it, but we got it ready for publication and 26 publishers turned it down.

The half of them faith based and half of them secular.

Secular folks thought it had too much Jesus and the faith based people thought it was too edgy.

And so.

Willow Weston
00:07:08.120 – 00:07:09.400
Where do you fit Paul?

William Paul Young
00:07:09.960 – 00:07:32.330
Which didn’t bother me at all.

And they had one issue in common, and that was, we have no idea where to put this in a bookstore.

You know, is it self help?

Is it theology, Is it mystery?

Is it whatever, you know, And I mean, I’ve even found it.

Somebody sent me a picture not that long ago where the book is in the middle of Amish romances.

Willow Weston
00:07:34.090 – 00:07:35.450
Oh my gosh.

William Paul Young
00:07:35.770 – 00:10:35.440
Which is so funny.

I love it.

I totally love it.

But again, you know, nobody wanted it.

And part of the wonder of it all and the timing of it is that so many people are stuck between edgy and Jesus.

And, you know, there’s this.

But they didn’t see it.

I didn’t see it.

I mean, I’m only writing for my kids.

I didn’t, I wasn’t trying to, you know, upset anybody, which it, it did.

A lot of my own people, which are modern evangelicals, you know, fundamentalist holiness people, that’s where I grew up.

And, and I wasn’t trying to do something for the world.

It wasn’t a calling, it wasn’t a ministry.

It wasn’t any of those things.

It was.

I was trying to do like the Bible says, and submit to my wife, you know, so.

Well, it does say that, you know, submit one to another and she happens to be one of the others.

And so it was all, here’s the thing, by the time I turned 50, the things that actually matter were pretty much in place.

I got a lot of finished work to do.

I always will.

But identity and worth, value, significance, security, meaning, purpose, destiny, community, love, all of them were in place.

And I was working three jobs, two of them manual labor and A minimum wage stuff.

And I was content for the first time in my life.

I mean, like, this is great.

I’m not under the thumb of being a firstborn missionary kid, preacher’s kid, where I’m supposed to do something great for God.

And I was like, nah, this is good.

I’m working my butt off.

But I’m good.

And I’m so grateful that this happened to me.

Well, I couldn’t have written the Shack before I was settled about those things, but I’m so grateful that I was settled.

You know, my identity doesn’t come from the shack.

It doesn’t come from a book.

It doesn’t come from a movie.

And so whatever was going to happen with it was a curiosity as far as I was concerned.

And when you learn to live without expectations, everything becomes a gift.

And so it was pretty fantastic.

And it was just like, oh, my gosh, look at this.

How funny is this the one thing the book did give us?

And I include my friends in this and my family in this, and that is.

It invited me onto the holy ground of other people’s stories.

And every person is a story.

And if you want to go see a burning bush, just ask somebody, tell me your story, and you’ll see how the love of God is burning away in their life, all the things that are not living.

Willow Weston
00:10:36.160 – 00:11:09.120
One of the things that I kind of want to shift to talk to you about because it stood out to me so much and maybe because of my own story.

But in the book, Mac returns back to the shack, this sort of, like, origin of the pain where.

Where the.

The pain happened.

And I’m wondering how important that is.

Do you think, for people who need healing to return back to the origin of their pain with God?

William Paul Young
00:11:11.280 – 00:18:29.210
Good question.

I think for most of us, it’s extremely important, but I think that that journey is one in which we need the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Because I know some people can get stuck back in the shack, you know, that becomes their identity now, and they get holed up for.

And this is part of what Max experiences.

Because remember in the garden where there’s this little beautiful section, this plot, and Saudi and the Holy Spirit works with them to dig that beautiful place up.

And eventually that’s where his tears are planted so that the tree of life could grow inside of him.

Well, that’s what he’s done.

He has taken the loss of his daughter and created a whole sense of his worth, identity, and value and significance all around that loss.

And so for a lot of us, like I’VE had to go deal with a lot of crap.

When you’re five and six years old and you get sexually abused, when you go to boarding school and you get sexually abused, that’s stuff that you’re going to have to deal with.

And you can’t do it alone.

We’re just, we’re designed for community.

God is a community.

God has never been alone.

And Jesus and his humanity felt alone, but he wasn’t alone.

And he put his trust in the fact that he wasn’t alone.

That’s Psalm 22 that people want to talk to me about the my God, my God, why have you forsaken me passage, right?

That’s the cry of all humanity.

And so yes, yes, most if not all of us are going to have to deal with some of that history.

But in my life I’ve learned to.

And I went to therapy as soon as, you know, I blew up the world.

When I say that this has now been 30 few years ago, but Kim caught me in a three month affair with one of her best friends.

That’s what blew up the whole world.

And, and I, I, that almost killed me.

I almost killed myself a couple times during that first few months.

And, but that started this 11 year process of unwinding all my damage and unwinding the indoctrination of my view of God.

And so when I say the 12th year, the year I turned 50 and I went, my gosh, I’m like one of the healthiest people I know.

That’s because of 11 years, especially at the beginning, was hellish, but it was 11 years of working through that.

And I had, I pulled the yellow pages off the shelf when this first happened and looked under counselors and found a therapist in the yellow pages because their box said we specialize in sexual abuse histories.

And for the first time in my life I asked somebody if they could help me.

So yeah, it’s important.

You can’t just go like, well, you know, I’m going to start new today.

As if your history no longer exists.

God doesn’t want to make your history disappear.

God wants to redeem it.

And there’s a whole big difference between those two things.

A lot of us, we just want that history to be gone.

Not realizing the kind of impact and the poisons that we still carry around.

It’s like forgiveness.

If you don’t forgive others and yourself, you’re going to carry a poison around that’s going to affect all your relationships.

And forgiveness is for the sake of the one who’s been Harmed, primarily.

Reconciliation is primarily for the sake of the one who did the harming.

And that’s a way tougher.

That’s a way tougher road, reconciliation.

And that’s why it took.

I mean, Kim, she could forgive me early on, but the reconciliation, the rebuilding of trust, all that she had to see my life change over years.

I didn’t think she ever would, but she did.

So, you know, 11 years and I finally knew that she had every reason to trust me, and she did.

But that doesn’t make that history disappear.

And I hurt people back then by committing adultery.

I hurt people back then that I am still not reconciled to today, 30 some years later.

But it’s not a point of shame anymore.

It’s a.

It’s a regret, something to learn from which I did and do.

And my hope is there will come a day.

When I will be reconciled to every person that I’ve harmed.

And.

But that’s an ongoing journey that you only live day by day, one day at a time.

And sometimes the opportunity to be reconciled is absolutely miraculous, which it has in a couple situations for me.

But other times, I don’t know.

I don’t know if it’ll ever happen in this lifetime, but it will happen.

And, you know, for me to say, look, the changes in me over those 11 years and continuously now are better proof for my theology than anything else that I know.

Turns out that I’m a smart person.

I just thought.

I used to just think I fooled people, but I’m serious.

I graduated Phi Beta Kappa summa cum laude, first in my class, and I walked out thinking I fooled them.

And so it took a long time for that to heal.

Some of that’s from my relationship with my dad and stuff, but I know I studied theology.

I’m a street theologian.

I went to seminary, didn’t graduate, ran out of money, but I’ve done the work.

But it wasn’t my theology that transformed me.

It was my abiding, ongoing encounter and participation with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who dwell in me.

And so my life bears the fruit of which my theology growing up could never produce it could never produce it, but this does.

So it’s the hermeneutic of fruit.

Hermeneutic is a big technical word that just means interpretation.

The interpretation of a person’s life is better seen in the fruit of their life more than in the words that they speak.

Right.

Willow Weston
00:18:29.610 – 00:19:23.920
Well, I think there’s women listening who have experienced terrible, awful pain in the same way that you have.

And I have certainly and they can hardly bear the idea of going backwards to the shack of their life and dealing with the pain because it was.

It hurt so much the first time to have to go back and relive it or process it or bring it to the Lord.

They don’t do it.

And they live one year, five years, decades and decades.

I mean, I work with them where they have just thought, I’m.

I’m going to heal by not by not dealing.

Like the healing will come by not dealing.

And I’m wondering what your advice is for women who are doing that.

And they need healing and they long for it.

William Paul Young
00:19:25.120 – 00:30:42.000
Number one, you’ve got to go through it.

But here’s what you need to remember.

You’re not going back to an event.

You’re going into your own soul.

Okay?

A lot of people think it’s about the event.

Now, the event, as horrendous as it was, that’s got to be worked through.

But it’s the fact that that event is lodged inside of you.

So you’re not going back to an event.

You’re going deeper inside of you.

And that’s where freedom happens.

I’ve got a friend of mine, a bunch of friends on death row in Tennessee, and one of the Herald, he said this two weeks before he was scheduled to be executed.

He walks in, he goes like, you know, steel and concrete have nothing to say about freedom.

Freedom is what happens inside the human soul, and that’s the truth.

So one is you.

There is no way to come to wholeness without one.

A community of people of one sort or another.

Even if you have to pay a therapist, you know, that’s a place to start.

That’s how I started, is that I needed to trust somebody.

And the person that I was willing to take a risk on is someone that I paid to be trustworthy.

Right?

That’s ground level for me.

So you’ve got to confess so that these things come to the surface, so that there’s the possibility of healing.

God is not a.

Magic doesn’t do magic.

It’s not like God snaps the fingers and suddenly you’re all better.

As much as we would think that that would be helpful, it’s not.

This is about an actual relationship.

Your story actually matters.

And a lot of times the Holy Spirit will take us back to an event like accompany us or Jesus will or Papa, God will.

It’s not to change the history.

It’s to change the way we look at it.

And a lot of times it’s just to find Jesus somewhere in that picture, where’s Jesus?

Because he’s in us.

He was there.

And so sometimes it’s a little tweaking of theology, like going like, no, you were not separated from God when that happened.

No, this was not a punishment for whatever, whatever, whatever.

And shame has no role.

Shame has no legitimate role in the life of a human being.

It’s shame as I am something wrong, guilt as I’ve done something wrong.

That might be true.

It’s true for me.

Shame is I am something wrong.

And that’s a lie.

You’re not.

God knows the truth of who you are, not the damage that has been brought to the table by others and that you’ve perpetrated on yourself or others.

That’s not the truth of who you are.

God loves you not.

The damage is out to redeem the damage.

So in my place now, every time I get one of those letters because the shack has impacted somebody and moved them incrementally forward in the direction of freedom, that’s a redemption of my history, right?

That’s those losses of that little boy, right?

Those are the wrongs that I then perpetrated in part because of the losses of that little boy and those wrongs.

All of that is being redeemed and the shack is part of that redemption in my life.

And you don’t have to write the shack in order to have your history redeemed, but every time you move in a direction where you are agreeing that you are a truth teller and you choose to tell the truth about something rather than a lie about it, because lying is a survival skill.

So you let go of that survival skill every time you do that.

It’s a redemption of your history.

It’s a transformation and it’s an ongoing.

I’m glad now that it’s not a snap of the fingers fix because that would have been so disrespectful for me.

To me, it’s a process and you cannot future trip.

That’s a phrase of mine about creating imaginations of the future that don’t exist and then trying to cover all the bases so that you have control, which is an impossibility.

But a lot of us are fear based and we become control freaks as a result.

But you can’t future trip your process.

You’ve got to respond to what it is in this moment as it unfolds.

So again, get help wherever you can find it.

And if you’re not getting help somewhere, go find someone else and, and keep after it or you know what’s going to happen.

Is you’re just going to close in on yourself and you’re.

And you’re going to keep spewing the poison and you’re going to be isolated more and more and more.

And yes, you will deal with it.

If you don’t on this side, you will on the other.

And I don’t believe that death is our salvation.

Death is not a quick fix.

We’re going to deal with it.

Nobody gets away with anything.

And no harm that has been.

Has been perpetrated on us is not going to be healed.

Everything is going to be redeemed.

And that’s the promise of scripture.

Every knee will confess.

I mean, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess.

That’s scripture, right?

Everything will be enfolded in, given to the Son, who turns around, gives it to the Father, you know, so new heavens, new earth, all that stuff.

And.

But yeah, you know, and I’m so sorry for the harm that’s been done to you.

I’m just.

I’m sorry for that little girl who completely lost her voice.

I am so sad with you about what’s been perpetrated.

And so is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

They weep inside with you.

And you’re going like, why?

Why did you even let it happen?

And, you know, frankly, there’s not ultimately a good, reasonable, rational answer to that question.

It’s all wrapped up in things like personal agency that God will not take away our ability to choose, even if it were in our best interest.

Because as soon as you take away somebody’s ability to choose, you no longer have an impossibility of love.

It’s just not going to happen.

So there’s no reasonable, rational answer that will answer the why question.

I’ve changed it in my life, too.

Now what?

Okay, that happened.

Now what?

Because a lot of us get stuck inside the why?

Why?

And it becomes an attack against the goodness of God about a question that God cannot answer for us in a way that is sufficient.

So let me hold on to the goodness of God and the indwelling presence of God and the love of God who has never abandoned me, not once, not ever in my life.

And now I ask, so what now?

What do I do now?

And there are things.

The presence of the Spirit in you is way more strong and powerful than you think.

And sadly, the church has taken away that sense of our trust.

And hearing the Holy Spirit in our heart, in our gut, and hearing Jesus who dwells in us and in our union with Papa God.

And it’s just like, no, begin asking Even simple things like do you love me?

Do you love me?

It’s a simple question, but it’s so bedrock when I get spun out, when I get triggered, which doesn’t happen as much now.

There is definitely a movement toward wholeness in my life.

But when it happens, I go back to basic questions.

Are you still in me?

Do you still love me?

And what do I hear?

Well, that’s just your imagination.

Nah, it’s not.

God lives in my imagination.

And if it were just my imagination, then good, because God lives in my imagination.

But if I hear God speak something to me that is derogatory, shame building, fear driving.

I know it’s not God.

I know that’s a voice from my past.

I know it’s a voice from my damage.

I know it’s a voice from trauma.

I know.

I know that it’s not God because I’m a child of God and I’m loved with an everlasting love.

And so is everyone who is listening to this.

And I don’t.

It doesn’t matter to me whether you claim the name Christian or whatever, or whether God is a higher power to you or whatever.

God’s not offended by you.

Looking toward a higher power or a greater love than you know or whatever.

That’s a journey you’re on.

Great.

But you know.

You know that you’re loved with an everlasting love, that there has to be something.

You know there is something of value in you, and you’re worth the fight.

You’re worth the work.

So do the work.

And it is work.

I mean, it’s hard work and.

But you’re worth the work.

And it’s not.

It’s not work out your salvation and fear and trembling.

It should be in your fear and trembling.

Work out your salvation.

It’s not like the work brings fear and trembling.

It’s the work interrupts the fear and trembling.

Because we come with fear and trembling, those of us who’ve been abused and we’re scared out of our minds and trust is such a big issue for us.

And it’s like in my fear and trembling, I’m going to ask for help both of some community around me, Yellow page therapist who turned out to be the absolute perfect person for me by just pulling him off the yellow pages, who already had a history with me that I didn’t know about until well into our nine months.

People go, nine months.

That’s what I said.

He said it was going to take a year and a half, nine months.

He said, you’re done.

I’m like, you.

Willow Weston
00:30:42.000 – 00:30:42.560
Graduated.

William Paul Young
00:30:43.200 – 00:31:39.930
Yeah, I said what you said.

A year and a half.

He said, we talk about you.

We as the therapeutic community, we talk about you.

We’ve never seen anybody work this hard and stick with it.

And I almost bailed about three months in.

I almost killed myself.

It was so hard in my fear and trembling.

Work.

Do the work.

Tell shame to shut up and begin to violate the things that prevent you from moving in the direction of healing.

You cannot ignore this and you cannot go around it.

The only way is through.

And that’s like.

It requires trust.

And trust is such a difficult thing for so many of us.

But asking for help is the cry of a desire to trust and do it.

Willow Weston
00:31:41.610 – 00:32:14.820
I know that I could ask you so many things, Paul, but the last question I want to ask you, just because our time’s running short today, is you wrote a book about the great sadness and this pain and need for healing and connection with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And you couldn’t have ever written that book without having gone through your own great sadness and pain.

What do you do with that?

William Paul Young
00:32:16.660 – 00:36:31.230
Well, I’m at peace with it in the sense that.

God does not cause or set up situations so that evil becomes a means to an end.

That’s not the character of God.

Nothing justifies what was done to me, and nothing justifies what I did to Kim.

Nothing.

But God is a redeeming genius.

And so it’s not that.

Yeah, I can look back and say, yeah, I couldn’t have written this book.

Yeah, the ripple effects of this book would not exist.

I wrote this book, and I didn’t write it alone.

But God didn’t come out and just write the book.

You know, it’s always been through human relationships that God has written anything terms of scripture or a good rock and roll song or whatever.

And so it’s like, yeah, I mean, that’s what spawns in me gratitude.

I’m like, look at what we’ve done together.

Look.

Look at the work that I did.

And you’d’re working in me.

Look at what we did in the midst of all that crap, both of which was perpetrated on me and that which I perpetrated.

And how could that not.

Just birth gratitude.

I’m so grateful, you know, I’ve got a marriage with Kim.

It’s the best that it’s ever been, and it’s better than it could have been, you know, if I.

To make the decision not to have any more secrets was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

And that decision has rippled into the world because we come from a family of religious Christianity where we don’t tell anything.

We live under guard, we fake ourselves, partly because we’re afraid that people will see that we are a piece of crap.

That’s what we’ve been told.

My dad told me that my.

The abuse told me that.

Abandonment told me that.

My theology told me that.

That I was just a piece of garbage and that maybe God had picked me out to be someone that would end up, you know, in heaven and not hell.

All that kind of crappy stuff.

But, yeah, I’m grateful.

Grateful every day grateful.

But I don’t need it.

I don’t need.

I don’t need this book to know who I am.

I don’t need this book for me to feel good about myself.

I already had that before I wrote it, and it didn’t give me that.

I don’t need a movie.

I don’t need a platform.

Platform and notoriety.

They’re their own crosses in certain ways.

And because they’re false, they’re not real.

They seem real in this world, but they’re not real in reality.

They’re not permanent, they’re temporary.

But on the other hand, they’re unrighteous wealth, great.

But they open up doors in ways that the redeeming genius can climb into unrighteous wealth and accomplish things by what people bring to the table.

And so there is nothing that we can bring to the table that God can’t go like, all right, I can weave this into the tapestry of the sound that you will become.

Willow Weston
00:36:34.270 – 00:36:48.370
So beautiful.

Paul, thank you so much for using your life, your story, your voice, to make a sound that’s reverbing into all of our lives and making our lives more beautiful.

William Paul Young
00:36:48.370 – 00:36:59.490
I’m so honored.

Let me tell you.

Who would have thought?

It’s all this absolutely miraculous God’s sense of humor thing.

Willow Weston
00:37:01.490 – 00:37:02.290
I love it.

William Paul Young
00:37:02.530 – 00:37:02.810
I.

Willow Weston
00:37:02.810 – 00:37:03.250
Love it.

William Paul Young
00:37:03.570 – 00:37:04.770
Today as it’s ever been.

Willow Weston
00:37:05.570 – 00:37:10.370
Well, Paul, how can people connect with you and.

William Paul Young
00:37:11.200 – 00:37:11.680
Oh, you can.

Willow Weston
00:37:11.680 – 00:37:12.320
I know that.

William Paul Young
00:37:12.400 – 00:37:40.730
Yeah.

Paul Young podcast is the easiest.

And we’re working on.

We’re working on paulyoungpodcast.com so that it becomes more user friendly, so I can stick up my itinerary and stuff.

Anybody wants to show up, wherever I’m going to be and that kind of stuff.

I’m.

I know I have a.

A Facebook page and I know I have an Instagram.

Probably haven’t been on there for a few years, but I know it’s out there somewhere.

Willow Weston
00:37:41.290 – 00:37:43.610
And are you still self publishing your books?

William Paul Young
00:37:43.850 – 00:38:14.200
No, no.

A publisher came along and made an agreement with the guys in California who own their little publishing house, and they’re the.

And Hachette.

Hachette took the book internationally.

Hachette then also did Crossroads.

Simon and Schuster did Eve and Lies We Believe About God.

And Hachette is also doing the sequel for the Shack that is in the.

Willow Weston
00:38:14.200 – 00:38:15.600
Last.

There’s a sequel,.

William Paul Young
00:38:15.680 – 00:38:16.160
Huh?

Willow Weston
00:38:16.400 – 00:38:19.200
Really?

Wow.

I didn’t know that.

William Paul Young
00:38:19.360 – 00:38:20.640
I know.

Most people don’t.

Willow Weston
00:38:20.640 – 00:38:25.640
The last stages, as in you’ve written the book or you’re finishing.

William Paul Young
00:38:25.640 – 00:39:13.860
It.

It’s written and it’s.

It’s in copy editing, which is the last stages of the editing process.

And then it.

Then we start to.

They want to.

They don’t want to release it till probably October of next year, and for a couple different reasons.

One is they want to sell all the international rights, all the other languages that want it, and then do a.

A singular global release in 2026, which is so goofy.

So I didn’t even know they did this kind of stuff.

So that’s.

That’s there.

So Hachette’s involved in that.

And.

And I did a couple little.

Couple little devotional things, and.

And, you know, there’s always the movie you can watch, and so.

Willow Weston
00:39:15.460 – 00:39:27.790
I love it.

I’m waiting in great anticipation to see what the master violin maker does through all of this.

Paul, thank you so much for being with us today.

William Paul Young
00:39:27.790 – 00:39:28.950
Oh, you’re so welcome,.

Willow Weston
00:39:29.190 – 00:40:03.970
Friend.

I hope that you enjoyed that conversation and that more than anything, you know that you have a God who will meet you at your own shack, who will meet you in the messiest parts of your life.

And he will meet you in the valleys and the mountaintops and everywhere you go.

He loves you.

He longs to have relationship with you.

He wants to heal you, help you and empower you and purpose you.

And so keep colliding with him, friend.

We’ll catch you next week.