Sadness is a Wall Between Two Gardens

Years ago my husband Hardy and I had an experience which still makes us smile. We were in Winnipeg visiting family, and a missionary colleague invited us out for dinner to a Chinese restaurant together with our Congolese friend Pakisa Tshimaka, who is a paraplegic. We provided the transportation. 

After enjoying a delicious meal, we returned to our vehicle only to discover that our car would not start. It seemed the battery was dead and we would have to find someone who could help us restart it. 

As we sat there contemplating our next move, Pakisa glanced down the sidewalk and said, "I think Jesus is coming to help us." Startled, we followed his gaze, and sure enough, there was a bearded man coming down the sidewalk carrying a cross. He stopped for a moment, put down his cross and asked if something was wrong. We told him our car battery was dead and perhaps he could assist us by helping us push the car. He shook his head and said he was sorry he couldn't help us. He was carrying his cross all the way across Canada and he needed to be on his way, and off he went. "That wasn't Jesus, was it?" said Pakisa somewhat wistfully.

Hardy went into the restaurant to make a phone call. When the restaurant staff heard of our dilemma, one of the waitresses, a young Chinese woman, went to get her car, pulled out a set of jumper cables, attached them to her battery and to ours, and before long we were on our way. Pakisa smiled ruefully and said, "I think Jesus is a Chinese woman."

We often remind ourselves of that statement when our preconceived notions of how things ought to be do not match with our experiences.

I was reminded of it again when I read William Paul Young's novel, The Shack, for the second time. The author walks us through a father's journey with grief after his  youngest daughter, Missy, is abducted from a campground where the family is holidaying. She is brutally murdered. The book was published in 2007 and became a New York Times bestseller, with over five million copies in print. I read it at the time, was profoundly moved by it, but then put it aside. Recently, as we helped our oldest daughter and her family move to a new place, I rediscovered the book. My daughter had borrowed it and forgotten to return it. I read it again from cover to cover.

The Shack is an allegory in which the grieving father has a spiritual experience beyond anything he could ever imagine. Several months after the murder, he returns to the shack in the mountains where his daughter's bloody dress has been found. Like the battery in our car he needs a complete recharge, because everything in him has died. In the cabin he meets a God who is nothing like the one he has pictured all his life. The author depicts God as a big jolly black woman who loves to cook; Jesus is a brown bearded young man of Middle-Eastern origin, and the Holy Spirit is a lovely Asian woman. Together, the three-in-one help the father work through his grief and anger. He must face and deal with the demons of his own past before he can begin to work through the immense sadness and despair he feels at the loss of his little girl.

"Sadness is a wall between two gardens," writes the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran.

Rereading this book has been therapy for me. As I wrote in a previous post (June 24th), the saddest day of my life was the day we lost our firstborn son. Any parent who has gone through a similar experience will probably identify with this. I imagine that the grief is even more profound and also mixed with rage when a child's life is deliberately taken by someone. I cannot even begin to understand how angry and upset those people must be who lost loved ones in the recent missile attack on an airplane flying over Ukraine.

Like the main character in The Shack, those of us who have experienced the death of a loved one must go through the grieving process in order to be healed. It is never finished.

"Sadness is a wall between two gardens."

Often the wall of sadness grows higher and higher and it seems impossible to find our way over this wall to the other side. Reading a book like The Shack might help someone take another step toward healing.

[Postscript]

At the time I rediscovered this book, I was preparing to lead worship on Sunday and writing a memorial for a tree dedication which would happen that same week. We were also busy  helping our daughter and family move, so I didn't have a lot of preparation time. When I paged through the book, I noticed that every chapter was headed by a quote. These quotes helped me immensely and gave me the inspiration for the words I needed that weekend.

Interestingly enough, The Shack kept inspiring me and I was so moved that I decided to blog about it. I also received some strong "nudges" to do so. The nudges came from what Catherine Marshall, in her book Beyond Ourselves, calls the "inner Voice." This "inner Voice" prompts us and we ignore it to our own detriment. One nudge was that my daughter had given us things to take to the thrift store, and when I was sorting through things, the book was there again (she must have had a second copy). It looked like a well-used copy, but my daughter does not remember having a second copy! Another "nudge" I got was that our youngest daughter called and told me they had won a painting from a raffle ticket they had purchased. She said it was a picture of mountains and a cabin. When I saw the painting, it was "the shack," just like I had pictured it while reading the book! I now had no doubt what the topic of my next blog posting should be!