Their 20-something daughter died a couple years ago, and mom was lost in her grief. About a year after, the couple decided to go for a picnic drive, taking a lunch and camera, and planning to try and take a break from the deep sense of loss that seemed to be tearing them slowly apart. They drove into the country looking for a campground or park that had picnic tables, but couldn’t find one. About to give up they spotted something that might work, what looked like a table near a small outbuilding?
They pulled over, and walked with their lunch over to what turned out to be three or four concrete steps going nowhere, just sitting in the middle of this clearing. She glances over at the little building and sees that there is a plaque on the door. It simply says, “The Shack.”
Together they eat their lunch sitting on the steps going nowhere. She feels drawn to this small building and decides to go and look in it. Her husband refuses. “What if someone is living in there?” She opens the door anyway.
In a corner of the one room is a tree stump that has been cut to function as a chair. Another corner has a shelf with a pile of slate, like stairs…going nowhere. Then there is the desk; complete with chair, a pad of paper, pens and two copies of a book that neither of them had ever heard of, The Shack. A typed note lay on the table. It simply read, “Please take whatever you want.” They took one of the books.
With her husband standing quietly just behind, while she talks she is laying down one photograph after another in front of me. The steps, the little building, the sign on the door, the inside room, the tree stump chair, the shelf, and the table with everything she had described including two copies of the book sitting on the right side.
Tears in her eyes, she hands me a worn book and says, “This is the copy I took. This is the book that saved us!”
Taken from WindRumors, The Official Site of W.M. Paul Young
