The Shack & God is a Black Woman

Years ago someone gifted me the book The Shack by William P. Young. I remember when I first got it I couldn’t read it. Early in the book their daughter gets kidnapped and at that time my daughter was about the same age. As an incest survivor protecting my kids has been everything to me. I couldn’t go there. I was too afraid to even think about something like that, let alone read a book that was about it.

Well, as spirit often does when there is something for me that I am avoiding it sends it to me a different way. One of my coaching clients was going to read the book and asked if I would read it with her, I said yes.

In this book after they find evidence in this old shack that suggests that his daughter is dead the father, a White man, gets a note in his mailbox signed Papa, which is the name he has for God. The note tells him to go to the shack. When he gets to the shack God opens the door. God shows up as a Black woman. She said that of course God would show up in the form that he would least expect it. One of the things that I don't think we understand is that White men are the most wounded in this country mostly because they don't even know they are and you can't heal something when you can't see it.

As a Black woman I carry in me the strength, resourcefulness, hopes, and dreams of my ancestors who were slaves. What I carry in my very DNA is the level of respect for humanity that allowed my ancestors to nurse and love babies they knew would grow up to rape their daughters and kill their sons. And after 31 years of doing my own healing work, being willing to go into the wounds of my own journey this life time I have become quite a force. I am because they were.

I have had a White man say to me, “You always think you are right.” I told him that I get to always think I’m right. Another one called me bossy and suggested a softer stance on my stating that I am the promise of forgiveness and reconciliation in the world.

People often mistake this truth and knowing for arrogance but that's because they don’t know themselves, they don’t know the cost of this journey and because a Black woman is the place they least expected to find it.

Quanita