One of the greatest days of my life was spending an afternoon with my daughter’s well-marked copy of He Loves Me after she had returned from college shortly after it had been published. With her permission I got to read through the comments she’d written in the margin and enjoy what she highlighted. My daughter posted the picture above a couple of weeks ago. It’s my oldest granddaughter reading So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore. It took my breath away. I knew she was reading The Shack with her mom for the first time, but now she wants to read everything her grandpa has written. I cant tell how how that impacted me and I can’t imagine the conversations we’re going to get to have ahead.
I’m still amazed and incredibly grateful whenever I hear how something I’ve written has touched someone else deeply, and helped encourage their own spiritual journey whether it’s my family or people I haven’t met yet. The power of a story can invite people into a transforming reality they are not even expecting.
The Shack movie will be out March 3, and it will give people a lot to think about as they process that story and God in their own lives. And we are well into the process of adapting Jake’s story in So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore for a big-screen movie, tentatively titled Out of the Game. The movie focuses on the religious game Jake doesn’t even know he’s playing by serving his own need to gain approval from others. Though an encounter with a mysterious man who is living in more freedom than Jake has ever known his life begins to change. As it comes unraveled he has to choose between the false security of his past, or the risk of finding God is better than he ever dreamed. We made some changes in the story, but not to its meaning and I’m thrilled that we’ll have a chance to re-tell this story to a wider audience.
We just added a new section of the website that will let you look behind the scenes at the process I’ve been involved in, introduce you to some of the people I am working with, and if you’d like, I can give you an opportunity to be involved in the production. The link above will explain everything but we’re hopeful to make this movie with a combination of investment money and passion dollars from those who care about the message and want to help us make this movie. You can do that through a donation to Lifestream that will give us a stake in the movie and the ability to shape its message. In return we’d like to offer you some special gifts as our way of saying thanks and involving you in this unfolding process. .
Unlike The Shack, we don’t have a major studio behind us. This is an independent production, born in the heart of a man who found this book to be a meaningful part of his own spiritual journey by helping him see that God was not the demanding taskmaster he’d learned in his childhood. I am deeply involved in all phases to his project and am excited to put this story into a new medium that can touch a different audience of people. I invite you to click through to our behind the scenes video and see if this is something that would interest you.
And don’t forget, through December 31, you can receive a 15% discount for all items in the Lifestream Store simply by using the coupon code: “LSChristmas”.
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