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I am barnstorming Germany at the moment. I took a long, restful train ride through the countryside yesterday from Hamlen to Nuremberg. What a beautiful country this is! Except for that brief respite, however, this has been a grueling trip because I am having less than 24 hours at almost all of the stops I’m making. One day is not enough time to really get to know people and get to the important questions that help us sort out what Jesus is doing in individual lives. I’d never schedule a tour myself like this because it is so frustrating not having time to get past the curiosity questions and share more deeply. But this is what I have.

Today I had a bit of a break and went down to see the parade ground where Hitler held his public rallies. We toured the museum there and learned how he built his power over people by marginalizing, excluding, and even exterminating anyone who didn’t show a passion for his rule or tactics. It was sobering. So much of the language we heard was similar to what’s going on from those inside organized religion who want to challenge anyone who dares to question its authority, methodology or effectiveness of teaching people how to live in Father’s love.

What I have enjoyed about the trip is not only those in their 50s and 60s who have found fresh life in Jesus, but also the number of young people here who are passionate about a greater life in Jesus. They are not so much burned out by the rituals of religion as much as they are hungry to know an authentic life in Jesus that they didn’t find there to begin with. In every meeting I’ve been to there has been young, hungry, engaged men and women who are looking for what life in Jesus is really all about. It has been so encouraging. The Spirit is calling to a new generation to come to him in the freedom of simply learning to live as the Father’s children in the earth and not get lost in the religious activity of generations that preceded them. Amazing!

This is what we must encourage not discourage. If you care about God’s church in the earth you will discourage them or try to bring them into conformity with our tired religious practices. Interestingly enough, I received this email over the last couple of days from Becky back in the States that seemed to address this very thing:

I’m a 23 year old Christian who left “the box” 2 years ago. I was raised in church and after witnessing 3 pastoral affairs and 2 church splits, I threw up my hands and walked away. If that was God, I didn’t want Him. I didn’t know what to do. My decision to leave the church was against everything I’ve been taught here in the Bible Belt, but at the same time it was a decision that felt as right as choosing God in the first place. Interestingly enough, I had my first real and authentic conversation with God after I left the church. Although it was mostly filled with anger, it was the first time I allowed myself to be real with God. I spent my entire life in this passive aggressive state because all the formulaic prayers and activities didn’t lead to the life the Bible talked so much about. It seemed no matter what I did, I couldn’t feel alive and whole like the Bible said….

Reading The Shack last year changed a lot. I have never felt such a sense of relief after reading something. If that God is who God really is, THAT’S a God worth worshipping! I no longer had to be someone I wasn’t in order to love Him. What a relief. And although I feel confident in my decision now more than ever, I still often struggle with it. If this mindset is true, then why is it a 23 year old in 2008 was the first to figure it out? And that’s where you come in…. I’m starting from the beginning on your podcasts and plan to listen to them all. I just have to say thank you. It’s nice to know people older, with much more wisdom, education, and experience feel the same way.

I hear this so often from people. Who am I to think that these systems might be leading us astray? Wouldn’t those who are more intelligent or more experienced see it before I do? And if people don’t put that on themselves, those who set themselves up as leaders will do it for them. I can’t tell you how many people have faced a dismissive attitude from an elder or pastor with the same comment: “Who are you to think you can hear God better than me? If God were speaking those things today, wouldn’t he say it to me first?”

My answer to Becky would be, “Why not you?” Why not a twenty-three year old girl who simply wants to know Jesus? When Jesus was here he was excited when the simplest people captured the vision for his kingdom. He greatly rejoiced before God at such moments, grateful that God had revealed himself not to the wise and learned who were so busy trying to keep people under their authority, but to common people and children.

Wouldn’t we want to ask ourselves why our so-called leaders discourage what Jesus so blatantly affirmed? I wonder.

So, why not Becky? She is his—beloved daughter of the Most High God. He knows where she is and how to bring her along to where he wants her to be.

Why would God show her what others have missed?

Maybe it’s because her simple heart is unclouded by the need to build a group of people into an efficient organization. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t draw her salary from the success of her program and ideas. And maybe her vocational success isn’t tied to corralling a group of people under her control. If the truth be told most of those leaders who discourage people like Becky one day began with a heart just like Becky’s before it got confused by the obligations of building a Christian organization.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather rejoice with Becky and encourage her to keep going. Keep coming to him and follow him as best as you can see him. Feel free to make some mistakes in the process and he will teach you how to live in his freedom and his glory.

Why not her?

Why not you?

I’m off to Germany but completed a new issue of BodyLife. We haven’t had a new one since last September, because I’ve been way too busy with lots of other opportunities that this issue will explain.

The lead article is titled The Power of Living Loved and provides three snapshots of what it means to live in the love of the Father and how it transforms how we live on the earth.

There is also a lengthy announcement about some of the changes my life is undergoing in the aftermath of all the opportunities that the success of The Shack has opened to me. It also explains why you’ve not seen a new BodyLife since last September. There’s also some wonderful letters there from many of our readers who are also on some amazing journeys, as well as some new announcements of things going on around Lifestream.

We hope this issue encourages you to keep to the journey God has put before you and draw you into his life and grace.

Later today I’ll head off to the airport for a flight to Germany where I will spend the next three weeks wandering through Germany and into Switzerland to spend time with brothers and sisters on this marvelous journey. So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore was released last year in German, and He Loves Me will be released this summer as Loved! (Pictured at left.)

It will take me longer to respond to email on a trip like this, because I neither have control of when i can access email, or when I have time to respond to it. I apologize for any inconvenience that causes.

Here is my schedule for that tour:

June 6-8: weekend with group in Lengerich, Germany
June 9-10: evening(s) with group(s) near Hannover, Germany
June 11-12: meeting(s) in Nuremberg, Germany
June 13: meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany
June 14: meeting near Stuttgart, Germany
June 15: group in Bonn, Germany
June 16-17: group near Kaiserslautern, Germany
June 18-19: near Zurich, Switzerland
June 20-25: Geneva, Switzerland

Keep me in prayer will you? Sara will be joining me part way through the trip as she finishes up here school term here at home.

Here is the maize our last contribution was able to purchase for the families who have been displaced by violence in Kenya. There are wonderfully grateful to all who helped sustain them in this time of great need:

Here in Kenya is 8:26am. Yesterday we managed to meet with the team and I went immediately to the store to buy the maize, which was 65 bags as you may see in the pictures and we worked until evening to make sure that it is clean which can be acceptable by health department and I have handed over to the selected team to make sure that they may distribute according to the list we have in our office and they will start tomorrow while I will be in the next town called Eldoret with some leaders in Kitale for ten days. May the Lord bless you; we shall be in touch soon as I return back as also sent to you the work done.

We were able to send another $2500.00 this week from those who sent in money, and some extra we had around here… I got this back from our contact there this morning:

The family and the entire team, greetings once more in Jesus Name. Thank you very much for the great support you send. Tomorrow I will have the working team to plan how we will distribute. My brother, may the Lord bless you and the entire team for the seed you have showed in Africa and in our beloved country for brothers and sisters for the situation where they are living. I think it will be great support for more families. We shall be in touch soon as we complete the audio downloads you put on the Internet for us. I will share with you soon.

We will continue to send more as Father provides.

My earlier correction today, was again misinformed! Crazy how this stuff works. But the list is out and who would have thought 13 months ago when we cast this book on the waters, what God wanted to do with it.

Also Michele from the Sudan sent me a picture of some of the 80 children in her orphanage and the other 150 plus that show up each day for school. You can find out more by reading the previous blog.

A few months ago, I posted an email written to me by Michele Perry, a Florida woman who had moved to the Sudan a couple of years before because of a leading on her heart. She rented a home there and began to take in orphans. Michele has now taken in 80 orphans and cares for them, even though she was born with only one leg. Amazing stuff.

Today she wrote me with this plea: “We really need an expert team to join us here, but the right one! Administrative servant-hearted types, construction/engineering types and medical being the top needs at present. Mature, servant leader folks who want to be a team.”

So if you feel a tugging toward the Sudan or even want to send along some funds to support the work there, you can find out more at Michele’s website: Change the Way You See. And if you have a moment, please hold her, the orphans and their needs before the Father. Thanks.

She also sent me an article she had written that had some wonderful thoughts in it. Here are some excerpts:

A move of transformational love is rising up to be released from every tribe and tongue and nation. Those who wield the most powerful weapon there is are arising from the hidden and unseen depths of His heartbeat. Have you seen them? The dangerous, fearless lovers of the King, who has so captured their gazes no circumstance can distract them, no obstacle deter them.

They are the unlikely ones, the burning ones, the passionate ones the world has overlooked and called foolish. What would a people look like who are fully embraced by love? What would a people become if they were totally set free to live out their own identity?

Could a people be raised up to fight hate with love, injustice with mercy, war with peace, poverty with generosity, despair with joy, striving with rest, and religion with freedom? Where are the ones that so know His heart, they carry His heartbeat everywhere they go? Where are the ones who dream bigger than the pages of history and refuse to settle for what their eyes have seen? Where are the ones who will dance through the harvest fields of the nations with their gazes locked on the eyes of Love itself?

Watch out. Here they come—life in abundance, light so bright the darkness flees before its coming and night becomes as day at the rising of His glory in and through our lives.

If that doesn’t make your heart beat faster, I don’t know what will! Can you imagine a people so saturated in love that they live in a way that sets the world on edge?

The cover story in today’s LIFE section of the USA Today is entitled “The Shack Opens Doors.” What an article! It is mostly accurate. What’s more the spirit of it and the insights into Paul’s life will minister to people whether or not they ever get or read the book. I love that!

We just found out that Sunday The Shack will debut this Sunday as #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List for Trade Fiction. They hadn’t even been tracking this book until our new publishing partners made them aware of it. So we could have been on it far sooner. Who would have thought that this little book would go so far from its debut 13 months ago on this blog and The God Journey podcast?

Also Jay Leno held up a copy of the book on Friday night’s TONIGHT show. You can see that clip here. (Choose May 23 and look about 11:30 minutes into the show.) It’s done as a humorous look at things on Amazon.com, but it is amazing exposure.

We also received this picture today of a Shack display at a bookstore in Canada. It just gets weirder and weirder….

The reason I have loved being involved with THE SHACK, even though it has compounded my life tremendously, is because of letters like this:

I would just like to thank you so much for helping to write The Shack. I had all the questions Missy’s daddy did. I almost quit reading the book several times, because my heart just raged like his: Why? Why? Why? I didn’t realize (and I have been a committed Christian for 30 plus years) that I had so much bitterness, so much rebellion, so much unbelief in my heart!! I knew, in an intellectual way, that I had problems relating to the Father because of my relationship with my earthly father. And he wasn’t even a “really bad father”. He had anger issues he had never resolved, and they “rolled over” onto my mother and my brother and me”, but he was a wonderful provider, and he loved us. I just never knew what his hands were going to do: hit or embrace. I never felt (until mid-adulthood, and by then my thought patterns were set) unconditionally loved. And so, I never could believe, when I prayed, that God really loved me all the time.

All the way up to chapter 15 of The Shack, I was muttering and getting madder and madder. And then, something broke in me and I sobbed through the rest of the book. I still have questions about some of the things theologically and I want to think about those and explore them further: (for instance, I can’t wrap my mind around there being no “heirarchy” in the relationship between Father and Son, and none in our relationship with each member of the Godhead…) but all I know is, I have been set free from a deep-seated distrust of God’s purposes—his motives concerning me, my children, etc.

I know, that as a result of something divine that took place in me during the reading of that book, that I will never doubt His love for me and mine again. And that has affected my whole life. I can’t tell you in words, how the depth of that healing has altered my spirit. I thought I had forgiven my father, but now I know I have, and I am able to love him so much better. I don’t care about the theological questions. I am just so awed, so blessed, to have been truly reconciled to the Father.