Tolle Lege!.

"If anything matters, then every thing matters". The author said that line twice within the book. The first time he said it, I did not know what he meant. In the last page or so he repeated that line and by that time I understood what he was getting at. The book is not a mystery or murder or kidnapping story, it's the author's device for telling how he understands Christianity. I didn't see much original thought within the book. The author through his characters dream believed that God had knowingly put the apple tree in such a place that He had known before hand that Adam would eat from the tree of knowledge leading to the necessity of God to send his Son as a sacrifice in order to have us be forgiven for 'original sin' and also that God loves us dearly and is always with us and His Son will guide us always.

I could go on and explain more of the author's beliefs, but they all just seemed to be not that original (as I was listening to this story I was also listening to Hume's Dialogue's on Natural Religion, and Hume (thru Philo) was really refuting a lot of the points this author was trying to make, and that book was written before 1800). Also, I was reading "Pilgrims Progress" while listening to this book and there is some overlap with the story telling except Pilgrim's Progress would say 'to fear the lord is where wisdom begins' and this book ("The Shack") would emphasize God's love instead, and that forgiveness is one of our highest virtues. Though in-spite of their differences there were similarities in the narrative approaches and some of the conclusions and in the end both books seem to conclude that us humans need to outsource our ethical foundations to the divine instead of ourselves.