The Shack

Two books that I have recently read have had a profound impact on me. They have mede me ponder on the most influential books ever written. Well, that title goes to the Bible. But supplementing the Bible with Jesus' teachings of love, these books will do a spirit some good. The first one, The Shack, must be read with a box of tissues. The second one, Nobody Don't Love Nobody... must also be read with a box of tissues. The point that makes these books so influential is that they are considered non-fiction (despite the Shack being written from a 3rd person fictional narrative.) The topics are very tough to swallow. But any book that I can catagorize with the second most influential book I have ever read, Black Like Me, deserves mention.

For those of you who don't know, Black was a research project. Set in the 1950's before the civil rights movement, a white man underwent skin treatments to change the color of his skin to a darker shade, and completed the ensemble with black shoe polish. As a "black" man, he then proceeded to make his way through the South from New Orleans eastward, journaling the way he was treated, in many cases very poorly, and sometimes by the same people who had a week earlier, treated him with generosity and kindness when he was "white." It also showed the unbreakable spirit of a race of people who were willing to band together for survival, strangers helping strangers in the name of love and justice. Its author opened the eyes of many people during a time when our country needed to change its thinking. He paid the ultimate price for it though. He wasn't murdered, but contracted a disease it is believed from the treatments to change his skin color, and died a premature death. The cause was so simple, yet so profound that anyone with bigoted ideas who reads it can't help but feel ashamed by the simplicity of truth.

The Shack, for those of you who haven't read it, but heard about it, have probably heard one thing: God in the book is a black lady. That is all that was told to me by my friends who had read it, and I knew it had to be deeper than an issue of what God looks like. I read it, weeping when the main character went through the pain of losing his child, then weeping more when "Mama" took him through some tough lessons to soften his hard heart. It wasn't until afterwards when I found out that it was a true story, written like a novel by one of the minor characters. Having read it, I found it much like Ninety Minutes in Heaven, another example of God's miracles. And after all these miracles, people still doubt His existence.

Secondly, Nobody Don't Love Nobody is an older book, copywrighted in 1994, but it plays to an issue that is still present today: poverty. Non fiction again, it consists of many lessons a first-year teacher learns from teaching in a homeless shelter called The School with No Name. Examples include the teacher adopting a crack baby when a mother can't take care of it, taking in three siblings so that they won't be split up in foster care while their mother gets clean, to the strength a little girl teaches her from her own experience of being locked in a dirt-floor basement for a week or two because the mother's boyfriend didn't like her. Each chapter shows agape in the face of inhumanity.

Each of these books has left me changed forever. They were easy and tough. Easy to read, tough to get through. Each shows the evil presence that plagues this world, and the unbreakable human spirit. Like one of my favorite quotes from the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, "The heart can be broken, but it goes on beating just the same."

What is the most influential book you've ever read, and why?