PaulYoungWm. Paul Young

Author of “The Shack”
Paul was born a Canadian and along with three younger siblings was raised among a stone-age tribe by his missionary parents in the highlands of what was New Guinea (West Papua). The family returned to Canada where his father pastored a number of churches for various denominations. By the time he entered Canadian Bible College, Paul had attended a dozen schools. He completed his undergraduate degree in religion at Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon.

While in Oregon, Paul attended seminary and met and married Kim. Together they celebrate “the wastefulness of grace” with their six children, two daughters-in-law, and now two grandchildren.

In his Web site biography (windrumors.com), Paul writes, “These are some of the facts of my life, but they don’t begin to tell the real story. The journey has been both incredible and unbearable, a desperate grasping after grace and wholeness. Facts cannot tell you about the pain of trying to adjust to different cultures; of life losses that were almost too staggering to bear; of walking down railroad tracks at night in the middle of winter, screaming into a windstorm; of living with an underlying volume of shame so deep and loud that it constantly threatened any sense of sanity; of dreams not only destroyed but obliterated by personal failure; of hope so tenuous that only the trigger seemed to offer a solution. These few facts also do not speak to the potency of love and forgiveness, the arduous road of reconciliation, the surprises of grace and community, of transformational healing and the unexpected emergence of joy.”