I’ve had so much fun reading through the questions and answers from the Trail Guide each week that I’ve decided to share some of the answers other people might be interested in. But before I do, let me share an article with you.
A couple of weeks ago, I did an interview with the editor of The Christian Post about Just Love. Their article dropped on Monday, titled: ‘The Shack’ Co-Creator Addresses Universalism, Theological Criticism Ahead of “Unplanned Sequel” Book. I’m grateful to Leah Klett for this piece. Few reporters capture the gist of an interview as well and as accurately as Leah did here. Of course, they wanted to draw readers to the article because of my association with The Shack, but Just Love is the “unplanned sequel” to He Loves Me, not The Shack. Here’s a quote from the article:
(Wayne) lamented that far too often, people mistakenly believe that the Christian life will eliminate struggles. Genuine faith, he emphasized, is found in experiencing God’s love and presence amid pain, which in turn allows that love to transform believers and flow through them to others. “If you’re not in that flow, if you’re doing a bunch of religious stuff and it hasn’t initiated that flow, I would encourage people to keep seeking,” he said. “There is a life in God for you. There’s an engagement with Him that will answer every question you’ve had, and I don’t mean that in the sense that you get a hard and fast answer; I mean that you have presence in the midst of difficulty that makes sense of the chaotic world we live in until He comes to redeem it all.”
You can read the full article here.
Now to this weeks Q & A from the Trail Guide:
Q: Why would it seem as if God made this revelation difficult for everyone to understand?
A: Wayne’s answer to this turns the question around a bit — he doesn’t think God made revelation deliberately hard to grasp; he thinks God made it something you can’t get secondhand, and that’s a very different thing.
In Giving Up the Burden To Convince Others, Wayne makes the point that revelation “is something we can’t supplant for someone” — meaning you can’t hand someone a fully-formed understanding of God the way you’d hand them a fact. If you could, it would rob them of “the most convincing element” of the whole thing: knowing that God is real because you’ve actually encountered him, not because you were told about him well enough. He says a life following Jesus is “supernatural through and through” — not spectacular, but the quiet, unmistakable sense that this isn’t just you being a good person, that there’s an actual relationship happening. That kind of knowing has to be lived into; it can’t be transferred by better explanation.
That’s also why Wayne talks in places like Did We Get Sin Wrong? Part 4, about revelation being progressive rather than uniform — Scripture itself shows “a movement… from bondage and darkness about even who God is till the revelation of the Son.” It wasn’t given all at once, evenly weighted, because it was never meant to function like an owner’s manual you master and move past. It’s meant to lead you into an actual relationship, and relationships unfold over time — with all the mess, misunderstanding, and growth that involves.
He pushes this further in Living In the Squeeze, saying flatly that “God intentionally has left a lot of things in scripture ambiguous.” Not because he’s playing games, but because certainty handed over on a platter tends to produce performance and information rather than trust. Ambiguity, oddly, is part of what keeps you leaning toward him rather than toward a system.
So the difficulty isn’t God hiding — it’s God refusing to let himself be reduced to a formula. Wayne’s whole invitation, echoed throughout The Jesus Lens, is that the confusion clears not through better technique but through actually knowing Jesus, the one place revelation stops being abstract and becomes a person you can trust.
Sources:
Giving Up the Burden To Convince Others
The Jesus Lens
Go ahead, try it out yourself. You’ll find the button on every page at Lifestream or The God Journey. 
It also works in a variety of languages. If you ask a question in Dutch, Spanish, or French, it will answer in the language you used. It is a way for foreign readers to gain some insight from Lifestream or The God Journey in your native tongue.
