Past Connections
When I was a kid I used to be religious and go to church once a week, but as I grew older I became less interested on religion. I started questioning whether any of what they kept telling me in church even happened or not as well as questioning if there even was a God. So as time passed I started to not believe in anything anymore regarding religion. My parents were a bit overwhelmed when I told them that I didn’t really believe in what their religion was stating, but over time I think they just accepted it and didn’t talk about it anymore. So I pretty much became an atheist.
I remember when I was in my freshman year in high school, my teacher had assigned to me a book called The Shack, as I didn’t really like reading books that much hearing that the title of the book I was going to read was called The Shack really made me unmotivated towards this assignment; the title seemed like it would be a very boring book. This book particularly was very hard for me to understand what was going on within its story. I eventually learned that this book was focused on religion so the topic was very distant from me. The book in my opinion would require that you had a little of a religious background and since I was barely a religious person myself this book wasn’t interesting to me and just made me confused. I would sit down on my bedroom chair in frustration because I could never understand what was happening in the book.
One day while I read my book, I decided I would go ask my mom to see if she knew anything or even read The Shack. I remember that she was in the kitchen cooking lunch and I went to the room, sat down on the chair with the book in my hands and asked my mom if she had ever seen or heard about it as I pointed at the book’s cover. I was very lucky to know that she in fact read the entire book, and so I sat there for a good hour asking her questions in order to see if I could understand it better. I also remember that she even called me from her work reminding me that she had mistakenly told me something about the protagonist which wasn’t true. I went back to read to book again on some sections to see what perspective changed. The Shack is based on a true story about a man who had his daughter kidnapped only to find her body in this random shack out in the middle of the woods, weeks after the investigation had already ended this man decided to go back to the shack to see if he could get anything else regarding her daughter. The man went to the shack and saw that someone was living there. A random person was occupying the shack. The man had a good conversation with this random person that lasted a couple of chapters, asking questions like “Why did you let this happen with my daughter? I had faith in you!”.
These were the things that made me very confused while reading the book and I kept asking to myself “Who is this random person?” or “Why is the man asking him or saying these things to him?” and then just this one sentence that my mom said made most of the things in the story more clear to me. My mom said “Well, he isn’t talking to someone random, he was having a conversation with God!”. After that I went back a couple of chapters was able to understand what was happening and I now knew what was going on in that conversation that the man was having with God. I faintly remember from my experiences with the catholic religion what it was like to believe in a God. I always thought to myself that he was always watching me and that this figure loved me, when I look back at this I find it kind of bizarre.
When I went back to class the next day and answered the questions that the teacher assigned to us regarding the book, I was able to answer these questions without any difficulty. I also remember that a lot of people in my class and a couple of friends of mine were struggling with these questions because I don’t think they understood much of this book either. I felt good about myself when I was able to help them out. I knew that they were happy when they finally understood the story. What I found odd was that some of my friends were religious and they still never understood the book. So maybe in reality it didn’t matter if you were religious or not. Maybe anyone could have understood it right from the beginning and it takes the right person with the correct mindset to look for answers beyond what was given to him according to the story. I believe that this assignment has helped me develop that mindset in order to look for things beyond the author’s words in his story. In my high school reading assignments I was able to get references and key points I was unable to prior this assignment.
