Cross Roads: Seeing a Life Through Other People’s Eyes

William Paul Young came to wide attention with The Shack. He wrote it with his children in mind, drawing on notes made around his working life. Copies passed among friends before it reached a much larger readership and eventually became a film. Cross Roads is the novel he wrote after that success.

A Christian Fantasy With a Sense of Play

Young imagines an in-between place close to death, where a soul can be present even though the body is still in a hospital. Jesus appears directly, which startled me. The story also takes the comic possibilities of souls moving from one person to another seriously enough to make them part of the action.

What Tony Spencer Sees

Tony Spencer has built his life around money and position. He collapses and ends up in intensive care. While his body lies there, he meets Jesus in the world the novel places between life and death. At the hospital, a boy with Down syndrome named Cabby kisses Tony, and Tony’s spirit moves into him. Through more encounters, Tony finds himself seeing and feeling things from perspectives he could not have reached on his own.

This is an invented answer to what might happen near death. It made an interesting companion to Shelly Kagan’s philosophical treatment of whether anything survives the body. Young uses the premise to ask what someone would do if they could finally see the results of their choices.

What Counts as a Life Well Lived

Money and status can secure things a person needs. Tony has spent so long pursuing them that he has little practice at noticing what he has left behind. Watching him look through other people’s eyes, I found myself thinking about where I would want to put my attention while there is still time to change something.