Gay Girl, Good God
Gay Girl, Good God – The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been.
By Jackie Hill-Perry (B&H Publishers 2018)
I had missed reading this book after picking up a stack of similar books for our live-stream event last year on same-sex attraction and the Christian. It probably should have been top of my list.
Jackie Hill Perry is a poet, writer, spoken word artist and speaker from St Louis, Missouri. Her book reads quite well! Once in a same-sex relationship, she beautifully outlines her story of coming to faith. She has since been married and has children (with her husband Preston) so I had thought her book would come across as some kind of ‘conversion therapy’ – but this was not the only misconception she addresses.
Her childhood story is tragic. Her description of an absent Father (or the absence of his love) is followed by a harrowing story of abuse. Her account of life after school outlines her exposure to pornography, drugs and sex – all carefully and honestly told and within a biblical understanding of sin.
Her journey to faith in Christ involved a constant niggling, questions that she kept asking herself. She did all she could to try and suppress that and avoid the subject. One day, alone in her bedroom, God “turned her heart toward Him.” From that moment on, she wanted him more than anything else.
“When the Holy Spirit made his home within me, he opened the blinds and let the light in… I could see sin for the liar it was.”
Jackie’s story from then on is equally honest. She does not pretend that temptation had somehow dissipated. Her comments comparing the gay community she had been in with the Christian community she eventually found are worth reflecting on:
“the community I called home for a season of my life were all full of laughter and what I’d labelled ‘life’. But the reality was that my gay community was indeed lifeless. They were what I had been, dead. They were still image bearers, still friends, they still mattered. I still loved them , but I loved God more. They could not help me love who they did not know themselves. The difference between the gay community and the Christian community was not skill, intellect, comfort, humour, or beauty; it was that in one and not the other, God dwelled.”
The book includes some final chapters with resources for same-sex attracted believers to work through. For the unbeliever, the author adds this clear message:
“God is not calling them to be straight; He is calling them to himself. To know Christ, love Christ, serve Christ, honor Christ and exalt Christ, forever. When He is the aim of their repentance, and the object of their faith, they are made right with God the Father and given power by the Holy Spirit to deny all sin – sexual and otherwise. Someone trying to pursue heterosexuality and not holiness is just as far from right standing with God as someone actively pursuing homosexuality…we were not ultimately made for sex; we were made for God and His glory alone (Col 1:16).
- Andy Buchan, April 2020.
