A gay girl once? Yes. Now? I am what God’s goodness will do to a soul once grace gets to it.
Jackie Hill-Perry’s book is a poetic memoir that opens with this perfect encapsulation of her book’s focus. She says herself that her chief sin before coming to Christ was not homosexuality, but unbelief. That is not to diminish actions, but to get to the root of the problem. She did not truly believe in a good God to save her, so her thoughts and actions reflected that unbelief in a myriad of ways. And isn’t this true of all of us? My core sin was unbelief as well, and a pursuit of desires outside of God. We all need a good God to save us from our own choices.

I say that her book is poetic because at every turn I wanted to read a string of words again. She is a wordsmith by trade, and it is on full display. For example:

Words like gorgeous, amazing, wonderful, or breathtaking are easy, borderline lazy when used to describe the Holy One. If, over coffee, we could ask Adam what word came to his mind the moment after he exhaled and saw God for the first time, he’d probably say, “Good. I saw Him and knew He was good.”
All that He said was good was good because He was. Including all that He’d commanded me not to do, for He knew that the cruelest thing He could ever do was to not tell me and everyone alive to avoid what would keep us from Him.
She can even make the word “good” come alive like never before because of how she connects it to who God is. This passage also gives insight into Hill-Perry’s primary theme: God is good, and he shows that by saving you from yourself.


If you don’t accept Hill-Perry’s central conviction that homosexuality is a sin that people need to be saved from, this isn’t the book for you. I suggest you start somewhere else and come back to this one later. But she is also clear with her Christian audience that our treatment of gay individuals is not acceptable a lot of the time.

Saint Louis, being not too far removed from the Southern culture of holiness or hell, passed down through each watcher’s bloodline, must have made them think that making a terrible face would make me pick up a Bible.
What makes this reaction from Christians so disconcerting is illuminated a few pages earlier:

My hands, head, face, legs, hips, hormones, private parts, voice, feet, fingers, feelings, were all made by Him and for Him. Apparently, this body was never mine to begin with — it was given to me from Somebody, for Somebody. Somebody who’d made it for glory and not shame. Until I got to know Him though, my identity would be made up of whatever dust that flew up from the devil’s feet as he ran through the earth. (Emphasis mine)
Why do we expect non-Christians to act like Christians? Why do we expect them to understand what we only understood after a good God showed us? Can’t we show them the same good God and trust in Him to save them? Or must we act like we have it all figured out when we still sin against God every day?

She also lovingly calls out the church for elevating straight-ness over the gospel. Placing marriage over a relationship with the Creator. Making an idol of the here-and-now at the expense of eternity. I can’t help but use her words because they are just so good.

I know now what I didn’t know then. God was not calling me to be straight; He was calling me to Himself. The choice to lay aside sin and take hold of holiness was not synonymous with heterosexuality. From my prior understanding of God as told by the few Christians I’d met, to choose God would be to inevitably choose men too. Even if my liking of them became a way for me to chase away the gayness without God’s help, I figured, that’s what would please Him most. That when He looked at me, He saw a wife before He saw a disciple. But God was not a Las Vegas chaplain or an impatient mother, intent on sending a man my way to “cure” me of my homosexuality. He was God. A God after my whole heart, desperate to make it new. Committed to making it like Him. In my becoming Holy as He is, I would not be miraculously made into a woman that didn’t like women; I’d be made into a woman that loved God more than anything. If marriage ever came or singleness called me by name, He wanted to guarantee by the work of His hands that both would be lived unto Him.
That is the crux of our issue as the church, focusing on external signals more than someone’s internal, eternal status. We will only reach those who God wants us to reach if we reach out as He would: with compassion, and words that show what God has done and how we are all unworthy. Culture wars can’t win souls. The gospel wins souls.

If you have same-sex attraction, know that you are loved by God. And pick up this book. You will find a God who is good and wants to share His goodness with you. If you have a loved one who is same-sex attracted, pick up this book. You might learn a lot about your loved one by reading Hill-Perry’s story. If you are a child of God who wants to know more about how to reach those with same-sex attraction, still pick up this book. It will help you immensely in finding empathy and approaching everyone with the love of God.

Near the end of Gay Girl, Good God, Hill-Perry mentions a book that had an effect on her life: Christopher & Angela Yuan’s Out of a Far Country: A Gay Son’s Journey to God. A Broken Mother’s Search for Hope. I had already had an advance copy of Christopher Yuan’s upcoming book, Holy Sexuality and the Gospel, on my bookshelf. I immediately picked it up. It is less a memoir and more a theological study, and I can’t wait to tell you about it next.

You can buy Gay Girl, Good God at Lifeway, many other Christian bookstores, or on Amazon.

I received this book as a review copy and an eARC courtesy of B&H Books and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.