Can I Say That? How Unsafe Questions Lead Us to the Real God

Asking God “our hardest, deepest questions” builds a strong faith, according to this impassioned if problematic debut from Blain. After realizing that she was gay as an adolescent, Blain prayed to be straight “every single night for what felt like years.” She contemplated leaving the evangelical faith until a youth group leader encouraged her to work through her “struggles” in the church. Drawing on that experience and her challenges with an eating disorder, depression, and anxiety, Blain recounts how she brought her problems to God via prayer and received help, in the form of spiritual comfort and the kindness of others. Ultimately, Blain became involved in ministry work and married a man. Though she still experiences “the temptation of same-sex attraction,” she writes that she has found peace in the knowledge that “God could have made me straight, but because I struggle, I get to know the power of calling on the Holy Spirit.” While Blain’s candor is admirable, such statements raise the troubling notion that closeness to God is based in suffering, and her answers as to how exactly God provides succor can be vague. The result is an earnest yet unsatisfying account of reckoning with the challenges to one’s faith. (Aug.)