Out of a Far Country by Christopher Yuan and Angela Yuan

A gay son's journey to God.
A broken mother's search for hope.

Wow!! This is quite the story, a bit graphic maybe for some, especially younger readers, but very much a God work. At first I was a little disturbed by the details of his sinful life, but then I realized he was also pretty detailed about his new life in Christ as well. And knowing the depravity that he had dropped to makes the story all the more amazing.

The story begins with Christopher "coming out" to his parents. His mother Angela is used to manipulating and controlling and this is the final straw. She is in a loveless, disconnected marriage and decides to commit suicide after a last visit with Chris. Instead, she finds Christ and starts reading the Bible and praying and her husband joins her.

Chris, in the meantime, continues down the path of sin: homosexuality, drugs, etc. until the law catches up with him. His parents try to stay connected to him, but he rebuffs their efforts. Finally jail time make him stop and think and he turns his life over to God. He seeks to follow God, but he's struggling as he always believed his homosexual tendencies where who he was. A chaplain even gives him a book to read that says that God doesn't have anything against the homosexual lifestyle. He didn't make it through one chapter before he realized the book was not true.

Another thing Christopher realized is that while God condemns the sin of homosexuality, he doesn't hate the sinner.

I need to stop. I feel like I have already given too many spoilers to this book. The one thing I was concerned about with this book was that it would make allowance for Chris to have been born a homosexual and there was nothing he could do about it. But that is not the case. He also recognized that heterosexuality wasn't the ultimate thing either, first up was holiness to God. I really appreciated this book. God did an amazing work in both Christopher and in his parents, Angela and Leon and is continuing to do an awesome work through them.

I received this book from Blogging for Books and was not required to write a positive review.