Faith and Other Flat Tires: Searching for God on the Rough Road of Doubt

by Andrea Palpant Dilley, author of the bestselling A Grace Disguised Jerry Sittser (Foreword by)

Overview

At age twenty-one, Andrea Palpant Dilley stripped the Christian fish decal off her car bumper in a symbolic act of departure from her religious childhood. At twenty-three, she left the church and went searching for refugein the company of men who left her lonely and friends who pushed the boundaries of what she once held sacred.

In this deeply personal memoir, Andrea navigates the doubts that plague believers and skeptics alike: Why does a good God allow suffering? Why is God so silent, distant, and uninvolved? And why does the church seem so dysfunctional?

Yet amid her skepticism, she begins to ask new questions: Could doubting be a form of faith? Might our doubts be a longing for God that leads to a faith we can ultimately live with?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780310587088
Publisher:	Zondervan
Publication date:	02/21/2012
Sold by:	Zondervan Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Andrea Palpant Dilley grew up in Kenya as the daughter of Quaker missionaries and spent the rest of her childhood in the Pacific Northwest. Her work as a documentary producer has aired nationally on American Public Television. Her work as a writer has been published in Geez, Utne Reader and the anthology Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, as well as online with CNN, The Huffington Post, and Christianity Today. Her memoir, Faith and Other Flat Tires: Searching for God on the Rough Road of Doubt, tells the story of her faith journey. Andrea lives with her husband and their two daughters in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.andreapalpantdilley.com

 

Read an Excerpt

Faith and Other Flat Tires

Searching for God on the rough road of doubt

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By Andrea Palpant Dilley

Zondervan

Copyright © 2012 Andrea Palpant Dilley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-32551-2

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Chapter One

MUNGU YU MWEMA

One winter afternoon when I was twelve years old, my father picked up a hitchhiker. My two brothers were sitting with me in the back seat of our Plymouth Voyager van, which my grandfather had hauled off the junkyard and rebuilt. The cars we drove were all orphans that had been rolled or flooded or wrecked. The Voyager had a big dent in the sliding door from a downhill tumble.

The hitchhiker looked sixteen or seventeen, a tall Scandinavian wearing blue jeans with big holes in the knees. It was thirty-five degrees out. He ducked his head and climbed into the van with us, and then my dad drove on. The ensuing conversation, which I will never forget, went something like this:

"These are my kids, Andrea, Ben, and Nate. My name's Sam. What's your name?"

"Donovan," the hitchhiker said.

"Oh, that's a good name." My father paused. "Have you ever heard of Amy Carmichael?"

"Um, no ..."

"She was a Christian missionary to India who worked to save young girls from sex trade enslavement. The place where she worked was called Dohnavur, which is kind of close to your name, Donovan. So you have a good name, a name with Christian purpose."

"Oh."

In the hitchhiker's long pause that followed, I remember thinking, My father is out of his mind, preying on this young hitchhiker who wanted a ride and instead got a church sermon on Christian missionary history. I felt embarrassed in the same way I did when my dad prayed over our food in a restaurant and the waiter brought the ketchup while he was still praying.

Donovan rode with us for several miles until we reached the cut-off road to our house. After pulling the van onto the shoulder to let him out, my dad turned to my older brother, who was about the same size as the hitchhiker, and said, "Ben, why don't you give Donovan your jeans. It's cold out."

In the back seat of the van, Ben took off his pants and gave them to the hitchhiker while my little brother and I looked sideways at each other. Proverbial Christian wisdom says you give away the coat off your back, not the pants off your backside. In exchange for my brother's jeans, the hitchhiker handed over his own — the jeans with big holes in the knees — and my brother wrestled them on. Then Donovan got out. He was headed farther north toward Canada. I watched from the back seat as he diminished into the distance, a tall, lean figure standing on the side of a long winter road.

These years later, I remember the whole exchange as a small act of goodness. My father, the funny priest, blessed a hitchhiker not with holy water but with jeans. I can see this only in retrospect, though. Then, in my early teens, my mom and dad seemed painfully Christian and parental. After supper every night we had what was called "family time." We sometimes took walks in the woods or played card games, but more often than not, my dad directed us in an intellectual exercise of some kind. He would stride over to the living room bookshelves to find a book like Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, then read a passage aloud and try to engage us in dialogue. On occasion, he slid out one of the burgundy volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which my mom had bought from a door-to-door salesman in the mid-1980s. Family time turned into the Jeopardy game show, except that we didn't win any money and Dad got to pick the categories: French Huguenot history for 200. Invertebrate biology for 300.

"Dad, I have no idea," I said in response to one of his trivia questions. "You know I don't know. Cut me a break."

My father's most notorious family time activities weren't academic or literary; they were spiritual. He would ask us questions like, "How did you see the presence of God in your day today?" Or, as a way to bring together humor, metaphor, and my mother's dinner menu, he would ask, "How is the Christian life like a plate full of spaghetti?" My brothers and I had to ponder the analogy — maybe grace is a good meatball? — and then after a while, one of us would hold up our shackled wrists and ask to be excused.

My mother too had intense parenting tics. As an exhippy who didn't want her kids to end up brainwashed by mainstream America, she initiated a loosely mandated ban against instruments of pop and consumer culture. On her list of taboos:

TV = lazy bones

Video games = bad reader

Headphones = bad listener

Sunglasses = bad eye contact

"You can't trust a person who hides his eyes," she would say. "You look a person right in the eye; that's what you do."

My parents never bought a TV. Instead of watching cartoons, we read comic books, kids books, and biographies of Christian history. My mother read us stories about Amy Carmichael, the missionary to India, and George Washington Carver, the African-American botanist who in the 1920s helped alleviate poverty in the South. After dinner every night, my parents took turns reading aloud to the whole family from books like the Lord of the Rings series and the Narnia series.

Along with the taboos and the TV alternatives, my parents developed an arsenal of Christian character-forming mantras that were meant to counter the excesses of Western individualism (like selfishness) and teach us how to be strong, brave, and good.

Mantra 1: "Love is a choice, not a feeling."

This phrase was meant to help us overcome the weak, bleeding-heart melodrama of teen and preteen behavior. Before I was even old enough to have a crush on the kid next door, I knew love and marriage were not about romance but about choice, commitment, and endurance. Heavy stuff for a ten-year-old. I tease my parents now for laying on their kids such crushing truths of life, but they were honest, at least, doing their best to abolish the delusions of childhood.

Mantra 2: "Happiness is a choice."

As a sibling mantra to "Love is a choice," this phrase meant "Quit your bellyaching. Check your attitude."

Mantra 3: "It's good missionary training."

My parents used this phrase when my brothers and I complained about doing things we didn't like. It became the catch-all call for "Buck up and deal with it" and sometimes involved leaning over our dinner plates to shovel in the beans that we didn't want to eat.

Mantra 4: "Choices have consequences."

This phrase usually came before a spank to the backside and was another way of saying, "You chose this, not me. Try door number two next time."

Mantra 5: "Go M.A.D."

M.A.D. was an acronym for "make a difference." After hearing the phrase from Christian radio host Ron Hutchcraft, my mother started using it every day as my brothers and I walked out the door to catch the school bus. Kids, not just adults, were responsible to help alleviate the burden of the human condition by making the world a better place to live.

Going M.A.D. took various forms. When I was eight, my parents signed up to be foster parents with a humanitarian organization called Healing the Children, which brought patients from all over the world for medical treatment in the US. My brothers and I became temporary siblings to kids with brittle bone disease and Down syndrome who came for months or sometimes years to live with us. We pushed them around in their wheelchairs, played with them, and shared our bedrooms with them.

As if being a foster family wasn't enough, after school once a week my mom took us to visit elderly widows from the church who were cooped up at home watching TV and reading large-print copies of Reader's Digest. "You're ambassadors for the family," my mother said as we walked up to the front door of a widow's house. That was another one of her parenting mantras. In other words: Be good. Do good.

In so many ways, it humors me to remember the intensity of how I was raised. As the architects of my childhood, my parents mixed hippy social-justice values and Christian values to reinforce one overarching principle: anything that distracts you from a fierce focus on God, meaning, and the amelioration of suffering is not worth a cat sniff. Life was all about the big stuff — reaping wisdom from epic allegories like The Pilgrim's Progress and saving girls from sex exploitation.

Even now, I can still picture my mom holding up books at the dining room table and reading to us from those stories of hope and humanity. I can still remember my father saying in so many words to a hitchhiker, "Your name means something. Your life means something too." A Christian, moral, and philanthropic imperative motivated my mom and dad. It drove them as parents. It also drove them in their decision to go to Africa as missionaries.

* * *

When my parents were first married back in the early '70s, they spent five years in Tucson while my dad did his internal medicine residency at the University of Arizona. At a church potluck sometime at the end of his residency, my parents heard about a Quaker organization called Friends United Meeting that was looking for medical missionary volunteers. My parents applied and then accepted an invitation to go to Africa. In July of 1979, we flew to England so my dad could attend tropical medicine school for three months. Then we moved to East Africa, where we lived for almost six years.

The Quakers commissioned my parents to the Lugulu Friends Hospital in a rural agrarian area of western Kenya. The town of Lugulu had a quarter-mile strip of dukas, small storefronts made of mud thatch with corrugated tin pinned down for roofs. In the farm fields outside town, women worked by hand with their babies tied on their backs, tilling their way across the wide countryside of the western highlands. It was an eight-hour drive from Lugulu to Nairobi. International mail took weeks and often months to reach us. Phone calls cost a fortune. We lived out in the bush, as people called it. The US was so far away that in 1981 when we got a package from Uncle John in Chicago containing an audiocassette of the ethereal music to Chariots of Fire, my parents thought the film was about aliens.

The story of my parents' first year as missionaries is part of family lore. When we first arrived, Ben at age five learned from his new Kenyan friends how to swear in Bukusu, the local tribal language. One of the neighbors came to my mother and said, "Do you know what your son's saying?" My mom was appalled. Ben was sitting at the top of a guava tree cussing. Not long afterward, he threw a stick at our next-door neighbor, a woman named Florah. Throwing sticks at the neighbor doesn't usually come recommended in the manual on how to start missionary life. Swearing from the top of a tree doesn't come recommended either.

As the child of my missionary parents, I have my own memories, one of which is captured in a photograph that I've kept all these years. My brothers and I are sitting with our dad in a dead baobab tree. We're crouched together in the heart of the tree where the branches depart from the trunk, looking small in the great expanse around us and yet safe in our father's arms. The picture is framed in a wide panorama. Mount Kilimanjaro rises behind us. The Rift Valley savanna spreads out to the east and west, part of a three-thousand-mile basin that cuts a long swathe from Syria all the way south to Mozambique.

Historically, the Rift is purported to be the origin of all humanity. To me, it represents the origin of my childhood not just geographically — I grew up on the high plains that run west of the Rift — but spiritually. I came to faith in that place. The trajectory of my spiritual history began there. My relationship with the church began there too.

Every Sunday in Lugulu, we attended a nondenominational church that met in an A-frame auditorium. I liked church as a kid. For most of the ser vice, we stood singing, almost seven hundred people clapping and shaking our tambourines as mourning doves hovered and cooed in the rafters above. The auditorium had tall windows that were almost always left open. Walking across the compound toward the church, you could hear the sound of the congregation swelling and lifting in song. I've never heard anything like it again.

As a multilingual church, we sang both in English and in Swahili. One of the hymns was called "Mungu Yu Mwema":

Mungu yu mwema (God is so good), Mungu yu mwema (God is so good), Mungu yu mwema (God is so good), Yu mwema kwangu (He is so good to me).

That hymn reminds me of my childhood in Kenya the way sugar cane and hibiscus flowers remind me of that time. It conjures up, too, a whole community of people who raised me to believe in God and in God's goodness.

Over the fence behind our house lived Florah Ashene, the woman Ben threw a stick at when we first arrived. She taught home economics at the local high school and took part in a weekly Bible study with my parents and other neighbors in Lugulu. All the kids in the study memorized Bible verses and then recited them to parents in the fellowship. When it was Florah's turn to be my "Scripture auntie," I walked over to her house, stood in her kitchen, and said my passage by heart. She hugged me and sent me home with bananas.

Down the road lived Elijah Malenji, a man who became like an uncle to the kids in the community. He loved on us and prayed for us. As an evangelist with Trinity Fellowship, he owned an old reel-to-reel film projector and used to show Christian films like The Pilgrim's Progress at the high school auditorium where we met for church or on the hospital wards where my dad worked. We watched the '70s version with bad actors wearing fake, pointy beards and black Puritan hats. I remember sitting in the dark on the hospital's cold cement floor, listening to the sound of filmstrip ticking through the film reel as moths crossed the projector beam and Pilgrim trudged through the Slough of Despond.

Next door to us lived a Ugandan refugee named Betsy Kamuka, who worked with my dad at the hospital as head nurse and director of the medical student program. She was a smart, tough woman whose husband had left her to raise their son, Ivan, alone. We called her "Auntie Betsy." If other people in Lugulu were like backup singers for my spiritual formation, then Auntie Betsy was the lead gospel singer. She was the one who led me to faith. I was converted to Christian ity not by my religious parents, strangely, but by an African Christian living in Lugulu.

On the day of my conversion, I had gone over to Betsy's house to cook with her, something I did often. Her kitchen was the size of a closet with a small window facing south into the sun. That afternoon, while she and I sat beside a Kenyan jiko stove stirring a pot of frying onions, she asked me questions in the style of an informal catechism.

Do you know that God made you and loves you?

Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins?

Do you want to follow Jesus?

I don't remember what I said, exactly. But I remember insignificant details, those fragmented snapshots of a child's memory, like the can of Blue Band margarine sitting on the ground beside us as we talked and cooked. I remember, too, the feel of the cold iron frame of Betsy's bed after she invited me back into her room to ask Jesus into my heart. I held onto it while kneeling down in the dim light and leaning my head against the mattress to pray. There was no fanfare and no emotional frenzy. The experience seemed almost matter-of-fact. In the Lugulu community, learning about God was tantamount to learning about gravity. You had to understand it to make sense of things. Simple as that. After we prayed, Betsy said "Amen," and then we went back to her kitchen to cook.

As I look back now, I see my child self as another person, the kid I once was kneeling by a bed and making a significant existential decision. I'm not sure I had full awareness of what it meant. But what stands out more than the moment of my conversion are the years surrounding it, the larger religious context that set the course for the rest of my life. I grew up in a cross-cultural Christian community driven by an intense sense of ultimate purpose. Everything mattered. Every person mattered. Every moment mattered.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Faith and Other Flat Tires by Andrea Palpant Dilley Copyright © 2012 by Andrea Palpant Dilley . Excerpted by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword by Jerry Sittser....................11
Acknowledgments....................15
Introduction: Stripping Off the Ichthus....................19
1. Mungu Yu Mwema....................27
2. Darth Vader Loves Jesus....................43
3. Why Isn't God Like Eric Clapton?....................55
4. Waiting for Godot....................73
5. Letters to God....................87
6. Afraid of Being the Bologna Sandwich....................95
7. The Prayer of Unbelief....................105
8. A Wasteland....................117
9. My Car, My Cathedral....................131
10. The Church Wears High-Waisted Pants....................143
11. You Do Not Have to Be Good....................159
12. Atticus Finch....................171
13. Gandhi Lives Next Door....................181
14. Three Flat Tires....................197
15. Into the Dark....................209
16. A Strange, Insipid Beer Party....................217
17. Taking My Demons to Church....................229
18. Cat Litter and Nail Polish....................239
19. My Weltschmertz....................255
20. What Church Should Feel Like....................265
21. All I Need Is a Land Rover....................277
22. A Passing Light....................287
23. A Melancholy Christian....................295
Credits....................301

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'I did not intend to read this book--but then I started and couldn't stop. What a relief: a young adult faith memoir for people I actually know. Andrea Palpant Dilley is refreshingly, winsomely straight-up without being angsty or impossibly pious. She has questions about God, real questions, bottom line questions, and at the end of the day she leaves room for a faith where everything doesn't have to be tied together with a neat Jesus-y bow. Instead, Dilley raises the possibility--the hope--that honest Christian faith has loose ends, and that God is fine with that. By the end of the book, I wanted more of both God and Andrea Dilley.' -- Kenda Creasy Dean, Professor of youth, church, and culture, Princeton Theological Seminary, Author of Almost Christian

'Truth. Reality. Meaning. Where do we find these elusive treasures in a skewed, surreal, and often seemingly meaningless world of unspeakable suffering? In this story of her young life, Andrea Palpant Dilley, missionary child and modern woman, struggles with these great life questions in such an honest, literate, and engaging way that the reader is swept into her story as a fellow searcher for truth. Like all of us, she still struggles to find all the answers. But she has learned where 'tires are fixed' on the journey. I believe that in this book we are witnessing the birth of a major contemporary writer.' -- Frederick Dale Bruner, Wasson Professor of Theology Emeritus, Whitworth University. Author of commentaries on The Gospel

“Andrea Dilley’s literary stroll down her own particular path of faith reminds us that while that way is narrow, it is also, at times, rather curvy and fraught with obstacles. Her winsome recollections are a balm for anyone walking a similar journey.” -- Tracy Balzer, author of Thin Places: An Evangelical Journey Into Celtic Christianity and A Listening Life.

'Andrea compellingly writes a contemporary conversion narrative mixed with a cultural travelogue, as a representative of a generation that grew up in and struggled with one corner of the Christian landscape. It is written with a story-teller's ear and an English major's eye. For those who work around the church this is a must-read, to see the generation we long to reach.” -- Jim Singleton, Senior Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Colorado Springs, CO

'With honesty and candor, Andrea Palpant shares her sense of displacement, as a 'third-culture kid' finding her way in America and as a once confident Christian beset with doubt and confusion in a postmodern world. I suspect many readers will find themselves in the questions that drive her away from faith. I also pray that, in her story, they will also see a pathway back. At this time in our culture, and in the church, we are in need of people like Andrea, who do not shy away from their questions and doubts, who do not fear bearing their souls, and who show us a way through to the other side of faith.' -- Dr. Steve Sherwood, Asst. Professor of Christian Ministry, George Fox University and Young Life Regional Trainer.

“Andrea Palpant Dilley’s bracingly honest memoir serves as an antidote both to the negative view of missionary families popularized by such books as The Poisonwood Bible, and to simplified stories of Christian conversion. Her unconventional story of reconversion, mapped against key events of Pilgrim’s Progress, argues for both the unique trajectory of each individual experience and for shared themes in the long process of transformation. Her own rediscovery and embrace of her identity and community is shown, wisely, to be the starting point for what is “yet a long road in front of [her].” We hope that this fine and passionate young writer will take us along on her journey as it unfolds.” -- Maxine Hancock, Ph.D, Professor Emerita of Interdisciplinary Studies, Regent College, Vancouver, B.C., Canada; Author, Gol

“After summiting Mt. Rainier, John Muir wrote to his wife, ‘I did not mean to climb it, but got excited and soon was on top.’ That's how I felt when I finished reading Faith and Other Flat Tires during a very busy week. Seldom have I been so touched by the truth and ache of a spiritual memoir. Andrea Palpant Dilley's writing is fresh and clean and direct---you will examine your own soul through hers.” -- Paul J. Willis, author of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild