Review: "Faith and Other Flat Tires"

I was offered a free review copy of Faith and Other Flat Tires by Andrea Palpant Dilley published Zondervan. I thank Handlebar Marketing for the book and the opportunity to read and review this book.  [I am posting this review on my blog and Amazon.com.]

            Dilley’s memoir is a funny, painful, thought-provoking, and faith seeking literary accomplishment. The overall format takes the reader through a Bunyanesque Pilgrim's Progress of the daughter of Quaker missionaries to Kenya.

            She begins her story as a young child, acquainting the reader with the simplicity and the faith-affirming youth that she enjoyed as her parents’ daughter. After returning to the United States, she began to experience and question things that were off-limits in Kenya: rock music, secular literature, and whether everything that she had been taught about Christianity was actually true. This memoir is an honest look at a Christian upbringing and whether it makes sense in the world today.

            In high school and college, she continued to question and eventually considered herself to have left or lost her faith. She says she wondered what Jesus had to do with literature and film, she wondered why she received more joy in music than in listening to a sermon, and she wondered why God gave us senses but no sensory proof that He exists (107).

            She wandered through sex, drugs, and alcohol, and the complexities of literature, trying to find hope and help and meaning for the reality of the world around her. Eventually, her search brought her back to church: she writes, “Yes, I'll always have my demons. But I might as well take my demons to church” (231).  She brought what she believed was true and good and right along with all of her questions, sat them down in a pew, finally meeting a man that found God big enough to allow for questions, big enough to reach out and care for other people, big enough to look at the problem of evil and find love.

            The memoir does not end with a rigorous theological statement of belief, but rather with a peace in finding good and worth in the world – and in God and Christianity. She is still seeking to understand, but she is doing it in a positive and hopeful way.

            I found her book is very readable, very enjoyable, and above all, truthful. There many people who struggle with the things that they see around them and desire to ask questions, but in the church – as well as other places – they find themselves shut down and shut out and shut up. That should not be: if a person has questions and concerns and needs to understand what reality is, who God is, and what life is, the very place that they should be finding guidance – and even answers – is in the church, and from Christian people. Too often, out of fear or ignorance, Christians chase people away rather than interacting with them, trying to understand them, and walking with them. I hope this book will encourage people with questions, as well as those who think they have the answers, to be compassionate and not give up, but to search for the God who is there.