“I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to a friend, “is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith. … Peter [sic] said, ‘Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.’ It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.” During late college, at the start of my faith crisis, the “prayer of unbelief” was the only prayer that passed my lips. But it was still a prayer.

From Faith and Other Flat Tires by Andrea Palpant Dilley, published by HarperCollins