Road Trippin’ with Tyndale and Tessa Afshar: Stop #4

Road Trippin’ with Tyndale and Tessa Afshar: Stop #4

Welcome to Tyndale Fiction’s Road Trip Scavenger Hunt! We’re so happy you are here. To participate, collect the key words through all 13 stops in order, so you can enter to win our grand prize giveaway!

Some details:

• The adventure begins at Francine Rivers’s blog on August 1. You’ll have two weeks to make your way through all the stops (giveaways will close on Tuesday, August 14).
• While you do not have to start at Stop #1, keep in mind that the grand prize giveaway phrase will begin with the word you collect at that first stop.
• To complete your submission for the grand prize giveaway, be sure to collect the key word within each author’s blog post, submitting the final, completed phrase in the form hosted on this page.
• Also, be sure to enter the giveaways these authors are hosting on their blogs!

Enjoy the journey—we hope you’ll discover new books along the way as you hear from Tyndale Fiction authors about road trips, the settings of their novels, and more!

Happy road tripping!

————-

Friends, I can’t wait to introduce you to Tessa Afshar, a Christy Award–winning author of biblical fiction. Tessa’s latest release, Thief of Corinth—out just this month—is about a female thief in first-century Corinth who encounters the radical message of Paul. It has received starred reviews from BOTH Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. Tessa was born in Iran and lived there before moving first to England and then to the United States. Her conversion to Christianity in her twenties changed the course of her life forever. Tessa holds an MDiv from Yale Divinity School, and she worked full-time in ministry before recently deciding to write full-time. Welcome, Tessa!

The Road Trip Not Taken

Sometimes road trips are about who, not where.

Every summer when I was a child in Iran, we packed our bags and moved to the seashore for two months. The Caspian Sea, which is in fact the largest lake in the world, was a three-hour drive from our home. The narrow road leading north twisted up hair-pin turns, hugging a deadly drop to one side and craggy mountains to the other.

My father was a busy radiologist and could only join us for a couple of weeks when the summer heat reached its zenith and drove the hordes out of the capital. Those were my favorite days of the year, when the whole family came together and the real world disappeared into the shadows. We swam in the sea, took meandering walks, played cards, and frequented our favorite restaurants. We didn’t bother to take too many photos. We inhabited the moments, and the moments became memories.

One year when we were returning home at the end of our holiday, my father slammed the car to a sudden stop in the middle of the road. Without explanation, he opened the driver’s door and got out. We were flabbergasted by this unusual development. The road was too narrow for loitering. He bent down just in front of the car, and when he straightened up, he was holding a large turtle. “I found a hitchhiker,” he said.

He had braked barely in time to save it from being crushed under our wheels. To my indescribable delight, he brought the turtle to the car, and my aunt offered up her fashionable straw hat to nestle our guest in as we drove home. She never did use that hat again. The turtle became a reclusive member of the family and lived in our garden for many years.

There is something magical about road trips. Perhaps it’s the fact that for a short while you escape life’s nagging demands, or maybe it’s merely that you are with the people you love best, or that when you least expect it, God sends you unexpected gifts, like a turtle that stops you in your tracks.

Whatever the reason, I have a fondness for road trips. I am not the only one. King David liked them too. When life became oppressive, he said, “I would fly away and be at rest; yes. I would wander far away; I would lodge in the wilderness.”

Sometimes, life doesn’t give you that option. The practicalities get in the way. It seems more often than not, these days I take work trips instead of road trips.

Last year when I was writing my novel Thief of Corinth, I became desperate for a road trip with my husband. I had been working without a break for months and longed to escape the increasing pressures of a life that felt too full. Over months of research, I had become enchanted with Corinth and wanted to visit it in person.

The Romans, who had annihilated Corinth as punishment for a rebellion, had resurrected her two hundred years later from the ashes of its destruction. The new city was a boomtown, a land of opportunity where adventurers went to make their fortunes. Many of Corinth’s inhabitants were on the naughty side. In his letter to the house churches he helped to build there, Paul said they had been greedy, immoral, drunkard, slanderers and swindlers before Jesus grabbed hold of them (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). Perfect place for a road trip!

But the timing was wrong and my husband and I couldn’t go.

Instead, God asked me to take a spiritual road trip. A journey of the soul with him. “Arise and go, for this is no place to rest,” I read in Micah (2:10). And I knew God was telling me that I was not supposed to arise and go on a road trip. Rather, I was to arise and go to him, the restorer of my heart.

Sometimes when we most need rest, the best road trip is the one that happens on the inside. The one that brings us battling and striving to the arms of Christ and helps us to rest, not because we have managed to escape our difficult circumstances, but because we have found his presence.

Sometimes road trips are about who, not where.

Micah says of the Messiah: “And he shall be their peace” (5:5). That’s what I found at the end of the road trip I never took. My peace.

—————

Here’s the Stop #4 Important Information:

• You can purchase Tessa’s book, The Thief of Corinth, here. 
• Clue to write down: road
• Link to Stop #5, the next stop in the scavenger hunt, on Tessa’s Site!

Thank you for visiting, Tessa! I so enjoyed getting to know you better, and I’m sure readers will as well! (And I always brake for turtles!)

For my giveaway, I am offering The Alliance series and a bona fide “Survival Seed Vault.” This would especially come in handy if you were on a road trip and an EMP went off. 😉 You could use The Alliance series for research and then plant your heirloom seeds. Or you can just stash the entire can in your freezer until next year’s planting season.

To enter, subscribe to my blog and tell me your favorite road trip memory in the comments! (To subscribe, simply click on the “Notify me of new posts by email” tab when you comment.) I will reveal the winner on August 15th. Sadly, due to shipping costs, giveaway is applicable to contiguous US residents only.

If you would like to read how my love story started with a story (and a road trip!), you can visit my post on author Heidi Chiavaroli’s blog! See you there! 🙂