As publisher of Lake Drive Books, I have the honor of working with authors who are courageous enough to put their raw, real stories into the world. Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with one such author, Lauren Cibene, for a video interview about her new book, Tiger in a Lifeboat: Discovering India, Deconstructing Faith, and Deciding to Trust Again.
Lauren's book centers around a pivotal season of her life, where personal heartbreak, anxiety, and deep spiritual questions collided in a way that left her feeling completely unmoored. Seeking healing and new perspectives, Lauren and her husband took a chance: they bought deeply discounted plane tickets and headed to India on three weeks’ notice. What follows is an extraordinary journey—not just across the globe, but into the interior spaces of faith, fear, trust, and personal transformation.
At its core, Tiger in the Lifeboat is a memoir of spiritual and emotional survival. It blends faith deconstruction, recovery from trauma (emotional, relational, spiritual), personal empowerment and rediscovery, and travel memoir, using India as both setting and metaphor for transformation.
When Fear Looks Like Courage: Saying Yes in the Face of Anxiety
Lauren opens up about how traveling to India placed her face-to-face with her deepest fears. Whether it was confronting health challenges, grappling with intense homesickness, or relying on strangers who spoke different languages and lived by unfamiliar customs, she was constantly being asked by life itself: Do you trust?
Trust became the central, unavoidable theme of her journey—not just trusting others, but also trusting the Divine again, and perhaps hardest of all, trusting herself. Like trust, courage, she says, rarely feels like courage in the moment. It feels like fear. The difference comes down to a small, essential shift: deciding that fear won’t be the one making your decisions.
For anyone going through faith deconstruction, anxiety, or even just questioning where they belong in a rapidly changing world, Lauren's story is a balm. It's about learning to navigate profound uncertainty with honesty and hope. It’s about moving forward without having all the answers. It's about rediscovering trust in a world that no longer feels ordered or safe—and realizing that maybe you had more courage all along than you thought.
If you're looking for inspiration to keep going, if you need permission to trust yourself again, if you want to see what transformation looks like up close (without any filters or easy answers), I encourage you to watch the interview with Lauren, and of course, get a copy of Tiger in a Lifeboat, available now.
You can find Lauren on her Substack newsletter, where she continues these kinds of honest conversations, and on Instagram. Learn more about her at laurencibene.com.
Thank you for supporting authors like Lauren who dare to tell the truth about what it’s like to heal, grow, and trust again.
Warmly,
David Morris
Publisher, Lake Drive Books
Lauren Cibene is a doubtful-yet-hopeful Jesus person, gym rat, bookworm, writer, and author of Tiger in a Lifeboat: Discovering India, Deconstructing Faith, and Deciding to Trust Again. She used to be a confident evangelical, a homeschool student, a foster mom, a world traveler, a professional photographer. Now she’s a business co-owner and daylights as a conversion copywriter, penning words even non-readers read—descriptions on product packaging and Amazon pages—but she moonlights over on Substack. She lives with her husband near Atlanta.
