So I’ve been blogging for almost four months now. After a few ups and downs, I feel like I have a fairly good groove going into 2017. It’s a lot more work than I anticipated (who knew??), but I am hoping to post a couple of times a week moving forward.

A Look Back:

Google Analytics is a nifty little site that tells you all kinds of information about the action happening on your blog. Most of it is fairly indecipherable to me, but I have noticed a few fun facts:

• I am up to almost 4000 page views. That’s miniscule in blogland, but I kind of think it’s amazing. There have been 4000 moments when a person chose to spend their time reading something I wrote. If you represent any of those 4000 moments, I really do thank you. (I hope your 1 minute, 38 seconds was meaningful. That’s the average amount of time spent on my site, FYI.)
• My blog has been read in 39 countries. That blows my mind. I have a lot of Facebook friends that live overseas for different reasons, but 39 is a lot of countries. Page views have taken place in Libya, Sri Lanka, and the Netherlands – and I don’t even know people in those countries! And my third most popular country (after the U.S. and Russia) is Austria. Who knew!? Hello my Austrian friends — all 62 of you! Thanks for reading! I’m glad I drank all that Café Vienna in the 80s.
• Not surprising: my readers are mostly women (with a tiny percentage of men: Hi Dad!)
• My three most popular posts involved some thoughts on punctuation, my Oprah list, and the first time I posted about being on The Broken Way launch team. Fun! I liked those posts too.
• I had five page views on Christmas Day. I don’t know why this strikes me so deeply, but it does. It is meaningful to me to know someone was reading my blog on the most celebrated holiday of the year.

What’s Ahead:

The fun thing about having a blog is that I get to be the boss of me, and nobody is telling me to do anything a certain way. Of course no one is paying me anything either, so there’s that. #tradeoff

I am not sure exactly what’s ahead for this little blog, but I know this:

I love kids.

I love music.

I want to help kids love music.

I love writing music.

I want kids to love music.

I want kids to love the music I write.

Most everything I do will fall under all those things.

But then there is also this:

I do other things besides music.

I like to write.

I might write about things besides music.

So who knows?! Whatever is ahead, I know I am having a good time in this little space. I hope you are too.

The Immediate Future:

I am launching a new series for 2017 that I am really excited about! Hopefully it will serve as a super accessible way to get great music into your kids’ ears. Come back Thursday for all the details!

Finally, thanks so much for reading. If you are one of my 1,350 unique visitors, really, I thank you.

Here’s to great music in 2017!

Kristi

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Back in September I filled out a online form applying to join the launch team for Ann Voskamp’s new book, The Broken Way. 1000 Gifts, Ann’s first book, had been a game-changer for me – so anything written by Ann = I’m in. I didn’t think much about it and was fairly shocked to find out I had been accepted when I got an email a couple of weeks later.

In addition to receiving a free copy of the book, the launch team members were invited to an event in Voskamp farm country – including a gathering at Ann’s house. In Canada. 

We had two weeks notice to get our travel plans together. I checked my passport (thankfully, still good) and started checking flights (Toronto? Detroit? Buffalo?) for an option that wouldn’t break the bank. The cost of flight + hotel + rental car was starting to feel daunting.

Enter Angel Anne:

I connected with Angel Anne through the launch team Facebook group. Anne (with an e) lives in Rochester, NY, about a four hour drive from the Voskamp farm. She was planning to take a day trip for the event and invited me to ride along with her – plus offered to pick me up at the airport and host me for two nights in her home. See, Angel.

Also, Anne has pet donkeys.

I was out of reasons to say no, so I booked a flight to Canada. Ok, technically, it was flight to Rochester. When you are from the south, all of it feels very Great White North.

Pic of me at the airport:

Very excited!

Also, plane snacks:

I drink ginger ale on airplanes.

I arrived in Rochester and was greeted by Angel Anne, her copy of The Broken Way in hand. It felt like a moment from a reality show — searching the airport for the person holding the same book as you.

After Anne fed her donkeys (for real) we had tea and got to know each other. Anne is 20+ years older than me, with twice my energy. She runs her own business, travels, takes mission trips, loves her church, and generally gives her life away at every turn. I want to be Anne when I grow up. We went to dinner and caught an upstate New York sunset on the way home.

It’s pretty up there, y’all.

We left at 4:45am the next morning, which was painful, I won’t lie. It was made a bit easier by an early stop at Tim Hortons, a Canadian institution I was excited to try. It’s kind of a like Dunkin Donuts, sort of? Is there a better descriptor?

I’m not sure you are ready for this face:

It was practically the middle of the night and I was excited. Let’s go with it.

Onward.

Sunrise over the Niagara River:

And another stop at a travel center. The funny thing about this photo is that I took it from my place in line at Starbucks – behind one person. Tim Hortons is a whole big thing, but I didn’t want to wait that long for coffee.

Much of the drive was along Lake Ontario on the Queen Elizabeth Highway. It was just a highway, but I was practically in an episode of Downton Abbey. Look at the signs:

The crowns! All of a sudden I feel like having tea.

After four hours on the road and multiple cups of Tim Hortons/Starbucks coffee, we were finally close to the farm.

Lots of Amish influence. It was very peaceful.

And then, we pulled up to Ann’s house. I’m not going to show all the photos I took, because that seems a little invasive to the Voskamp family. But don’t think I didn’t take a lot. #stalker

Hugging Ann:

Here’s the thing about Ann Voskamp: she is who you think she is. Authentic. Real. Humble. All those words. She lives the life she writes about. So refreshing in our filtered, airbrushed, and carefully edited culture. The Voskamp family radiates authenticity – a pretty priceless quality these days.

Okay, just one photo from Ann’s house. I can’t resist:

After the gathering at Ann’s house, we headed to the afternoon event – held at this gorgeous barn:

We had hot cider, snacks, and soaked in the gorgeous views.

Then Ann read from The Broken Way:

Pictured here with her precious daughter, reading a significant story from the first chapter that sets up the content of the book. 

The barn gathering was a quiet, sweet time of hearing Ann read her own words. It was Gospel-saturated and beautiful in every way. She pointed us to Christ. There was true fellowship, koinonia, in that room that day. None of us wanted it to end.

One last selfie from Canadian farm country:

After sweet goodbyes to new friends, Anne and I reluctantly tore ourselves away from the farm and began our 4+ hour trek home. We stopped for dinner at — one guess — Tim Hortons. (I was nothing if not fully committed to the Canadian experience.)

We collapsed in bed for what can only be called a nap, since we had to leave for the airport at 4am. I left Angel Anne, boarded my plane, and was back in my classroom by noon.

I’m so grateful for the experience. So grateful for Ann + Anne — and grateful for memories I will keep forever.

XOXO,

Kristi

I will have review of The Broken Way up on the blog soon. It is so rich I cannot read it quickly, really just a couple of pages at a time. I am about halfway through and can’t recommend it enough. 

Ann Voskamp has also written beautiful books for the Advent season. I’m in my second year reading her devotional for adults, The Greatest Gift. Unwrapping the Greatest Gift is her version for kids. Both are full of powerful reminders that Christ is on every page of the Old Testament. 

This post contains affiliate links, which means if you click and/or purchase anything I recommend, I might make a small commission. Thank you for your support! 

A couple of weeks ago I filled out a little form applying to join the launch team for Ann Voskamp’s new book, The Broken Way. Friday, I received an email saying I had been selected. Being the good little blogger I am, I instagrammed and tweeted, and then this happened:

Our friendship now firmly established, Ann and I have some things to tell you. She has a new book coming, and it’s about to break us all wide open.

Sitting to write this post, it is tempting to try and channel my inner-Ann, with poetic phrases and poignant metaphor. But let’s be real: I trade more in the subtle currency of sarcasm and pith.

I’m not that poetic. I’m not that flowery. And perhaps that’s why I love Ann’s writing so much. (And, to recap, Ann tweeted me once, so we are #firstname friends.)

Maybe I love Ann’s writing because she figured out a way to devote multiple paragraphs to the celebration of shredded cheese. (One Thousand Gifts, chapter 3, if you don’t know what I am talking about.)

Gratitude for cheese is always something I can get behind.

Perhaps I am a fan of Ann’s writing because our modern world has replaced poetry with sound bites. We’ve sacrificed 140 line sonnets for 140 character tweets. Perhaps we have forgotten there can be a lot to say about important things.

Speaking, describing, illustrating – being vulnerable – at the highest emotional place is risky, and people might say isn’t that a little over the top?

And I think – yes. Yes, it is. Because if there was ever a topic to go over the top about, isn’t it Jesus?

Should speaking about Jesus, and the Cross, and the blood poured out on our behalf incite only emotions that rest in the nebulous middle? Words like pleasant? Agreeable? Nice?

Isn’t Jesus’s brokenness on our behalf worth a lot of words? A lot of vivid, expressive, histrionic words?

Ann is a master at words. And she writes them down for us. She is a self-described broken vessel, nothing but a conduit of grace. The Broken Way is for all of us who are broken. And who among us isn’t broken?

(And I don’t mean to draw attention, but wasn’t that last sentence just so very, very Ann? I’m working on my flowering.)

As a member of the midwife delivery team for the birthing of this book, I get to be a part of a private launch-team Facebook group. In barely 72 hours, people have shared griefs that make me weep. It’s a hurting world, and we all hurt. Apparently none of us gets to skip the hurting. It’s a requirement of Christ-followers.

But here’s the thing: the hurting isn’t something to simply be endured. The hurting is the thing. The brokenness is not a hiccup or a speed bump on the way to joy. The miraculous-ness of the Gospel tells us, somehow, it is the joy.

But how can that be?

I suspect The Broken Way will be a bit of a navigational guide. Just a beat-up sailor friend, one who has faced down some deathly storms and come out on the other side, sharing her story on how to ride the surges of brokenness.

You know the quote:

“Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”

D.T. Niles

I suspect The Broken Way is also a shelter gathering. A group of beggars gathering to remind each other where the Bread is. The Bread that was broken on our behalf. Manna that comes just enough. Never more, never less.

So we gather: battered sailors, hungry beggars. Daughters, wives, friends. Partakers of cheese. Partakers of the holy, broken Bread that is the source of all sustenance.

The Farmer comes in from the barn, leaves a bucket from the henhouse at the back door with his boots. I can hear him washing up at the mudroom’s porcelain sink. He steps into the kitchen. I look up from the dishes. He’s seen it already. The man can read my eyes better than he reads the skies. Sometimes all our unspoken broken speaks louder than anything we could ever say. He reads my slow breaking over the kid’s lightning- bolt news and all my not-enoughness that I can’t even grope through the pain to find words for.

He pulls me into himself, enfolds me. And then, into the quiet, he says it so soft I almost miss it, what I have held on to more than a thousand times since.

“You know—everything all across this farm says the same thing, you know that, right?” He waits till I let him look me in the eye, let him look into me and all this fracturing. “The seed breaks to give us the wheat. The soil breaks to give us the crop, the sky breaks to give us the rain, the wheat breaks to give us the bread. And the bread breaks to give us the feast.”

Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way

We shall break bread together when The Broken Way releases October 25^th. I will receive a free copy of the book, but all thoughts and text are my own. My #firstname friend Ann is not at all responsible for my weak attempts at emulating her poetic prose. That’s all on me.

 More information at www.thebrokenway.com.

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