Fifteen years ago, in a faraway land, I used to write stories of living and teaching in southwestern Germany. I’d write them here, little anecdotes from the tiny world in which I lived. In the beginning, it was called, quite descriptively, “Kristi Is Teaching in Germany.” Like anyone raising financial support as a missionary in…
Author: Kristi
Teacher. Writer. Traveler. Learning to see God everywhere.
Seventh Grade
I remember seventh grade better than the other grades. That’s not true, actually. I had only five whole school years where I went to school and sat in a desk beside classmates. Five sets of teachers and schedules. Five school pictures and years with both a first and last day of school. So I remember…
Wading on Epiphanies
At 3:00 PM, the day looks inauspicious, and the plan that I crafted myself before dawn—a plan predicated on a dry Sunday afternoon—seems less pleasant than I’d hoped it would be. I had imagined sitting on a bench while kids skated and scooted around me. I’d imagined tea and apple slices and golden hour at…
Things That Made 2024 Better
I’ve long finished the year with a list of what made it a better year than it could have been. I’ve always hedged it so carefully, not wanting to label a year “good” or “bad,” when it was so often both, and everything in between. All I have ever been willing to say is, in…
In The Bike Lane
The first time they rode in a real bike lane—not the sidewalk or a wading pool, not an empty parking lot or a school playground—I saw my daughters’ lives flash before my eyes. But not precisely the way you think. I promise. It was this spring, the first genuinely hot May morning, when we woke…
Fake Grass & Real Friends
The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings. You’ve Got Mail (1998) I don’t remember whose idea it was to sit down in the first…
Why We Ride
First, something else I didn’t do for money: I recently published a collection of poems that I’ve written over the past five years into a small poetry book. My commemoration of a season of being mostly at home full-time with small kids, it is called Small Prints, a title taken from a blog post by…
Spiral Places
I once called this a spiral place. Nineteen, full of vague longing (to feel safe, confident, connected) and pointed questions (“So, will I just be single forever, then?”), I sat on a sand dune in late summer and wrote myself a letter. They told us to, the staff members running this retreat for student leaders,…
Things That Made 2023 Better
Notes from the past year, from a gloriously cool and cloudy New Years’ Day. It has been a surprising year in many ways, full to the brim with change and growth and activity, only a little of which made it into words here. Still, looking back before looking ahead has been my practice, a moment…
The Way Home 