I actually really really really love the fall and am hoping it comes back some time soon. For someone who did not grow up with changing leaves, apple orchards, or an actual need for a good windbreaker it is all very exciting. Season changes mark the passing time so well. They establish good memories and shifts in your life. Last year I was working at a school, living with a friend, planning a wedding. This year I am….brace yourselves….four months pregnant! That’s right, folks: married for five, pregnant for four, and so our lives go.

Needless to say, Joey and I are incredibly excited. As scary as coming into adulthood has been, I have to say that it has also been a series of little revelations of what the real adventure of my life will prove to be: loving my husband, raising my family, heading together towards heaven. It is all much sweeter than I imagined it would be. I have dreams almost every night about this baby. In most of them, she is a girl. In one of them, she came out as a toddler. Let’s pray that does not happen.

I am so thankful for the ways God has attached me to Himself in this journey; and for the ways He has shown me, in spite of my misguided perceptions, that real success is loving Him and being known in Him above and beyond anything else I thought it was. Not everything becomes clear in relationship with God. But, what is always present in Him is abundant life that is ours to have.

Many of you know and have followed all that has happened with our friend Bob Lesnefsky (www.prayfortheb.com). He and his wife are the kind of people that make your life one-hundred percent better just by being in it. If you have ever spent even a short amount of time with either of them, you know that for yourself. I could go on about it, but suffice it to say, there are no two people in this world like Bob and Kate. He is doing so much better and they have said to us again and again how difficult it will be to express all the gratitude they feel for all the support they have received. A lot of kids in our ministry and people who are generally concerned have asked why something like this would happen to someone like Bob. I think God has utmost patience for and even loves our moments of deep questioning. But, I just wanted to say: being able to watch their family walk through this has confirmed what I knew was true about God. He is always present. I have no idea why things happen or why my friends are struggling through such a burden; but I see them still loving their children and each other, still hoping, still laughing, reaching out to those around them and I know that that is the presence of God in their lives. There is no other way to be sustained in this world.

So, thanks for your prayers and be encouraged. In everything, He is there. “He goes before all things and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). Peace! ~KPL

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It’s the fresh and refreshed experiences in life that make you feel like you really do have one (a life, i mean). I still can’t put to words my thoughts on marriage and the changes my course has taken here in the last few weeks, but I can say this. I love my husband’s ability to pull me into the moment. That part of his person is essential to me. I sometimes struggle to be present. I am so caught up in what I am doing, what I am not doing, what I think I should be doing, the reasons I feel I am not doing whatever it is I think I could or should be doing. And he’s the one to say, “hey- let’s go to a drive in movie.” And then I am sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of a field in a tiny town in Ohio watching “Night at the Museum” and eating a literal tub of popcorn. And I am in the moment and happy to be… I remember it’s the only place there really is. This afternoon we sat in a patch of grass between the back of our apartment building and the alley in our bathing suits, trying to ignore the dumpster, playing music, and talking about our lives. It is good to plan and good to dream, but today, sitting in the grass is my life. Moral of the story: Don’t miss what’s happening around you because you are trying so hard to figure it all out. I am thinking that all things will get figured and all we really have to work with is right now. Go to a drive-in. Eat a candy apple. Chase down the ice cream truck. You will thank me in the morning. Peace! ~KP

At the moment, I am sitting in an elementary school classroom. It’s the classroom I have worked in for the past year and a half. A lot of you probably don’t know this, but I spent a short stent on a Christian record label in Nashville. I signed the deal my senior year of college and I thought that was that. My plan was set. It’s funny…when I picture myself as a kid, I realize that I just believed I would grow up and become famous somehow. Signing a record deal felt like it was that simple. I saw in my mind my songs on the radio, being on big-name tours, and lots of glamorous photo shoots. There is so much I could say about what it has been like for me living through the early twenties of my life. I have been so surprised (what do you mean, I’m 20 and I’m not famous yet?!?) by the changes of “plan”. I guess what I would like to write most in the big scheme of things is all I have found in learning to go with the flow.

After about two years, I split from the label in a little bit painful (mostly hurt pride), but very necessary moment of change in my life. I had been continuously writing, travelling, and recording my music just as I do now. But, I had also done a few other things I had not planned on up to this point: worked in a pottery shop, at a restaurant, sold kool-aid full time for a while (I kid, I kid) waiting for fame and fortune to magically arrive. Things were happening that hadn’t been part of my said plan and I was realizing how much of my soul had been comsumed by my idea of success and meaning and by the plan itself. You know that I moved to Ohio, you know that I met a man, you know that I became invested in a ministry that has changed everything I thought I knew about success and happiness. But, something else really providential happened in my life at that point that I want to share with you.

I, Kelly Pease, got a real-life job teaching music in a Catholic Elementary School. Now, keep in mind that my plan for my life was insta-fame. I never imagined that I would undergo the pains of the responsibility that come with being a normal human being. I mean, hello?!? Have you seen all of my stage clothes?? Do you know how cool I am?? (Hopefully, you are hearing the undertones of sarcasm as I ridicule my own vanity…but, seriously…have you seen my stage clothes?) But, I needed a job because I needed to eat and also because God had a new abundance of life He needed to give me.

So, I wake up at 6 to leave my house at 7 to get to work by 8. I sing songs with six-year olds like “Father Abraham” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It”. I teach the values of quarter notes and half notes. We clap rhythms and take tests and name the lines and spaces on the staff. It’s more than a hop, skip, and a jump away from having a multi-platinum record. And not because it is far away from so-called “fame”, but because it has been a part of the good God’s plan for me, has it brought me closer to the person I want to be; the one I am when no one is watching.

There are so many things I still don’t know about the plan. I do know that God has given me gifts I want to use in whatever way He sees fit. And I also know that being exactly where He is holding me in each moment of every part of His plan is success. It is abundant life. I can’t say enough about how fulfilling it has been to see those kids singing the mass parts or how it sounds when a ten year old prays, “I cast all my cares upon You!” The simplicity and detachment from the world I have witnessed in their lives at this point in mine is just what the doctor ordered.

More than anything, I am moved by the way that God loves me, that He would show me in such intimacy what He meant when He told us to be like little children. I love witnessing the joy they take in the things I often care so little for and how little they care for what I thought was so important. I like being the music teacher at St. Alexis Catholic Elementary School. I like that God really does have a plan for me and for the continual restoration of my soul. I don’t believe there is a right and wrong way to serve Him, but I have learned that His idea of how we do that is often different than ours and always so much better.

I don’t know if I have communicated what I wanted to say. But, I have a class of second graders playing “heads up seven-up” so I have to run. But, the bottom line is: trust the plan He has for you. Don’t get too wrapped up in your own idea of success or in the ways you think you have failed. Oftentimes, there is a victory in store you wouldn’t have recognized as a victory had God not re-routed your path to begin with. And take comfort in the truth that all we think we have lost and won is held in the heart of God and all He has for us there is love. Peace! ~KP

It’s been a whirlwind of a few weeks and this past weekend I had the pleasure of leading worship for a group of women in Houma with my friends Audrey Assad and Julie Sellers. Praying with women is a beautiful thing… especially such lovely ladies as these! I drove to my parents house late Saturday night, struggling to keep my eyes open, so that I could wake up the next morning and prepare for that most feminine of events: the wedding shower!!!! FYI: I am getting married in two months! How can you not have fun when all your closest friends are together AND you get to dress up AND there is a table filled with sugary treats and coffee AND you get to open presents?!?!? I love the person who came up with this idea. All in all the weekend was filled to the brim with something that I treasure so: sisterhood.

I have learned over the years that the monsters of jealous rivalry between women are threats against the possibilities there are for the growth of God’s kingdom that come about when women stand together in support of and admiration for one another; when we go to bat for one another instead of competing; when we see the love God has for us AND for our sisters in Him; when we acknowledge that the gifts He has given to this girl or that girl are not a threat, but an asset to our team!

Now keep in mind that I am in the homestretch of planning a wedding, so I am on emotional overdrive. Beyond it actually. I have been thinking of this my whole life. I simply could not imagine what it would be like. There were times I doubted any of this could or would happen. Then I looked up and realized that God actually DOES have a plan and it is just as He says: far more than I could have asked or imagined. All of that being said, I can be seen weeping at any place or time… airports, restaurants. It is really quite humorous. It’s a time when you retrace the path that lead you here, reflecting on all that it has been in a sort of preparation for moving forward. So, knowing my love of sisterhood and emotional state, you can imagine what I look like right now as I try to remark on the incredible women in my life. I have friends who have known me from childhood through my clumsy and embarrassing moments of adolescence and on. We have lived side by side through the scariest and most sad moments of our lives to date. We have laughed and celebrated every birthday, every achievement, every exciting thing from a first kiss to getting engaged. I have cousins who are like sisters. They have known me from my first day on the earth and have treasured me, keeping me in their hearts, reinforcing at every moment that I have value simply because I am. I have friends who have come like surprises later in life… girls who have made it a mission to know me truly. They remind me who I am when I get confused and teach me things I really need to know, everything from how to make coffee to how to find healing in Christ. I have attachments of the heart that simply cannot be measured by words and this has made my life so full.

But the moment in the weekend that will always be timeless to me was taking my grandmother into the back room of the house and showing her my wedding dress. She is eighty-three. She raised six kids, twenty grandchildren, twenty great-grandchildren, and always a few on the way. She was a young bride once herself. She held my mother in her arms. She held me in her arms. And maybe she will hold a child of mine one day. It seems like the most base of all things in life, the simple truth and yet so complex: time marches on. It keeps its secrets locked up in the past and future. There is nothing you can do to speed it up or slow it down. The stories time has given the women in our lives to tell… what they haven’t felt or seen or experienced… all the things they thought they couldn’t do that one day they just did because they had to for their children and their families… the transformations in their hearts because of the recklessness of the love that had grown there. I don’t think it could ever all be put into words. But, I do think there are tiny pieces of time that hold still and remain as though they are always new. Standing in the closet with my grandmother and my wedding dress was like seeing the hands of the past and of the present grasp and interlock fingers. Everything feels at once all so spread apart and held together. I am so happy to be her granddaughter. And all you girls: talk to your aunts and grandmothers, mothers and sisters, cousins and friends… there is a piece of your understanding of yourself and the world you live in hidden in their hearts.

Now seriously… that was good advice. I should have a talk show. Peace! ~KP

I love being able to stay connected to my friends; people I don’t get to see or talk to that often. And it is so nice to get encouraging comments about my music and ministry from people who support me. It’s cool to see photos from shows that people tag. But, I guess in my mind it boils down to this question: what kingdom am I building? I can spend an hour looking through pictures that people have tagged me in on facebook over the years. I can spend an hour posting pictures of the parts of my life that I want to put on display. But, I tell you, I feel sick when I am done; like I am saturated in my idea of myself and of the other’s idea of me. And do any of those ideas even matter? When all of that is said and done, I have wasted that much energy building up my own kingdom; a kingdom that is fading away. 

I write this in humility because I will always struggle with vanity and self-absorption. It is the plight of humanity. But, I want to keep striving to hide my life inside of Christ. His is the only kingdom that really lasts. So, I want to help to build it here on earth. And it is only in Him that I am ever really known. I will miss you, facebook and myspace friends. But, my love for you reaches farther than a comment wall and I am running out of clever things to say on my status! Peace! ~KP

People say that Southerners have a strange fixation with place and time and I find this to be true. For me, I think it has something to do with identity, or my sense of self. Sharing a memory with people… with your family and your friends you have known since before you shaved your legs… makes you feel grounded, reminds you of who you are. Holding on to the past makes you feel rooted. Meeting someone in town who knew your father makes you feel important, part of a legacy, like you matter. I have been gone just over a year and tonight I am back, sleeping in my brother’s second old bedroom (it was my sister’s old bedroom first). Driving through the neighborhood, I get a flash of how comforted I used to feel by it all; the surroundings I mean. Getting into adulthood was tough for me, and my hometown became like a support, a friend. 

But it is a crazy thing that happens when you willingly abandon all the things you think are holding you together. The past few days I have heard a lot about Simon Peter dropping his nets when Jesus called. Not into the water, but dropping them as in leaving it all behind: his job, family, and visions for his future. There is a certain liberation there, I think, when your ideas about yourself and your life are reshaped and reborn. You are forced to be renewed when everything you thought you were leaning on and defined by is miles away. 

So, the last year of my life has been a season of leaving things behind. And with the stripping away of my need to identify myself in a place, in a culture, and a name; all my fixations and imagined realities - I come home now and it is just me and this town. This town where I used to live. This town I used to feel like was the only place I could know myself. And the perspective has changed because I look at it. I drive in it. And I love it, purely. Not out of my own need do I love it, but just because I find it wonderful.

I love how the land in Louisiana is flat and when you are driving from here to there you can see the sunset in its entirety. You can see the whole sky. I love crossing the wetlands and seeing moss hanging from the trees and cypress knees shooting up out of the water. I love that it can be January and in the 60s. I love those things you have to look forward to to help get you through the winter like crawfish and king cake, making plans for Mardi Gras and “Gumbo weather”. It’s just a good place that I am proud to be from. Leaving was right thing for me and I don’t get homesick like I used to. But, coming home now is filled with new revelation and appreciation. I don’t know where I will end up in life, but there is a chunk of my heart and soul that will always be here in Louisiana. It is good to be home tonight. Peace. ~KP

2009 has been fine so far and my resolution, as it is every year, is to have the best year ever. there is no telling what is going to happen this year. i get excited when i look back on the last couple years of my life and realize that God was working things out all along that were so far beyond me. i am impressed again with the simple truth that knowing Him is the only thing. where else have i ever been able to make sense of who i am? where else have i ever been able to sort through the chaos around me? He has the power to transform and renew. with Him, nothing is ever lost…no dream is gone forever, no sin is hanging over my head. everything has a meaning and a place. while we are suspended in space, He is holding all of it together. He is all there is. In Him we live and move and find our being. what seems unreasonable and illogical is the only reason there is: that Jesus Christ came so that we might have life! everything else is secondary under the banner of knowing Him. that is 2009 for me. nothing else really matters. love and peace from the snowy hills of Boston!! ~kp

Allow me to explain. Adore is a ministry based in Houma, Louisiana under the direction of Bishop Sam Jacobs. It is a ministry of evangelism through worship and eucharist adoration. Monthly worship nights happen in Houma, Houston and Phoenix. And about three or four times a year, we pack our bags, hop on a bus, and go into whatever communities will have us. There are twelve of us here. Josh Blakesley, Matt Maher, Paul George, Kurt Davidson, Jayme Braun, Raul Doria, Kenny Butler, Kemi Ndolo, Colton Gatlin, Fr. Tim Hepburn, Kristin Niedbala, and myself. I don’t know how else to describe what is happening except to say that God is breathing life and restoring hope in the church, in our hearts, in places that were dead. And it has been particularly beautiful to travel during the season of Advent.

What I have loved most about Advent is pondering the hiddenness of Christ in the womb of His mother, the hiddenness of Christ in the Eucharist, and the hiddenness of Christ in my own heart. There could have been no better way for me to prepare for the coming of the King in my heart this Christmas than by spending two weeks praying with some of my closest friends and witnessing God’s providence to His people. There will be more to come on this. I find that I don’t ever realize what God has moved in my heart until I have had some time to let it settle. 

At the moment, I am sitting on the bus with everyone. We just attacked a McDonald’s. It looks like feeding time at the zoo. And the bus rolls on. We’ll be in Slidell tomorrow for the closing night . Come on out if you can. Peace and love! ~KP

It was a truly incredible weekend. I feel so blessed by the insight God has given to my heart. I was reminded this weekend to store up my treasure in heaven. I can’t really say that my involvement with anything I have done in my lifetime has changed me as much as my involvement in this ministry has. The kids coming to the Dirty Vagabond center day in and day out have impacted me tremendously. I have a friend who, by the world’s standards has very little in the way of material things, popularity, great accomplishments, or family stability. But I don’t think I have ever come across a heart so adamantly sure of the love that God has for her. She is beautiful in simplicity and rich in intimacy with the Savior. It is amazing how as I make more of a deliberate effort to focus my life towards what I can do for the poor around me, I am confronted with my own poverty. It is definitely a poverty of spirit and heart when I hold a famous actress or singer in a higher regard than I do this dear friend of mine. She looks like nothing to the world, but I know she is valued to the very utmost by the King of Glory; one of His highly favored ones. I am then reminded that my TV is just a box. My computer…just a box. My radio…just a box. Why am I ordering my life to this ridiculous standard of value and worth?

I am reminded that life is made up of the little seeds of revelation God has planted in this plot of land that He has given me; moments of showing His face to me. All I can say is, you become a lot more free as a person when you realize that you are just a fumbling idiot and a slob who is greatly treasured by the King. I am serious! It really makes me laugh to think that God probes every part of me and sees all the discrepancies and still gives and gives and gives until I am so full that I can barely even digest the first of His giving! But, that is His love. That is His mercy. That is His gift. It matters nothing what you can or cannot do. So embrace your inner-slob and know that you are treasured still!!! Store up your treasure in heaven. Paper, coin, fame, and human glory…it’s all passing away. Only He remains!