I have rediscovered Ann Kiemel.

I love Donald Miller’s writing. But having finished Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What, I’ve been searching for someone else who writes with such authenticity. Searching in vain.

Until, last weekend, I thought about Ann Kiemel, whose books I devoured during my post-college days of the 1980s. She wrote in simple free verse, and mostly just told about her encounters with people and how she shared Christ with them. She was a great inspiration to me, and since we were both single at the time, I felt a kinship of sorts.

Then she agreed to marry Will Anderson. I saw her doing such amazing things to influence people–not only people in her immediate sphere of influence, but people like me who read her books. Now she was abandoning all of that (abandoning me!) to live on a farm in Idaho and raise a family. She has, indeed, pretty much disappeared from the Christian landscape.

I found two of Ann’s books on my shelf, I’m Out to Change My World and Yes! I brought them home. Though her recent years have not been good (I understand that she wrote a book in 2004 airing some dirty linen), there was an exceptional real-ness to those earlier years when she wrote those books which moved me so much. Would her writing still move me?

Well…it does. The other morning I read six chapters (they’re short) in I’m Out to Change My World, and in each one, I got choked up. The Agnostic, God is So Good, The Taxi Driver, Homesick GI, Ordinary Days, Spinach and Dreams. This heart for God which so captivated me 20-some years ago still comes through, and I find myself, today, again inspired by her words:

I’m an ordinary girl in a big world,
but I’m going to change it–
God and I
and love.

UPDATE August 2012: Ann Kiemel has returned to writing, with her own blog. Check it out at AnnKiemel.com.

Additional posts about Ann Kiemel Anderson:

• Sept 2012: Ann Kiemel and Her Continuing Example
• Feb 2014: Ann Kiemel Stricken with Cancer