A New Season Is Here

I have been keeping two secrets from you.

Not the bad kind. The kind that you sit on for months because they are not quite ready, and then one morning you wake up and realize — they are ready, and I have been silent long enough.

So I am writing this from my desk, on a Monday morning, with the third cup of coffee that I probably should not be drinking, to tell you what has been building behind the scenes, and to invite you in.

Secret One: Grace Notes

Starting next Wednesday, I am launching a podcast.

It is called Grace Notes, and it is short, fifteen to twenty minutes, every Wednesday morning because most of the women I love are not sitting in a quiet room with a journal when they need to hear from God. They are in the school drop-off line. They are at a stoplight on the way to work. They are folding the third load of laundry of the day and silently wondering if anyone sees them.

Grace Notes is for her.

For a long time, I have been doing what I do: writing, leading Celebrate Recovery, speaking when invited, mentoring women through the hardest seasons of their lives, and the same sentence has been coming back to me from every direction: "I thought I was the only one."

I have heard that sentence in recovery rooms and in church lobbies and in the comments on Instagram posts I almost did not publish. I have heard it from women who run companies and women who are barely holding their week together. I have heard it from pastors' wives. I have heard it from women in their first year of sobriety. I have heard it from myself, more times than I want to admit.

That sentence is what Grace Notes is for.

So if you have ever sat in a pew thinking, "if these people knew what was actually going on in my life right now, they would not let me serve on this committee" — friend, I made this podcast for you.

I will not pretend I have it all figured out. I do not. What I have is a Bible that has carried me through more than I expected to live through, and a willingness to say the thing out loud that most of us have been trained to whisper.

First episode drops Wednesday, June 10. You can subscribe wherever you listen — Apple, Spotify, all the usual places — and I would be so grateful if you would.

Secret Two: Things We Hide

This fall, my next book releases.

It is called Things We Hide: For the Woman Who Looks Like She Has It All Together and Knows She Doesn't, and it has been the hardest, most necessary thing I have ever written.

I cannot tell you everything yet. I am pacing myself. (Mostly because my publisher is gently reminding me to pace myself.)

But here is what I can tell you:

This book is for the woman in the third pew on the right. The one who shows up. The one who serves. The one whose name everyone knows. The one who would never let anyone see what is actually happening inside her head, inside her marriage, inside her quietest hours.

I wrote it for her because I have been her. Because I have sat next to her. Because I have led groups full of her.

And because I believe — with everything in me — that grace is louder than the things we hide, and that the church does not get to be a place where women have to perform wellness in order to belong.

I will be sharing more over the next few months — cover reveal, excerpts, the story behind a few of the chapters, and a book club kit for women's ministry leaders who want to use it as a study. Pre-orders open later this summer. If you want to be the first to know when, the email list is the place to be. You can join at kristenalderman.com

What This Season is Really About

Here is the honest truth.

I am tired of nice Christian content that does not name what is actually happening to women in the church. I am tired of teaching that asks women to perform their healing instead of live it. I am tired of platforms built on the illusion that someone has arrived.

And I am tired of pretending I have not been pulled toward this work for a decade.

This summer is the first time I have ever stopped pretending it is going to magically happen on its own. The podcast is one yes. The book is another. They are different rooms in the same house — and the house is called grace for the woman who looks like she's fine and knows she's not.

If that is you, you belong here.

If that is someone you love, will you send her this post?

I am not building a platform. I am building a table. And a table is only as full as the people who get invited to it.

So consider yourself invited.

I will be here every Monday with a new post — sometimes a devotional, sometimes a story, sometimes a behind-the-scenes from the book launch — and every Monday with a new podcast episode in your feed.

Pull up a chair. There is room.

Grace and grit, Kristen

Kristen Alderman is the author of Messy Grace and the forthcoming Things We Hide. She leads Celebrate Recovery at her home church in Houston, serves nonprofit clients through Southeast Revival Designs, and writes weekly at kristenalderman.com. Find her on Instagram [@realkristenalderman] or listen to her new podcast, Grace Notes, wherever you get your podcasts starting on June 10th.