Karl & Liesl Kranich

Hey, Y’all!

This is my first time writing from Indiana.  As you can tell by the “y’all”, I’m not totally acclimated to being a Hoosier yet, but we are so happy to be here.  Some praises include:

• safe travel for us all as we drove across the country.  We knew the furniture wouldn’t come quickly, so we took a slower pace and let Anja have her first Smoky Mountains experience as well as Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.
• When we got here, Anja was able to jump right in to the same VBS program she had to miss when we left Florida!  What a blessing for her to have fun with kids learning about God that first week here.
• Our stuff was delayed but finally got here this past Monday and so far almost nothing’s been broken
• Our Florida house just closed on Thursday!!!  What a huge blessing.

We’ve been keeping very busy between Karl working at the office and both of us working hard at settling in and learning where to find things here in town (Karl’s already a regular at Lowes).  We still need to study for our drivers’ license tests, and a bunch of other stuff, so you could pray for good time management and prioritizing for both of us.  Also, Karl brought a cold home and gave it to me, so we’d love to get better without needing to put finding a doctor 1st on our list of things to do.

Now for some of what’s happening at Keynote!  I was going to write this myself, but this e-mail we got said it better so here goes…

First, Keynote is a crazy place these days!  As I write, we have 2 bands rehearsing and preparing music for overseas trips – one heading to New Zealand and one to Israel!  Yesterday (June 17th), 75 students arrived to begin what we hope will be one of the greatest adventures of their lives.  Keynote will have 5 bands (plus a media team and a film team), Impact will have 2 bands… here we go!

Think about this for a moment: last summer we shared the Gospel with nearly 6000 people and saw 248 indicated decisions for Christ – with only 5 bands.  With 7 bands heading out this summer (11 including the international teams and the office teams), we can only wonder what God might do! PLEASE be praying for God to do amazing things and change many lives this summer – ours as well as those with whom we share the Gospel.

Our welcome dinner was with the summer project students.  One of the bands, called Destino, focuses on reaching the Latin community and I discovered that one of the students goes to UF (Go Gators!) and another, Andrea, is here from Argentina and is the product of ministry of a couple of friends of mine who were CCC staff at UF when I was a student.  Later they moved to Argentina and the rest is history.   Who knows what lasting fruit will come from these students this summer?

Thanks for your love and support for us in so many ways.  God bless you!

If you need our new address or phone number, just click on Contact Us and let us know!

We are finally on the move! It’s been five months of Orlando house prep, showing, support raising, and packing, and the end is here. The picture above is the Keynote office in Westfield, Indiana, where I (Karl) am writing this letter and waiting to close the deal on our new Indiana home on June 6.

After closing and a few days of working on the house, I’ll fly back to Orlando for some final packing and then the movers will arrive on June 11. Liesl, Anja, and I will say goodbye to our Orlando home and take our minivan north.

We’d appreciate your prayers for the travel and all of the other details—it has already been an adventure. Last Wednesday, Liesl and I left Orlando at 6:44am in our Chevy Prizm and planned to drive 16 hours straight to southern Indianapolis. We had just made it into southern Indiana when the oil pressure light started flickering and then lit steadily. We had enough oil and were not overheating, but decided that it was not worth losing the engine to make it to our hotel. We drove a few more miles and then got a different hotel for the night. The next morning, AAA towed the car to a mechanic near the Keynote office, and we were able to borrow a car for the day. We made it to our new house orientation meeting, which went well. We’re thankful that the car trouble didn’t cause more problems.

Please pray:

1. that we would remember all of the details that need to be taken care of in Florida and Indiana, and not be affected too much by stress.
2. for a smooth transition for Anja.
3. for safe travel.
4. for the sale of our Orlando house to complete soon (buyer financing has been delayed).

Thank you for your partnership with us in this adventure!

We’ve got so much going on and are happy to say that God is pulling the details of our lives together better than we could have imagined.  There’s so much to say thank you for, from getting a contract on our FL house in 5 weeks (and having God “move a mountain”  that would have ended the deal), to our Indiana house being well on the way to completion to our support needs being down to only $155 a month left out of $1200! We will be leaving Orlando in the beginning of June and will be Indianans by mid month!   Just pray for us that we would keep God as our focus and not all the flurry of activity leaving brings.

Once again we’ve been getting incredible emails to pray and praise God for and this one was particularly good.  We met Rasool when we were in the office a few months ago.  He works with The Impact Movement, a partner ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ that is reaching out to the African American community.  We hope you will be as encouraged to pray and praise with us after hearing this story!

Thanks so much for your prayers for us while on the road. God answered them big time.

The scenario was more challenging than I imagined. The debauchery and sin that filled the streets were unlike anything I’d seen in person. It was so raunchy on the street we couldn’t even bring Ire’Ana (our 10-year old daughter) outside the hotel. But in the midst of darkness God moved.

Not only did we get to do both sets for an hour at the times we were told, God gave us favor with the hip-hop promoter, Ali, who had called me about us having 20 minutes to perform. He was cordial, and accommodating the whole time! He even told people to check out our concert!

We were supposed to go on @ 7:30p. It started raining @ 5pm. They thought about canceling the night’s concerts. They decided to wait it out. It stopped. We went on and saw lightning all around us, winds picking up - but no rain! It was like that the whole concert! By the end of the set Ali’s crew of hip-hop deejays were all on their feet clapping to our songs! Right after we were done and had put half the stuff in the trailer, rain came down hard and fast! Amazing!

Totals from both concerts:
83 comment cards collected
19 decisions to receive Christ
12 interested in talking to someone
5 led to Christ after outreach concert

The next evening, Ali called me back asking if we might be available to do a concert in June in Alabama where he’s from! We can’t do it b/c of schedule, but look @ that turn around.

We are truly grateful for all that occurred. Thanks again,
Rasool

Thanks for praying for Rasool and his band and the people they are able to reach.  God bless!

(this is also available as a pdf here)

Wow!  I got to write you all on Leap Day!  Karl and I were glad for the extra day this year, since our house goes on the market on Monday and we needed every extra day we could get to fix up the place.  We’re tired and sore, but it’s almost ready.  Yay!

We’ve been getting Keynote band prayer updates and we’ve gotten so many good ones, I couldn’t decide at first what to share with you in our limited space.  The first one was from a couple we met from the office, who had this to share:

 Lindsay and I are here in Dallas recruiting for Keynote at the Dallas Winter Conference.  Last night a guy named Steven walked up to me while I was standing at our booth and asked if Blue Sky Nine was a part of our ministry.  I affirmed him that BSN is our acoustic rock band and asked if he had seen them sometime.  His response was, “Yeah – that’s actually why I’m a Christian now.”

He said a friend who was a part of Campus Crusade on his campus invited him to a concert.   He wasn’t into anything on the spiritual level, but loved music and decided to attend with his friend.  He enjoyed the show and afterwards ended up talking to Michael Shumann – one of our intern vocalists from last year.  Michael shared the 4 Spiritual Laws with him and Steven gave his life to Christ.

Now Steven is at the Dallas Winter Conference, growing and being challenged in his faith, and even considering missions opportunities for the future.  God is changing lives all around us!

Please take this opportunity to praise God for Steven, and to pray for God to prepare the way for our bands’ spring touring season.  There are a lot of students just like Steven out there, lost and waiting to hear Great News of hope at our upcoming concerts.    -Benton

This same group is touring from now until mid March through Egypt!  And the most recent prayer request was for a guitar lost by the airline.  So please pray for them.  We also have mentioned the Boyds, a family band who have toured internationally with great response.  They are taking some time off as a band for the boys to be at home for a while and for the parents to be able to do talks at our FamilyLife marriage conferences.    Bruce sent some incredible updates:

A few highlights from the conference . . . with the new format, my favorite part of the weekend is an audience sharing time in the last session where couples grab a mic and talk briefly about the impact of our time together.  Several got up to share publicly how they came into the weekend planning divorce, but were leaving recommitted to one another.  Another husband realized that his anger was tearing their marriage apart and he purposed to his wife that he never wanted to do that to her again.  A wife shared that her marriage had gotten so desperate that she began considering a handgun to take her own life – but that this weekend had restored their relationship . . . and on the stories went.  I think God answered your prayers!   It was such a thrill to be a part of seeing the Lord work so powerfully, and knowing you were playing a big part in these changed lives.  Awesome.

I am so excited that we will be able to contribute to these people’s ministries and be a part of God’s work in this way!  Please be praying for Keynote staff to be open to God’s leading in each new circumstance and pray that many would come to know Him and have their lives changed.  God bless you!

 (this is also available as a pdf here)

Hey, y’all! As this is our first letter of the year, we hope you all had a blessed Christmas and are now well recovered from it . We had recovered from it, but then the potential buyer we had for our house fell through and so we’ve been suddenly thrown into our own personal episode of “Sell this House”. I don’t know how many people they have working behind the scenes to do all that in two days- it sure takes a lot more work from our perspective. So, that would be prayer request one, that we would be efficient about getting the work done so we can get our home on the market (the second request being that it would indeed sell ).

Karl has been wrapping up work for our old team and beginning to learn about his future role as well as being our handyman. We are now getting Keynote emails with exciting stories about what God is doing and can’t wait to get there. He’s also been figuring out how much financial support we will need before beginning to work full time for Keynote. Thanks to a number of surprises from various sources, we are happy to say that our initial goal has already been cut by more than half and at this point we only need to raise about $500 monthly! Please say a big thank you to God as you pray for Him to provide the rest of our needed support (and we say a big thank you to all of you!!).

I just finished taking a grad course called Humanity/Christ/Salvation. It’s one of several courses CCC staff take to complete a Biblical Studies certificate. I must admit, that I am not known for liking to study systematic theology (Karl does, however ). All that hard thinking was worth it, though (which is truly saying something when it took me six hours to read one chapter!). The work was hard and frustrating, but the end result was so sweet, I’m glad I did it, because the point of theology is not for its own sake (that really would be a waste of energy), but for the sake of knowing how awesome our God really is and falling even more in love with Him.

Have you ever heard an astronomer talk in detail about how big our universe really is? When I just look at the sky, it’s pretty, but when I hear just a taste of the depths of it, I’m in awe. That’s what this was like. We get used to hearing how Jesus died for our sin, but when we look at the details of the magnitude of our fallen condition and the enormous lengths to which God went to reconcile us to Himself, while not contradicting His own character, I feel overwhelmed with His love and care. So, if you get a chance to think hard like this, I highly recommend carving out the time and the brain power to make it happen.

I’ll leave you with a C.S. Lewis quote that I found challenging regarding how we should view all people:

It is a serious thing…to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations…it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to (these possibilities), that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal… But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. (The Weight of Glory pp. 14-15).