Monika Platt

Jun 12, 2023 | christiancourier.ca | Angela Reitsma Bick |Monika Platt |Erin Knight |Becky Jones

It sounds like a Dickens tale. Born poor and orphaned at age 12, John Fawcett survived by apprenticing to a tailor. He became a Christian in his teens, married at 25 and began pastoring a small rural church for pennies – sometimes potatoes, if that’s all his parishioners had. It was 1770, Wainsgate, England. There’s no earthly reason for his name to be remembered 250 years later . . . but it is. He’s in our hymnals as the author of “Blest be the tie that binds.”You know the words, right?

Mar 31, 2023 | christiancourier.ca | Emily Wierenga |Heidi Vander Slikke |Monika Platt |David T. Koyzis

“As long as we are not quite sure we are unworthy, God will keep narrowing us in until he gets us alone.” Oswald ChambersThere’s a kind of loneliness that almost befriends you. A kind that wraps around me, scarf-like, as I ski across the fields. The snow is much like I imagine manna would have been, layers of giant white flakes. The sun shining on each flake. But when I skirt the shadows of the woods, the snow becomes listless, plain Jane, just a wrinkly white sheet.