Words from Muddy Pearl - Reflections
Love in the time of Covid
Last week, forty-five days into the most recent lockdown, a neighbour thanked me for saying ‘hello’ to them. I was pretty taken aback. I’ve got plenty of experience of people saying ‘thank you’ when I take my leave but this was my first at ‘hello’. I’d popped out of my front door which, in these […]
Life will never be the same again
Today we celebrate Candlemas, one of the important occasions in the narrative of the Gospels, redolent as it is with numbers, and a key milestone on the road. For the Celts, it represented one of the Quarter Days on which rents and other dues are settled. And if you were an Anchoress in medieval times […]
New Year, New Lockdown.
I guess we hoped by now we would all be heading back to offices, or bars, or gyms after the Christmas break, but now we’ve been told as a whole country once again to Stay at Home. Perhaps this one will be easier because (let’s face it) we saw it coming, or because we’re professionals […]
Holding and Beholding
This year has been a struggle and a marathon for many, just to stand still. At Muddy Pearl we look back, catching our breath, and we are humbled and thankful to see how the Lord, our friends, authors and readers have helped us through. We have released a workbook, our first fiction titles (one achieved […]
None of Us Lives For Himself
At first glance, you might be justified in assuming that a book combining the stories of an 18th Century German Count and a technically detailed flight over Europe is, at best, appealing to a fairly niche subsection of readers. You might even feel justified in counting yourself out of that group. However, what Phil Anderson […]
Armistice Day 2020: Remembering Stories that Time has Forgotten
On this Armistice Day, the ceremony of the Centenary of the Burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, London, is playing on my television in the background as I am writing this, and I sit and think of the other anonymous names from which Time has made us move on. As The Archibishop of […]
God’s perfect timing, even when publishing in a pandemic
Three years ago, Anna, Muddy Pearl’s then assistant editor and I were sitting at our table on the Publishing Scotland stand at Frankfurt Book Fair, beside an enormous panel depicting our forthcoming book, The Gift of Blessing by Kate Patterson. Anna snapped a photo of the banner to post on social media, and to encourage Kate that […]
Charity
In The Accidental Social Entrepreneur I explain how Hand in Hand the Charity began – here’s a snippet… This is how Hand in Hand began in Africa and today supports 3,000 children year on year. Would all of that happened without the jumpers, I can’t actually say, but those hundred odd-shaped jumpers have had a significant […]
Affordable Housing
Making houses available for the poorest in the world is a challenge, not because we can’t build small quality houses, but how we do that commercially, and facilitate the poorest to buy them when they have no formal income. You see, who will lend to a person who doesn’t have a wage slip to prove […]
The view from the editorial desk
This week I’ve been editing Kate Patterson’s lovely new book, Living for Eternity, which is all about knowing God, the One who is with us now, and the One we will be with in Eternity. In Chapter 8, I came across a story about George Müller and the orphanage he ran: It is striking that so […]
