I gave up trying to make it look “correct,” fiddled with it a little longer to try and make it look intentionally impressionistic and—failing at that, too—walked away from the easel, defeated.

♪I have been involved in church life for nearly 70 years, half of those years as a pastor. I love the church except for one thing: churches and pastors don’t seem to know how to disagree agreeably. Too often when a church and their pastor cannot agree on how well he is doing, separation results. But must it be this way?

♪The NHL playoffs are finally upon us, and for many of us Canadian hockey fans this is the most wonderful time of the year. Teams are now finally prepared to push all their chips and truly do whatever it takes to get sixteen wins and hoist Lord Stanley’s glorious cup.

♪At one point the title to Collin Hansen’s 2008 book Young, Restless, Reformed would have described me quite well. I was young (in my early 20s), restless (in many ways) and Reformed (drinking regularly from the well of the three Johns: Piper, Edwards and Calvin).

I love to dabble in different creative projects. Whether it’s carpentry or gardening or cooking or painting—it all brings me great fulfillment.

♪Hello there, my name is Andreas Huebert. I am a contemporary artist—a sculptor. I was born in Central Asia, in Kyrgyzstan 51 years ago. I started to sculpt at a very young age, but unfortunately, stopped doing it when I became a teenager.

♪Loneliness can be a time of being depressed and feeling sorry for oneself or it can be regarded as a gift from the Lord to get closer to him. So much of life is in the attitude we have.

♪“You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

♪“What do you think about Donald Trump?”

♪ Every Christmas Eve my children look forward to my purple plum torte. Along with roasted turkey and Walter C. Scott’s A Christmas Carol, the simple yellow cake crowned with plums and sprinkled in cinnamon sugar is tradition. Every year the challenge remains the same—in December plums are not grown in northern climes.

♪ An era is ending. See if this agrees with what you’re seeing. For the last several generations, when our churches needed a new pastor, we assumed there was a group of moveable pastors “out there” looking for a church. “Out there” were unknown pastors trained, experienced, and ready to move their families across the continent to pastor our church.

♪ A recent article by James Wood recounts his evolution from a fanboy of Tim Keller to a critic (www.firstthings.com, May 6, 2022). His argument sparked a flurry of responses, both positive and negative (from David French at frenchpress.thedispatch.com and Rod Dreher at www.theamericanconservative.com, for example).