♪We sat in an unfamiliar church, in the last row. I could see the stony backs of our young adult children a few rows forward and as I watched them, I knew that this wouldn’t be the day things would change.

♪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.

♪We often hear about how angry and cruel public discussion has become today. But we often hear excuses for our bad manners. One excuse is to claim that, far from being rude, we are only showing “tough love.” Much cruelty is justified by those two words.

♪I’ve slept through some of the best scenery in North America. Or, at least, that’s what my husband says. We’ve traveled along Oregon’s coastline, through the Rocky Mountains, in the Sonoran Desert, and along the Mississippi River.

I tried to stay objective but within minutes of landing in Málaga, Spain, to go and visit our EMC workers, I was captivated. Four of us from Canada spent almost two weeks there, and one of our main focuses was to discern the future ministry of our new work in Algeciras.

♪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.