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5 Reasons Anxiety Has to Take a Backseat to God

Even if you are not crafty, you can create dazzling artwork for your home. YouTube offers a wide variety of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tutorials. Videos guide novice artists through step-by-step instructions. The description below the video typically includes the colors, brands, tools, and supplies. Our sample video is easy to follow. To enhance your painting, this talented artist shows us several neat uses for everyday household items, such as a wide-toothed comb. The video begins with a blank, pre-stretched canvas. Using tubes of acrylic paint, several swirls are placed on the canvas. The artist uses a large brush to blend all the colors in a big mess, leaving a stark white spot in the center, lower portion of the canvas. He dabs at the mess using a sponge with a green scrubby side. This technique softens the harshness of the brush strokes. Image from YouTube. The video shows various brushes used to create long lines on the canvas. With a few brush strokes, trees emerge from the shadowy abyss. With a new sponge, the artist creates lines along unseen edges and shadows of the trees. Now it’s time for the comb, which creates an unbelievable effect in this painting. Image from YouTube. Using the comb, the artist gently moves it back and forth across the center of the painting. This creates swirls, blending the colors and bringing out some lighter shades. Another common item enters the scene, a plastic fork, to create more highlights. Nearing the halfway point in the video, the painting is beginning to look somewhat recognizable. Finishing The Comb Painting As the video progresses, the artist uses cotton swabs, a rubber band, and the edges of cards to create stunning details. Aside from the soft touch of experience, this painting is replicable by almost anyone. The level of intricate detail looks complex, but the video shows how easy it is. The use of household items helps defray the cost that is usually associated with this level of artistry. The painter creates a palette using a simple clipboard and a sheet of paper. This allows a mess-free area to prep paint. After adding lamp posts, a cotton ball and clothespin create the “light” emanating from the lamps and the reflected light on the wet pathway. The detail in the finished painting is impressive. You can almost feel the “wetness” of the rain. Image from YouTube. If this one seems intimidating, there are plenty of beginner-level DIY tutorials available. You might also have access to local businesses that offer painting sessions. Almost every town has a paint and pour business. These unique opportunities allow you to create a painting while sipping your favorite beverage. A facilitator guides you through brush and color selection and offers pointers on technique. Jay Lee Painting is the YouTuber who created the “Walking in the Rain” painting. Their YouTube channel has tutorials for all skill levels. Another good channel is DIY Art Blast, which has painting videos and other DIY craft projects. Painting is a relaxing pastime whether you begin here or with a paint-by-numbers set from the local craft store. Explore your inner artist! Try your hand at painting and see if you enjoy it, or pass this on to a friend who might. You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post Artist Uses Comb To Add Stunning Touch To Painting Of Rain appeared first on InspireMore.

Could this be the next best indie-vibe movie of the year?

And it may give you nightmares

Former BBC News anchor Huw Edwards pled guilty to charges of indecent images of children Wednesday. Edwards entered the plea at Westminster Magistrates Court in London, surrounded by a packed press gallery, according to Variety. Edwards was once one of the highest paid and most notable voices of the BBC. He spoke only to give […]

A horse that bolted from the trail in a remote countryside area of Alberta has been found after a “crazy journey” that saw professional trackers, planes, and emotional support from strangers as far away as Germany, all lend a hand in looking for him. Flex is a championship endurance horse, and an inseparable companion to […] The post Missing Horse Reunited With its Family After ‘Crazy Journey’ appeared first on Good News Network.

We are living in unprecedented times. That statement is always true, but as events around us continue to unfold, it’s difficult to awaken each morning without wondering what development of the day will become history in the making. Unanticipated incidents, be they acts of God or assassination attempts, define themselves. Others, from proposed legislation to controversial court cases, are subject to the manipulation of their acolytes. Claiming to be on “the right side of history” is a common tactic such people employ. The phrase, usually emanating from the Left, is used as a debate-stopper, an argument-ender, a moral cudgel, as if the one who invokes it has special insight into the ultimate judgment of things (which, ironically, implies an ultimate judge, an implication most of them are unwilling to accept). But the judgments of man are notoriously fickle. As the eminent 20th-century journalist John Chamberlain said: “There is no compulsion on the decent human being to be ‘with history’ when history is driving headlong toward an abyss.” There was a time when the Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott decisions by the Supreme Court were thought to be on the right side of history, to say nothing of Roe v. Wade. Royalists thought they were on the right side of history during the American Revolution, as did Jacobins and Bolsheviks during the French and Russian revolutions. All were mistaken, and the world is better off for having recognized that forward doesn’t always equate to progress. British writer and lay theologian C.S. Lewis pointed out: Progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. Progressives’ preoccupation with being on “the right side of history” is both ironic and cynical given their generalized disdain for that which has come before. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to be proven “right” on so many things—economics, education, good governance—because they are “on the side of history.” Wise policymakers don’t behave as if the world began with their coming of age. They believe in knowing and learning from those who have gone before. They respect generations of accumulated insight, “the democracy of the dead,” in the words of English author G.K. Chesterton, in contrast to “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” Claims to be on “the right side of history” fail to recognize that throughout time, immense progress has come as the result not of arrogantly pressing forward but humbly hearkening back. It’s no accident that two of the world’s most consequential advances, the Renaissance and the Reformation, both begin with the prefix “re,” a Latin root that means “again.” Describing the milieu of that time, British historian and author Alec Ryrie says: “The Renaissance gave western Christendom a slogan: ad fontes, ‘to the sources,’ an urge to return to the ancient, and therefore pure, founts of truth.” Among those truths was the concept of metanoia, a Greek word that biblical scholar William Tyndale translated into English as “repentance.” For his service to humanity, Tyndale was burned at the stake in 1536, demonstrating the arrogance of those who presume to know the future. There is, as it turns out, no predetermined “right side of history,” at least this side of eternity. Events may be as cyclical as they are linear; the world repeatedly has devolved into disarray only to be regathered by a return to first things, balance, and centeredness. The more we abandon the wisdom of the ages in favor of our own arrogant assumptions, the more we hasten the day when there is no more history, the world having descended into barbarism—or nuclear winter. The right side of history is not something that can be proclaimed, only revealed. And only over time and by One whose judgment is inscrutable. This calls for humility, something those who casually invoke the phrase tend to desperately lack. History will take its own course; the best way to ensure we’re on its good side is to learn from what has gone before, respect our role in its current unfolding, and revere its ultimate judge. The post The Right Is on the Side of History appeared first on The Daily Signal.