Friday Five – 10 November 2017

Here are some interesting articles from around the internet for you to enjoy:

1. How to Turn Down the Volume of Your Anxiety – “Every Christian wants to know God more; few Christians fight for the silence required to know him. Instead, we spend our days smashing stillness-shattering, knowledge-destroying cymbals on our ears and in our souls. And with so many gongs and clashes in our lives, it can sometimes be difficult to isolate and identify them. So let me help you do this and then provide some mufflers.”
2. Loneliness may be a greater public health hazard than obesity — and experts say it’s getting worse  “As more people opt to live alone, delay or forego marriage, and recede into their smartphones, rates of loneliness are skyrocketing in the United States, according to new research. … Holt-Lunstad’s research shows loneliness could pose an even greater threat to public health than obesity, and other research has found it even rivals the risks of smoking.”
3. Don’t Just Read Alone – “Communal reading has a prestigious pedigree running from Moses through Jesus (Luke 4), Paul (Acts 17), the early church (Col. 4), and beyond. Yet many Christians today read little and gather infrequently. How can we retrieve this great tradition and reinstitute this important spiritual practice?”
4. Everybody’s Eating Alone – “Eating among company is healthier than eating alone in a number of ways, especially if we begin in childhood. A September paper from the Vanier Institute of the Family reports that “family meals are associated with a variety of beneficial outcomes for youth,” everything from literacy to better mental health to reducing the risk of substance abuse.”
5. The Teaching Gift – Turbo Charging Transformation – “Teaching inspires action that ignites transformation that informs understanding. … Teaching goes beyond just instructing or modeling the content of God’s word. Obedience to the word is as much caught as it is taught. Teaching is a means of doing until you know something well enough to teach it to someone else. The art of apprenticing comes to mind.”