Helping Others Helps You to Live Longer
A new review of the health effects of volunteering found that helping others on a regular basis — like serving food in a soup kitchen or reading to the blind— can reduce early mortality rates by 22%, compared to those in people who don’t participate in such activities.
How Do we Learn From The Idiot In The Room?
When I was in New York a couple of years ago doing a training programme for church planters, one phrase in particular stuck with me. We were told that a good church planter/leader was an ‘agile learner’. In other words, somebody who had not shut up shop but was still reading, observing, listening and processing almost all of the time. They had not shut themselves down to people outside of their tribe or to people with new and different ideas. What I have learned is that a good leader does not shut down if the person opposite him is not from his tribe, is slightly irritating and may not even be sound (as I define it).
A healthy church with a passionate outward focus can expect as much as 50% of the congregation to be loosely connected at any given point. Why? It means spiritually mature people are inviting their friends. Of course, the goal is for people to move from loosely connected to faithful. But once the loosely connected become faithful, the healthy culture of the church should compel them to invite their unchurched friends.
But the principle is the same. If we have something against someone here, or if we know we’ve hurt or sinned against someone else, the Lord calls us to do what it takes to reconcile with your family member in Christ, to forgive them and to do whatever it takes to seek forgiveness from the one we have wronged. For this is a table of unity — and if we eat and drink of the table of fellowship while holding something against another person, we are play-acting. And you know as well as I do that the Master has a great deal of patience with everything except play-acting. His word for play-acting? Hypocrisy.
Negligent parents, lawbreaking kids
We need to hold parents more accountable, both culturally and legally, for the actions of their children. Maybe then more parents will be more engaged in the lives of their children on the front end, rather than the back end, in front of a judge. Society has avenues for juveniles who refuse to obey their parents. But where are the safeguards for society when parents decide not to use those avenues?
I’m tired of hearing how good the kids who commit heinous crimes are. Maybe we should start putting parents on the witness stand so they can tell us exactly what they did to raise such perfect children.
The 60 million Americans who don’t use the Internet, in six charts
So why don’t people go online? The Department of Commerce tried to answer that very question in a June report on America’s “Emerging Online Experience” — which, as the department notes, hasn’t quite emerged in some corners of the country. Intriguingly, the agency found that half of offline households simply don’t want Internet — they either feel they don’t need it, they can use it elsewhere, or it infringes on their privacy. For the remaining non-users, the big factor is cost.
Fort Worth Zoo’s new elephant born into name controversy
Barely born, baby elephant Bowie is already at the center of controversy.
Turns out almost nobody but a Texan knows the right way to say his name.
After 40 years of David Bowie ( Boh-ey) songs, we now have to explain that the Texas city, county, brick boulevard and baby elephant are all Boo-ey. As in that Alamo guy.
Don’t Remember Sending That Text? You Might Have Been Asleep
“My charger is right there in the corner so sometimes I would keep it right here next to me. I guess I got up and texted and went back to bed but I don’t remember it,” sleep texter Megan told CBS 2′s Kristine Johnson.
Friends and family were receiving messages from Megan that she didn’t even remember sending.
“4 o’clock in the morning, 3 o’clock in the morning, it would just be a sentence of jumbled up stuff,” she said.