This is a Salaback Church podcast.

Today we kick off a brand new message series.

It's called The Lost Art of Friendship.

And we're going to talk for five weeks about a very important subject, a subject that we all

wrestle through at different levels, the subject of friendship.

But I want to begin with research I did this week.

I read this article by a guy named David Brooks.

He's written a couple books.

He actually writes for the New York Times, and he wrote an article, and he was talking

about the power of relationships, and he did this longitudinal study.

And they took a group of kids when they were like five or six years old in poverty. They took these kids, and some of them,

they connected them beyond their socioeconomic class, and some of them stayed connected in their

community. So they didn't have relationships outside the community. And what they discovered over a multiple decade period of time is that these children who were

connected beyond their community with relationships, with people who could help them with

education, with jobs, with resources, that they were able to break out of the poverty that they had been in as families

for decades simply because the power of relationships.

Now, we know this to be true, right?

People talk about this all the time.

You know, you are oftentimes the sum total of the five people that you're closest to.

The relationships in your life are influencing

the quality of your life. And studies actually show us with the power of friendship, friendship

changes us. So if we have good friendships in our lives, we actually live higher quality

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