Latest / The Daily Article / Watching seven playoff games but avoiding the Golden Globes
Transcript
- 0:02[SPEAKER_00]: Good day!
- 0:03[SPEAKER_00]: It's Monday, January the 12th, 2026, and this, is Dinnison Forum's daily article podcast.
- 0:09[SPEAKER_00]: I'm narrator Chris Elkins, giving voice to today's daily article written by Cultural Theologian Dr. Jim Dinnison.
- 0:17[SPEAKER_00]: It was a busy weekend for some subsets of American society.
- 0:21[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a college football fan, you likely watched Miami and Indiana win their playoff games.
- 0:28[SPEAKER_00]: Perynthetically, Indiana, quote, looks like it will never lose again according to one of my favorite sports commentators.
- 0:36[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a pro football fan, as many seem to be these days, you had five games to watch, including the bears, come back for the ages, Saturday night, with one more contest tonight.
- 0:49[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a movie and TV fan, you likely watch the Golden Globes last night, where one battle after another and Hamlet won their categories.
- 0:59[SPEAKER_00]: If you're none of the above, you're wondering if you should keep listening this morning.
- 1:05[SPEAKER_00]: While I watched every football game I mentioned, I have not seen even one of the movies or TV shows for which golden globes were awarded.
- 1:14[SPEAKER_00]: As a result, I'm avoiding reviews of last night's ceremony this morning.
- 1:18[SPEAKER_00]: Time is too short to spend it on what is irrelevant to me today.
- 1:22[SPEAKER_00]: But this fact is more relevant to our souls than many people seem to know.
- 1:27[SPEAKER_00]: The Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, begins his book, Falling Upward, his meditation on the spiritual life, this way, quote,
- 1:38[SPEAKER_00]: that there are at least two major tasks to human life.
- 1:42[SPEAKER_00]: The first task is to build a strong container or identity.
- 1:46[SPEAKER_00]: The second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold, in quote.
- 1:53[SPEAKER_00]: In his first task, we ask the essential questions, what makes me significant?
- 1:58[SPEAKER_00]: How can I support myself and who will go with me?
- 2:02[SPEAKER_00]: However, the container these questions help to define quoting roar is not the Indian itself, but exists for the sake of our deeper and fuller life, which we largely do not know about ourselves.
- 2:16[SPEAKER_00]: In quote, when we focus on the container, but not the content, over time, we inevitably resign ourselves to lives without meaning, or we fixate on means as ins and commit ourselves to aims
- 2:30[SPEAKER_00]: But when we learn to focus on the purpose for which our lives are intended in what roar calls the second half of life, several positive consequences occur.
- 2:41[SPEAKER_00]: Quoting roar again, we have less and less need or interest in eliminating the negative or fearful, making again these old rash judgments holding onto old hurts or feeling any need to punish other people.
- 2:56[SPEAKER_00]: Our superiority complexes have gradually departed in all directions.
- 3:00[SPEAKER_00]: We do not fight these things anymore.
- 3:03[SPEAKER_00]: They have just shown themselves too many times to be useless, ego-based, counter-productive, and often entirely wrong."
- 3:13[SPEAKER_00]: So, what is the purpose for which our lives and our time are best spent?
- 3:18[SPEAKER_00]: I recently learned that I am a direct descendant of two of the passengers on the Mayflower voyage to the world in 1620.
- 3:25[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, my great-grandfather, Times 10, was apparently the last of these passengers to die.
- 3:33[SPEAKER_00]: In the moment I learned this about myself, I viscerally felt myself
- 3:40[SPEAKER_00]: It was as though I became the child of a celebrity and thus a celebrity myself.
- 3:46[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely nothing tangible changed about my life.
- 3:49[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't suddenly become richer or wiser, but knowing who's I am in this context enhanced my sense of who I am.
- 3:58[SPEAKER_00]: Brother Jeffrey Tristum of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston claims that my impulse is more foundational and empowering than I thought when he stated, when we know who's we are, we know who we are.
- 4:14[SPEAKER_00]: He points to Jesus' baptism commemorated yesterday by many Christian traditions.
- 4:19[SPEAKER_00]: At which the Father proclaimed in Matthew 3, verse 17, this is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.
- 4:27[SPEAKER_00]: Then he notes that Jesus' subsequent temptations were, quote, precisely about doubting and denying his true identity, in quote.
- 4:36[SPEAKER_00]: The first two in Matthew 4, verse 3, and verse 5 began, if you are the Son of God.
- 4:43[SPEAKER_00]: The third similarly tempted Jesus to abandon his identity as God's Son and worship Satan instead, as we read in verse 9.
- 4:52[SPEAKER_00]: According to Tristom, it is only after he has gone through this inner struggle that he could emerge and begin his public ministry.
- 5:01[SPEAKER_00]: Through the rest of that ministry, Jesus never wavered from His identity as His Father's Son.
- 5:08[SPEAKER_00]: He saw His Father's glory, prayed for His blessing, chose His will over His own, committed His spirit to Him in death, returned to Him in paradise and inner seeds at His right hand today.
- 5:22[SPEAKER_00]: Now, he wants to help us embrace his identity as our own.
- 5:27[SPEAKER_00]: As you know, when we trust in Christ as our Lord, we become children of God, according to John 1, verse 12.
- 5:35[SPEAKER_00]: Now, our Father wants his children to become like his son.
- 5:39[SPEAKER_00]: As Paul explained in 2 Corinthians 3, verse 18, new living translation, the Lord, who is the spirit, makes us more and more like Christ as we are changed into His glorious image.
- 5:53[SPEAKER_00]: God's purpose stated in 1st Lessonians 5, verse 23, is to sanctify you completely, so that your whole spirit and soul and body will be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
- 6:07[SPEAKER_00]: However, we separate clergy from Leity and thus believe, though we may not say it in words, that true godliness is for the professionals.
- 6:16[SPEAKER_00]: This makes sense in other realms, professional golfers and musicians perform in ways we cannot and so on.
- 6:24[SPEAKER_00]: But Jesus wants his entire church to be holy and without blemish as we read in Ephesians 5 verse 27.
- 6:32[SPEAKER_00]: Our Father's goal, stated in 1 Corinthians 1, verse 8, is that every one of us be guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
- 6:42[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
- 6:43[SPEAKER_00]: God's purpose in making us like Christ is not just that we experience the abundant life.
- 6:49[SPEAKER_00]: He intends for us as stated in John 10, verse 10.
- 6:53[SPEAKER_00]: It is also that we become catalyst for restoring humanity to him, salt and light in a decaying and dark world, witnesses whose word and works are so compelling that multitudes are drawn to him.
- 7:08[SPEAKER_00]: In Acts 2, we read that the Spirit transformed a fearful fisherman into a fearless evangelist.
- 7:16[SPEAKER_00]: Referencing 1 Timothy 1 vs. 15 and 16, he made the church's greatest persecutor into its greatest evangelist missionary and theologian.
- 7:26[SPEAKER_00]: He turned a son of Thunder, noted in Mark 3, verse 17, into the apostle of love referenced in first John 4, verses 7 through 12.
- 7:36[SPEAKER_00]: And people changed by Jesus into the character of Jesus, changed the world.
- 7:42[SPEAKER_00]: They still do.
- 7:43[SPEAKER_00]: For what purpose will you spend your time and life?
- 7:47[SPEAKER_00]: With what contents will you fill your container?
- 7:51[SPEAKER_00]: How will you express your identity as God's child?
- 7:55[SPEAKER_00]: God's Spirit will make us as much like God's Son as we choose to be.
- 8:01[SPEAKER_00]: So how much like Jesus do you want to be today?