The 2024 NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments kick off today, so if your office seems a bit more sparsely populated or email responses come slower than usual, now you know why. And the lengths to which some will go in order to watch the tournament’s opening days of chaos speak volumes to the place it has within our cultural psyche:

• A reported 37 percent of Americans are willing to call in sick or skip work to watch March Madness.
• One in five have canceled dates or birthday parties in order to catch the games.
• Those not willing to skip work will watch an average of six hours of tournament play while on the clock (and that was the estimate before working from home became more common).
• For men not willing to fake an injury or illness, March Madness is the most popular time of the year to get a vasectomy and have a legitimate reason not to leave the couch.

One of the primary reasons for the tournament’s popularity—especially its opening days—is the fact that it truly feels like anything can happen in most of these games.

As I wrote last year,

Upsets are common and, unless they happen to your school, we get to embrace the seeming randomness of each game’s outcome without being personally invested in the results. We can root for the underdogs without any sense of disappointment when they lose. There aren’t many other areas of our lives where we can emotionally invest in something without any real risk if it doesn’t go our way.

And considering the ways in which the sport has fundamentally changed over the last few years, this season’s tournament could be as unpredictable as any before it.

NIL money, transfer portals, and the chance to choose

As Billy Witz notes,

Three years ago, under mounting legislative and judicial pressure, the N.C.A.A. changed two major rules. It allowed athletes to make money from so-called name, image and likeness payments, and it eased restrictions on players transferring from one school to another. Those changes — prompted in part by a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the N.C.A.A.’s authority — have upended the top levels of college sports.

As a result, previously unseen levels of parity exist in a sport that used to be dominated by the blue-blood programs that routinely recruited the nation’s best prospects. Now—for better or worse—those players often go to the programs where they can get the most playing time while padding both their résumé and their bank accounts in the process.

While it would be naïve to assume that paying players is new to the sport, the ability to do so in the open has changed the way many of these young men and women have come to view their time in college. And given how much can ride on finding the right fit and opportunity, many of them are better off for it.

Consider this: Of Krysten Peek’s eight players who could help themselves the most in this year’s tournament, five of them started their college careers playing somewhere else. And before the tournament even started, a little more than 10 percent of players on the men’s side of Division I entered the transfer portal with the hopes of finding a better situation for next season.

For some, it will work out well. For others, it will not, with some losing the scholarship they had in the failed pursuit of a better opportunity.

Either way, though, most players seem to relish the chance to make that choice for themselves. And there is an important lesson in that reality for us today.

The consequences of free will

One of the fundamental truths of what it means to be created in the image of God is that we possess the freedom to choose how we will use the life he’s given us.

Now, that doesn’t mean we can do anything, as all free will exists more as a menu of options than the absence of limitations. But our heavenly Father created us to go through life with the ability to decide how we will approach it.

Ideally, we would use that freedom to choose to love and obey him. That is far and away the best approach, and Scripture makes that abundantly clear across its pages. But Scripture is also clear that the gift of freedom requires us to own the results of our decisions (Galatians 6:7–8).

We don’t get to make a choice and blame God or anyone else for how it turns out.

Ultimately, those consequences belong to us, and it’s a sign of maturity—both emotional and spiritual—to be able to accept those consequences and move forward. That doesn’t mean we have to like the results. But whether it’s a busted bracket or something of far greater consequence, when we choose to live in the past, we greatly reduce what the Lord can do through us in the present.

So choose instead to learn from your experiences, then move on to wherever God leads next. That’s how we grow, both as people and in our walk with the Lord.

Where do you need to experience that kind of growth today?

Denison Forum

Who is the “most watched person on earth,” according to Time magazine?

If you’re following the news, you might nominate:

• Taylor Swift, who now has the 1 music film ever on the Disney+ platform
• Princess Kate, who was just spotted in public for the first time in months
• Tom Cruise, ranked the most popular actor of 2023
• Or Lionel Messi, ranked our most popular athlete.

But the answer is twenty-five-year-old Jimmy Donaldson, better known by his online alias MrBeast. His videos have garnered a social media audience of over 425 million fans; he estimates that he appears on a screen somewhere in the world about thirty billion times a year.

Now MrBeast is making news for a deal he struck with Amazon worth as much as $100 million. “Beast Games” will consist of a thousand contestants competing for a $5 million cash prize, the largest single prize ever offered on television or streaming. Donaldson will host and executive produce the show, which will be available in 240 countries and territories.

His secret is not just his entertaining and well-produced videos (Time reports that he shoots as much as twelve thousand hours of footage for a fifteen-minute clip). It’s also the way his viewers are invited to engage with him. At his suggestion, for example, viewers have planted twenty million trees and more than six hundred thousand people donated enough money to help remove thirty million pounds of trash from the oceans.

Grayson Logan, an eleven-year-old who watches MrBeast videos every day at his home in Arkansas, says, “I like him because he’s super nice and he helps people and gives them money.” A digital marketing expert says of Donaldson’s appeal: “His whole perspective is, How do I make the average person extraordinary?”

This question helps explain Donaldson’s astounding popularity, since most of us seek to be “extraordinary” every day. There’s a paradoxical path to our goal available right now, one that transcends anything our media-driven culture can offer.

“My core identity is not that of a consumer”

It was my privilege to hear Rev. Tish Harrison Warren at Dallas Baptist University’s Veritas Lecture Series last night and then to join her on the platform for a conversation.

Her book Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life was Christianity Today’s 2018 Book of the Year (Here’s our review). Her second book, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep was Christianity Today’s 2022 Book of the Year. She was also an opinion writer for the New York Times. I have followed her ministry with great gratitude for her intellectual brilliance, practical relevance, and evangelical yet ecumenical cultural engagement.

In Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish writes:

Christian worship, centered on Word and sacrament, reminds me that my core identity is not that of a consumer: I am a worshiper and an image-bearer, created to know, enjoy, and glorify God and to know and love those around me.

She also states:

The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.

Our problem is that our faith formation and our “daily routines” so seldom seem to intersect.

Privatizing truth and meaning

You and I live in a “seeing is believing” culture that defines reality as that which is material and measurable. This is one consequence of our scientific, secularized society, “secular” being Latin for “of this world.”

Earlier societies lived with mystery and the reality of the supernatural, from the Greeks and Romans with their pantheon of Olympic gods, to early Christians who sought and lived by the power of the unseen Holy Spirit, to medieval cultures governed by the spiritual rhythms and dogmas of the Catholic Church.

Then came the birth of modern science founded on the scientific method, which focuses only on that which can be measured in some tangible and objective way. Darwinian evolution further removed the mystery of creation, then Freudian psychoanalysis taught us that religion is an infantile neurosis. Now our postmodern, relativistic culture is convinced that all truth claims, including (especially) religious truth claims, are personal and subjective.

But this privatizing of truth and meaning isolates us from others and from the God who made us. It insulates us from our inborn quest to be part of a cause greater than ourselves. It separates spiritual formation from our daily routines. And it commodifies our faith as a means to personal, even selfish ends.

It should not surprise us, therefore, that a video creator who gives viewers a chance to change the world in a collective and tangible sense would be one of the most popular media figures in history.

How to live an extraordinary life

To live an extraordinary life, stay connected to the One who came to give us “more and better life than [we] ever dreamed of” (John 10:10 MSG). Make him your Lord by submitting to his Spirit’s power and leading. When you “steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions,” as a result “you’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met” (Matthew 6:33 MSG).

Tertullian (AD 160–240) noted:

Prayer cleanses from sin, drives away temptations, stamps out persecutions, comforts the fainthearted, gives new strength to the courageous, brings travelers safely home, calms the waves, confounds robbers, feeds the poor, overrules the rich, lifts up the fallen, supports those who are falling, sustains those who stand firm.

Will you experience such victory today?

Wednesday news to know

• No alternative for Rafah invasion, Netanyahu says, as rift with US grows
• Hong Kong lawmakers unanimously approve security law giving government more power to curb dissent
• Nvidia reveals Blackwell B200 GPU, the “world’s most powerful chip” for AI
• MacKenzie Scott donates $640 million to 361 nonprofits
• OTD in 1965: LBJ sends federal troops to Alabama to protect a civil rights march

Quote for the day

“For any person of faith, public engagement must be balanced with times of withdrawal, of silence, prayer, questioning and wonder beyond the reach of words. Otherwise, faith with all its strange and startling topology becomes a flat and sterile thing, something to be dissected instead of embraced. And typically once something is fit only for dissection, it is dead.” —Tish Harrison Warren

Denison Forum