Happy New Year! Welcome to the Daily article podcast for Monday, January the 1st, 2024.

I am Chris Elkins with the Denison Forum, narrating today's article written by Dr. Jim Denison.

Around a million people packed into New York City's Times Square on New Year's Eve to watch the

ball drop usher in 2024 while an estimated audience of one billion my wife and I

included watched from home the ball which was 12 feet in diameter and weighed 12 tons

featured a new design this year based on the bow tie shape of the actual

Times Square. This was not the only such event around the country, however. Mobile, Alabama,

dropped a 600-pound electric moon pie as onlookers ate the world's largest moon pie cake. Boise, Idaho dropped a giant potato,

while Las Cruces New Mexico dropped a 19-foot chrome chili and Raleigh, North Carolina,

dropped a 10-foot tall copper and steel acorn. My favorite such event took place in Lebanon,

Pennsylvania, where a ball of bologna was used

to celebrate the new year. My least favorite was in Key West Florida, where a drag queen was lowered

inside a supersized high-heel shoe. It seems safe to predict that these or similar events

will occur at the end of 2024 to ring in 2025.

The ball drop in Times Square has been employed for more than a century, and many of the others are now long-standing traditions.

One year, however, will be our last year. One New Year's Day will be our last New Year's Day. I cannot say that

today will be that day, but I cannot say that it will not. Even if Jesus doesn't return to our planet

this year, he may come back for you or for me. 67 million people died in 2022. If a third of them were Christians, as befits our percentage of the

global population, he came for more than 20 million believers that year, and likely a similar

number in 2023. Each time, he keeps his promise from John 14.3. If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to

myself that where I am you may be also. And he will return one day to our planet just as surely

as he left it, as stated in Acts 1, verse 11. This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw

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