Corporatology

God Loves Vegas

I'm trying to train myself to interrupt my human tendency to categorize people long enough to actually see a person. No mistake, Vegas isn't the villain that gets redeemed. It's just my vision is changing.

And maybe so do I

It's easy to say God so loved the world while subconsciously dividing the world into people and places we're comfortable loving and those we're not.

Vegas confronts that.

The goth.
The furry.
The hacker.
The cocktail waitress.
The executive.
The drunk.
The scantily clad.
The exhausted convention worker.
The Australian.
The tourist.
The person whose politics we hate.
The person whose theology we hate.
The person whose life makes absolutely no sense to us.

For God so loved the world.

Not the cleaned-up parts.

The world.

I'm trying to train myself to interrupt my human tendency to categorize people long enough to actually see a person.

Make no mistake, Vegas isn't the villain that gets redeemed.

It's just my vision is changing.

God loves Vegas... and apparently, I needed to see that.

I don't like Las Vegas.

I've said it so many times.

Vegas is overstimulating.

It's loud and bright and smells like cigarettes even when no one is smoking near you. There are screens on buildings and screens inside buildings and music coming from somewhere all the time. Everything flashes. Everything beeps. Everything wants your attention.

There is no subtlety in Las Vegas.

It's a whole-city contact buzz.

And it is naked.

You know what I'm talking about... not the naked of transparency and freedom. The naked that makes even my grown self want to cover my eyes.

Especially as a Christian woman who has reached the age where I mostly want everyone to drink some water and put on something - anything - please.

It's a lot.

I was in Vegas for work. Hacker Summer Camp, which means the city was even stranger than usual.

Hackers and executives. Goths and punks. Furries. Nerds. Suits. People in leather. People with spectacular hair. Latinas and Aussies and Brits and people speaking languages I couldn't identify. Every shade of beautiful human skin. Tattoos and piercings and badges and backpacks and platform boots and wildly inappropriate T-shirts that made me smirk.

Hundreds of thousands of people moving past one another.

And at some point, I stopped telling myself how much I hated Vegas.

I started looking at the people instead.

And this thought kept coming back to me:
God loves every single one of them.

Not generically.
Not collectively.

Not in the vague way we sometimes say that God loves "everyone" because that's what Christians are supposed to say.

Individually.
Completely.

That woman.
That guy.
That person.
The person dressed in a way I don't understand.
The drunk one.
The loud one.
The glittered one.

The one whose entire vibe inspires me, and the one who looks suspiciously like my younger, wilder self.
The one whose life I might disagree with if I knew anything about it.
The one I might instinctively categorize before I've even learned their name.

God knows their name.
God knows the whole story.

And I know almost nothing.

That realization changed Vegas for me.

Intentional

Years ago, I started a small mental exercise. A practice in kindness - as it were.

I try to notice something about the people who cross my path.

Cute nails.
Cool hair.
Sweet kicks.
A funny shirt.
A whole vibe that deserves acknowledgment.

And whenever I can, I say it out loud.
"I love your nails."
"Those shoes are fantastic."
"Your hair is so pretty."

Tiny things that cost me nothing.

Most of the time the interaction lasts five seconds.

But I've watched faces change.

I've watched someone who was moving through the world unnoticed suddenly smile because another human being stopped long enough to say:

I saw something wonderful about you.

In Vegas, I started wondering if it might also be a spiritual discipline.

Because noticing requires me to interrupt something.

My judgment.
My distraction.
My hurry.
My assumption.
My own importance.

For a few seconds, I have to stop thinking about myself long enough actually to see the person standing in front of me.

And maybe that is one of the smallest ways we learn to love our neighbor.

Not by understanding everyone.
Not by approving everything.
Not by pretending our convictions don't matter.

But by refusing to let our convictions become an excuse to stop seeing people.

Jesus was remarkably good at this.
He saw people everyone else had already categorized.

The immoral woman.
The tax collector.
The sick man.
The foreigner.
The religious leader.
The criminal hanging beside Him.

People were constantly trying to tell Jesus what category someone belonged in.

And Jesus kept looking at the person.

Maybe that's what I needed Vegas to remind me.

Because it's easy to love humanity in theory.

Humanity is lovely from a distance.
People are considerably messier.
They're loud.
They vote differently.
They believe differently.
They make choices I don't understand.
They eat the chicken some protest.
They unknowingly support companies and industries you'd rather implode.

Sometimes they wear considerably fewer clothes than I would personally recommend.

And God loves them.
Deeply.
Completely.

Without requiring my comprehension first.

So I stopped saying I hate Vegas.

I worked hard that week. I talked to what felt like a thousand people. I tried to pay attention. I tried to encourage people when the opportunity appeared.

And then I went back to my hotel room.

I put my legs up the wall.

I read a book.

I watched the sun hit the Encore, turning the whole building gold.

I watched Vegas change from daylight to neon from twenty-something floors above it.

And strangely, those are most of the pictures I took.

Not the spectacle.
The sky.
The light.
The view from my window.

Little pieces of quiet in one of the loudest cities in America.