Weekly Words

Vegas and Vision

The first time I ever visited Las Vegas, I immediately learned what I liked about it the most. It was not the delectable food, the plush hotels, the monstrous buildings, or the overwhelmingly lavish hotels and casinos. It was not even the opportunity to indulge in any conceivable mischief one thousand miles away from home and people who knew me. The single thing that blew me away more than anything was the vision of Las Vegas itself. Vegas sits in the middle of nowhere perched in the midst of a valley. Yet years ago, there was a vision to transform a mundane and inconspicuous little town into a booming resort and vacation spot. Now, what once was a bump on the map is now one of the most famous vacation and convention centers in the entire world. That is vision! Whatever you may think about Las Vegas, you must admit that it is the embodiment and result of vision at its best. Vision looks into the future and sees a reality that does not exist in the present. Vision imagines that something can be where nothing is right now. Thus, vision is a paradox because it is always seeing something that you can not see!

Vegas can teach us so much about having and living with a vision. So many of us shy away from the vision we have for our lives or of the future because it exists in the middle of nowhere. The remoteness of what we believe our future can be is so distant that it scares us away from taking our own vision seriously. The current inaccessibility and present invisibility of what we believe the future can be saps our strength and drains away our devotion to vision. But every now and then people decide to live in vision, see the unseen, work for the imagined, and commit to making something out of nothing. The next thing you know you have a place with extravagant hotels, opulent casinos, world championship prize fights, world class concerts and shows, and people from all over the world coming to take part. Vision created Vegas. While everyone looked and saw mountains of rocks, miles of sand, and volumes of useless desert plants, there were others who saw what Vegas could be.

In many ways, this is where Vegas meets Jesus (don’t be too holy for this!). In the midst of a desert of legalism, rocks of rigid religious regulations, sands of separatism and exclusivity, Jesus had a vision of a spirituality governed by Love and pointed toward inclusivity. Now, just as millions of people sort through the Las Vegas strip, billions of people have sifted their way through Christianity trying to find meaning and makes sense out of life. Yet, both began with Vision. I want to encourage someone to start taking vision seriously. Refuse to let the current rocks, the present sand, and the existing desert, be a barrier to your imagination. Where you want to go and who you want to be may be in the middle of nowhere, but when you live in vision you can make nowhere become somewhere and nothing become something. VIVA LAS VEGAS!!!!

Humbly in Christ’s Love,
Pastor B.A. Jackson