My First New Temptation

My behavior this weekend was boorish. There's a certain appeal every once in a while to cast off that respectable you that you've spent years developing in order to wallow in that old neanderthal self of your college years. The only thing is, I never really had any college years. By the time I was in college, I was already too old and too mature for the kind of college years that most people refer to as THE COLLEGE YEARS. So my approximation of my college years filled with boozing, partying, gambling, lascivious behavior, and other outrageous stunts, was mostly reduced to a kind of crude humor not normally allowed outside a locker room - and it got old in my mind really fast. I only maintained the pretense because nobody goes to Vegas to discuss theology, politics, or the complexities of life. For every moment when Shakespeare was in my mind, I masked it well with some half-baked discussion of some girl's anatomy and had another beer.

Las Vegas style temptation no longer has any appeal to me. Gambling (or should I call it throwing money away) is no longer fun. Drinking lost its appeal years ago. I'm too old to wander around picking up chicks. And all that drunken frat boy stuff stopped being fun after about one semester in college.

As I sat inside the Paris casino waiting for a friend, I watched all the women go by, dressed up for a night on the town, no two alike, no one really having "fun", and it occurred to me that I'd much rather spend time doing something real. Vegas suddenly seemed so artificial to me - a fantasy where the curtains were rolled back and the tiny wizard had been revealed.

Though I may have overdone it before - Kenya, Mississippi, Church, etc... - prompting a need to escape to Vegas for some counter-programming, the rightness of my path became crystal clear to me this weekend. There is a true power and a true desire for real relationships and real fun and real celebration that is other-centered. There is more fulfillment in a quiet moment of real laughter or real tears than in 10,000 nights of the artificial revelry of Las Vegas. I began to see the temptation such a REAL life could hold.

So God has dangled the temptation in front of me - to follow Him without reservation and to leave the glittery world behind. The question is, will I yield? Or will I remain boorish in some vain attempt to stay part of a world I no longer feel any connection to?

Aw heck... I give up. I'm trading in Vegas for a real life.