This week, I finally taped what I know best....

For the first time in my life, I brought a video camera on vacation. If you find it surprising that a professional video guy has never recorded his own family or vacation exploits, then you're not alone...my wife has been wondering the same thing for a couple of years now.

It's like this: after a full day of planning video, scripting video, shooting video, editing video and talking video, the last thing I want to do is go home and roll tape. I'm sure any middle-school teacher who comes home to her own teenagers and any accountant that files an extension for his own taxes can understand that...like they say, the cobbler's kids go barefoot. However, with a town like Las Vegas, it's difficult to really capture the experience with the few really good words that I know, so I brought the camera along.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed having that little camera around. Stacy and I took some really cool video...and more than anything, it was relaxing. I found that I was less concerned about creating those unforgettable vacation moments when I knew I had a way to remember them later. I may make a habit out of it...we'll see. I'm tempted to run back home and edit it into a nice, polished fifteen-minute video...but I think that may ruin it. (A college professor of mine wrote her doctoral thesis on the folkloric value of home movies...she sees an incredible beauty in their rawness, and when her book comes out, I will buy it. Her name is Judi Hetrick, and I intend to read it cover to cover). If I do edit it, I'll see if I can put a two-minute version on the blog.

We had a wonderful time in Las Vegas. Somewhere over the course of the four non-working days that I spent with Stacy in Vegas, Stacy and I made the switch from noctural to diurnal living. And I don't mean that as an exaggerated way of saying we stayed up late...I mean we actually began to sleep during the sunlight hours and remain awake during the darkened ones. We started coming in somewhere around 7:30 a.m. and waking up around 4 p.m. After a couple of days, we discovered that Las Vegas is a very different place at 4:30 in the morning. Most of the revelers have fallen asleep or passed out by this point...and the streets are sparsely populated, mostly by gambling addicts moving from casino to casino, and prostitutes who haven't called it a night yet. The prostitutes are easy to spot...and if you just thought, "how?" then I think you owe yourself a pat on the back and a cup of hot chocolate. The compulsive gamblers can be spotted by their shifty, droning, joyless playing of slots, roulette, blackjack. They aren't necessarily poor, they're just joyless. They may even be doing well, but they don't seem to be alive. They just keep doing it.

There are signs and pamphlets all over the casino advertising help numbers for gambling addiction. It seems to me a little like putting the number to the Mayo Clinic on every pack of cigarettes. We're handing people the loaded gun, and daring them to play with it without getting shot. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying gambling is a bad idea...in fact, I did quite a lot of it this week, enjoyed almost every minute, and ended up about $100 ahead. It's just amazing how the very things that God built us to be attracted to (risk, gain, sport, food, sex, etc.) are the things which, if we are weak in our ability to manage that enjoyment, will destroy us. We have the wonderful taste and stress-relieving effects of our pilsners, stouts and heffeweizens, and AA meetings and rehab clinics to help repair their damage. We have the profound pleasure and soul-sharing of sex, and porn recovery programs and VD clinics to help repair the damage. We have the thrill of risking a little bit of our hard-earned income on the chance that we may leave with more than we walked in with, and we have gamblers anonymous and the NV Trouble Gaming Helpline to help repair the damage. (BTW: "Gaming" is now the correct word to use in Las Vegas...apparently "gambling" sounded too much like "gambling.")

All it tells me is that God was very right in making some very key demands of man. These demands don't ask for joy or even understanding of God's will...just obedience. Man is a brilliant design, but it seems to me that while we are capable of astonishing innovation and acts of absolute genius, we may not, on the whole, be trusted to know ourselves deeply. We seem to be able to understand both the fantastically minute and awesomely large...but some of our most brilliant minds have also been our most tragic biographies. (Hemingway had his drink, Plath her drugs, and Byron his sex, to name a few). God knows our beautiful strengths, to be sure...and I'm confident that He revels in them. But if He is omniscient, then He also knows our weaknesses, and He knows that they would reveal themselves most readily under the pressure of our pleasures. That's why, I think, He tried to beat us to the problem by offering those key commandments. At the risk of sounding preachy, I think the big idea was that, when our weakness impairs our ability to make rational decisions, we can choose simple obedience as our rationale.

Now, obviously, the big questions then come in how to interpret what God's commandments for our lives are. That's a topic far too big to handle here....probably to handle anywhere. But my hope lies in my belief that our earnest effort to follow that which we truly believe is God's will is, in itself, pleasing to God...for our sake, it had better be, anyhow.

Peace,
Justin