The Good, The Bad, and ...

Wherever you go, there are good people and not-such-good people. This is one of the things I’ve learned while living in Las Vegas. Little did we know how prophetic it was when Mom and I went to see Martin Scorsese’s Casino just months before it became known that I was to be appointed to a church in Las Vegas that summer of 1996. I’ll confess to an infatuation with stars like Sharon Stone and Elisabeth Shue, and I let that influence my imagination of what we would find here. I think the only real celebrity I’ve seen in the fourteen years we’ve been here is Matt Damon, and that was the result of being moved to first-class to get me away from a drunken and unruly passenger. Who I have met in the time we’ve been here are people who are remarkably like you and me, people who work, raise families, aspire to success and despair at failure. That’s because, for the most part, I tend to hang out with good people and to avoid the not-such-good ones. It may seem that the latter are more prevalent in Las Vegas, but from what little I know about it they come here from around the globe. It’s the yin and the yang, there are good and bad people everywhere. I do not doubt that the lure of Sin City is strong to those bent on evil, but their ilk is not exclusively the city’s population. I am grateful for the many good acquaintances I’ve made here, grateful for having successfully avoided most of the bad ones (with the exception of those I had the misfortune of being subjected to through Trinity UMC), and am looking forward to meeting the many more good people that I’m sure are in my future.