Vegas Delights: Dissecting Your Desires & Understanding Why

♥ 6 MIN READ-

I celebrated my 30th birthday in Vegas with two of my girls who I’ve known since high school (they were also May babies turning 30) and my sisters. Honestly, this trip wasn’t my idea, but when you can save money by parlaying a work trip into a birthday celebration you should just take the win. So I did. The trip was everything you would expect of a girls trip in Vegas- hilarious experiences with random strangers, excitement, flirting, dancing, good food, late nights, questionable decisions and lots of laughs. We learned lessons, swore each other to secrecy and lived on a level that I don’t think any of us were expecting. We each left a piece of ourselves in Vegas. But most importantly, we each showed our truth in Vegas.

The Backstory

For my birthday I typically do something that takes me out of my comfort zone, yet helps me reflect.  Every year God gives me a birthday scripture, usually during my birthday prayer meeting with my pastor. This scripture sets the tone for the next year of my life. Ironically this year’s scripture was:

Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. Ps. 37:4

Translation: Find joy in doing what He wants you to do and He will enjoy giving you what you truly want.

Think about it, I was spending my birthday in the land of seemingly endless delight with the focus to delight myself in God. The juxtaposition was hilarious and intriguing.

The Lesson

Honestly, Vegas never appealed to me. Not because I’m super Christian or whatever, but because it seemed like a fantasy and I’ve spent too much of my life avoiding reality (I’ve grown since then) to willingly choose a fantasyland. To my surprise, Vegas preached me a sermon. The truth is that Vegas is what we make it. It can be an escape, but for me, it was a revelation. A case study on desires.

Vegas was a mirror. I saw an endless sea of creators trying to manufacture their best lives but instead creating Frankenstein’s monster. I’ll explain. The appeal of Vegas is the opportunity to become whoever and experience whatever you want. If only for one weekend you can live life beyond your normal constraints as if you’re someone else. For my girls the mindset was we were letting our hair down. We were having a Girls Trip-esque weekend. We weren’t worrying about work, bills, family drama or any of the other stress that may be waiting for us at home. We were gonna live it up and make memories to sustain us when we return back to our monotony. Every girl was free to live her version of her best life with no heat and no judgment from the rest of us. None of us could ever be described as wild or crazy but Vegas beckoned us to be a little wilder and a little crazier than normal. Take risks. Throw caution to the wind. Push the envelope.

This seemed to be the tempo of Vegas. It provides access to just about every delight and gives you the freedom to choose without the threat of judgment or consequence. Just be. Just live. Do you. Vegas requires a level of honesty because when you have the freedom to choose without the threat of consequence, your choice is typically what you’ve truly wanted all along. Vegas is full of people not showing who they are, but who they wish they could be. They are simply living out their desires.

What I See Clearly: Our delights are usually a direct reflection of our perceived deficiencies.

Within myself, my crew and in every person I met I saw the truth that what we delighted in told a story about what we saw lacking in our lives. The ones who felt constrained in our lives lived a little more recklessly that weekend. The ones who lacked affection flirted a little harder. The definition of our “best lives” was just inserting the things we felt like were missing. We played God that weekend and sampled what it would feel like if the prayers we wanted most had been answered. We took the pieces available to us and lived our version of our “best life” the best way we could. The result carried traces of Frankenstein’s monster because we didn’t have the ability to give ourselves what we truly wanted, at least not with the pieces Vegas provided.

Pure Exaggeration

Vegas is an exaggerated version of our everyday lives. Every day we have the choice to choose what delights us, the options just may not seem as apparent. The stark difference is that in Vegas people give themselves permission to give in to the desires they’ve been entertaining. Vegas seems like a lie, but for the fantasy to work, it requires you to tell the truth.

Side Note

Who you are on vacation shouldn’t be the best version of yourself either. Getting away from our normal allows us an opportunity to rest, reflect and realize who we want to become, but we always have the opportunity to be that better person, even at home. Let vacation be an opportunity to level up, but don’t feel like you have to get away to be who you want to be. You shouldn’t have to get away from your life to live your best life. Take the time to figure out what you truly desire and let your everyday life reflect that.

The Real Question

The question is not really what do you desire, but why? What problem in you or your life have you convinced yourself that fulfilling this desire in this way will fix? The desire isn’t the problem. The fulfillment is. Where we go, how we fill the void, what we label as the solution can make a delight detrimental. If we don’t understand the purpose of the delight we will treat it like a deficiency and fill it with whatever is easily available. We become impatient and use whatever we see that seems to fit the bill, but when we try to fix it ourselves the solution will always be lacking because we rarely understand what we really need. I think the crux of the problem is we don’t like to feel incomplete. I know I don’t. The second I realize something is missing, I want it. Waiting just reminds me of what I don’t have. Sometimes I would rather force a square peg into a round hole just to have something there, rather than waiting on the piece that actually fits.

And this is what I saw everywhere I looked in Vegas. Not judging anyone, but simply seeing reflections of myself. I appreciate God for focusing me with my birthday scripture before the Vegas trip because it allowed me to see both who I was and who I had become. I had been the girl trying on the wild and crazy persona just to see what it felt like not to be the responsible one all the time. I had drunk a little too much and made questionable decisions just to be able to say that I had done it. I had been that girl but I had become someone else. Yes, I was in Vegas but I was still me. Surrounded by an endless sea of delights I saw that I was able to retain who I was and what I wanted. When you know what you truly want, that doesn’t change just because you have more options and when you are who you want to be, you don’t have to pretend to be anyone else. Vegas proved to me that I really was happy with who I was (which was a miracle because my hair and my skin were acting up.)

My prayer is that you don’t suppress your delights. I pray that you study them, dissect them and come to understand why they exist. If you pay attention to them they will preach you a sermon about who you are and who you want to be. They are honest in a way that we rarely are with ourselves. Find the root of it and follow that delight back to God. Allow Him the space and time to fulfill it the way He desires. It may take time and it may feel like the long way around, but when He does it, the fulfillment will be complete and you will be fully satisfied. Any other method will leave you having to be cleaned out before God can fill you up.

«Consider This»

• What do you desire most?
• Are you being honest about your desires?
• When you examine them what do you see at the root?
• How are you fulfilling this desire?

Let’s have a conversation about this. Share your thoughts below.