A Meditation on Las Vegas

I drove to work yesterday and I thought about Las Vegas.  I stopped at the first stop light on my route, sandwiched between the Taco Bell and an abandoned bank building.  The sunrise was just blooming, my sights set on the road ahead with a peach and purple sky.

I thought about all those families, grandparents, moms, dads, brothers, sisters, girlfriends, and boyfriends, their lives snuffed out.  I went about my daily routine, I had a break for lunch and then went back to work.  I didn't want to go back.  I wanted to do something.  I prayed, I suppose that's something but I think anyone reading this understands my sentiment.  When something so violent, so awful happens you want to DO something.  You feel uncomfortable just sitting there, eating chips, reading a book, having a conversation about football.  How can all of these normal things continue?  This awful event happened!  Life isn't about chips, or books or football, it's not even about work.

The problem is, I don't know what to do.  I listened to lots of suggestions, donate to the Red Cross, donate blood, tell your friends and family that you love them, call them today and tell them.  Tell them twice.  That doesn't feel like anything.  I am honestly bewildered that something like this could happen.  Stack this on top of all the other disasters in the headlines, Texas, Puerto Rico, North Korea.  There are at least a dozen more.

I read the quote yesterday about Mr. Rogers and in times of trouble to look for the helpers.  It was something to that effect.  I think that's good but that doesn't really help me, it gives inspiration, it gives a small blip of good in the face of overwhelming evil and sorrow.

But when I need help I go to the Gospel of John.  John helps me put into place what I'm fumbling around with.

John 14:1-6a, "Do not let your hearts be troubled, You believe in God, believe also in me.  My Father's house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.  You know the way to the place where I am going."
Thomas said to him, 'Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?"
Jesus answered, 'I am the way..."

I don't know a lot of things, I don't know all the answers, I don't know what practical steps to take, I don't know how to explain certain things.  I feel like Thomas, I feel, somehow, that we are all like Thomas with something like this.  "We don't know....we don't know....we don't know the way"

Jesus doesn't give Thomas a list of arguments, a defense of who He is, He gives Him one answer and it's the only answer I've been able to find so far that helps at all:

"I am"....that's what Jesus says, to our questions of not knowing, not understanding, "I am, the way"