Finding God in Vegas by Donald Harold Young

This is not another book about religion. It is a book about love.

Finding God in Vegas tells the story of Don Young–a successful pharmaceutical executive who seemed to have it all: wealth, status, success. But behind the image was a man deeply unfulfilled, quietly crumbling under the weight of materialism, disillusionment, and spiritual emptiness.

Despite earning a master’s degree in theology, Don spent years rejecting anything that resembled spirituality. He swallowed the lies that told him happiness came from status, achievement, and control.

But in the most unlikely of places–Las Vegas–he experienced a spiritual awakening that shattered those illusions and led him to something far more powerful: Love.

Not the fleeting kind. Not conditional or performative. But the kind of love that heals. Love for self, love for others, and the unconditional love God has for all people.

Whether you're religious, spiritual-but-not-religious, skeptical, burned out, or simply searching for something deeper, this book is for you. It’s an invitation to rethink what matters, reconnect with your heart, and rediscover the truth that was always there: you are worthy of love.

With honesty, humor, and hard-earned wisdom, Finding God in Vegas reveals that it’s never too late to open your heart, shift your perspective, and live a life rooted in something deeper than worldly success: Love.

The love in this book is for the hurting. For the hopeful. For the seekers and the skeptics.

The love in this book is for you.

Amazon  Author's Website Author's Amazon Page

Excerpt from Finding God in Vegas © Copyright 2025 Donald Harold Young

CHAPTER 1
Stars and the Moon

It was February 2014. My life of the moderately rich and unfamous epitomized the American Dream, just as the first Black president of the United States began his second term. My childhood world of the 1970s, and my teenage world of the 1980s, seemed like polaroid pictures, or ancient celluloid memories captured on VHS or—even more prehistoric—8mm film, silent movies whose words and music left me long ago. Despite being now an adult, these characters still roamed my mind’s stage—ghosts haunting me whenever the noise and distractions of my life were muted, when I only heard sounds of silence.

My head and heart had long ago disconnected from one another, a skill that had become second nature while living my young life in the closet. I was adept at quickly compartmentalizing what I did not understand, or wasn’t ready to understand.

I was living in downtown Chicago in a newly built luxury high-rise, earning a salary of well over three hundred thousand dollars a year, plus a bonus and stock options. This allowed me to buy what was behind door number one, two, and three. Theater tickets front and center. First class vacations at the Ritz or Four Seasons. High-end shopping, and countless bottles of champagne, never again drinking wine that sparkles, because nothing sparkles like a Krug Grande Cuvée Brut and, of course, we deserved this.

Eating out several times a week, my kitchen was clean and immaculate. I’d drop a hundred dollars on this meal, sixty dollars on another meal, and three hundred dollars on steaks and martinis. Sometimes I would invite “friends” to join me, bringing the bill to well over five hundred dollars. These meals and friends have long since moved on, literally and figuratively.

I continued to gain weight in my late forties. I believed my belly displayed the good life and boasted that having a heart attack was a sign of success. Wealth was health, certainly not a sickness or something to avoid.

As an executive at a pharmaceutical marketing agency, I understood how healthcare works in the United States. Disease—self-inflicted or otherwise—would reap financial rewards for my pharmaceutical clients, and I, by extension, would benefit. Healthy people don’t generate profit. The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t earn money selling an apple a day. But there is plenty to be earned selling a once-a-day pill, or pills for life. Even better if we can hook customers while they’re young, ensuring a lifetime of profits.

In exchange for these success symbols of my worldly status, I was working fifty to sixty hours a week, rarely taking time off. On a plane and alone in a hotel room every week, I was often eating meals by myself while missing day-to-day moments with my family and our little cat Mozzer—my one consistent and constant joy.