My hotel room has waist-high black grass painted on the wallpaper and floor-to-ceiling mirrors at all corners of the room. This is one of the strangest hotels I’ve ever stayed in, and I’ll tell you what–these folks are sneaky.
As is normal for hotels of this caliber, there’s a fridge, and it’s full of alcohol, along with some juices and other things. I went ahead and picked up a bottle of water and a bottle of pop for dinner last night, intending to drink half for dinner and half when I woke up…. because there’s no coffee pot in the room (this place is weird). So I pulled out a bottle of juice and a can of Red Bull and set them on the counter, replacing them with my own drinks.
Didn’t even think about it. A little while later, I spotted a sign that said the fridge is full of sensors. And anything you move will be charged to your room. Of course, the sign is tiny and not on the fridge at all.
So, I replaced the drinks and drank my own stuff last night, and I’m going to talk to the desk people today and see if they will make an exception for a Kansas farm kid who missed their teeny tiny sign.
What really irks me, though, is that I’m pretty sure the girl who checked me in told me that taking anything out of the fridge will be charged to my room. I just wasn’t really paying attention.
The sign that says not to move stuff (if the word “sexy” bothers you, please ignore it; it’s a label for marketing; this is Las Vegas, and you can’t get away from it)
Today’s verse is Proverbs 9:9.
Instruct the wise,
and they will be even wiser.
Teach the righteous,
and they will learn even more.
If you’ve ever tried to teach anyone anything, you know that wise people learn easily and foolish people don’t learn at all. That’s a principal you’ll see over and over again in the Bible.
When God is trying to teach us something, people who are wise will listen, and people who aren’t will just do their own thing. What’s nice about being wise and being foolish, though, is that you can choose which one you’ll be.
Yes, you have a choice whether to be wise or foolish. It’s not just something that happens. You aren’t born one way or the other. You are wise or foolish based on what choices you make in your life.
The verse right after this one says: Fear of the Lord is the foundation of wisdom. So if you want to be wise, you need to start fearing the Lord. Not the kind of fear that keeps you cowering under your covers at night. That’s not what this fear means.
Fearing the Lord is reverence. It’s recognizing His authority and His sovereignty, which is basically His right to do whatever He wants with the universe. You understand, don’t you, that God doesn’t have to explain Himself to us? He made us. He made everything. And if He wanted to start over, He’d be within His rights (even as we understand them) to wipe everything out and begin again. We do it with our own creations all the time.
We need to recognize that God can do that if He wants to. But He doesn’t. And He even chooses to tell us about His plan and teach us how to live. It’s up to us whether to accept it or not.
If you fear God, you will learn how to be wise, and if you are wise, you will grow wiser every day. If you don’t, you’ll be foolish, and you’ll keep making the same mistakes over and over again. And that’s how you end up with a sky-high hotel room bill, because you move the things in your fridge after the girl at the desk told you not to.
So don’t be foolish. God has showed us how to be wise, and it’s so much better (and much less expensive) to be wise.
Always Peachy 