Years Ago I Was At A Promise Keepers Pastor's ...

Years ago I was at a Promise Keepers Pastor’s Conference – It was a great conference. I went with pastor friend of mine and to save some cash we went in together on renting a car and a hotel room. So we booked all of this months in advance believing everything would be ready for us when w arrived. Now being guys, we were willing to stay in the same room, but you know, we each wanted our own bed – guys, you know what I mean. Well, we get to our hotel, a well known national chain, and they do in fact have a room for us, but not with two beds, but one king size bed. This was very disturbing. After a lengthy conversation, it turns out that they did have the room we requested, but they had given it away. They promised to fix the situation. Well, it was a week long conference and it became kind of a running joke that each time we would come and go from our room, we would ask if they had a room with two beds as promised – the answer was always the same, “we’re working on it”.

So, our last night at the conference we arrive late at the hotel, about 1:00 a.m. after saying long good byes to friends. We go to our room and our key doesn’t work. It was one of those credit card kind of keys. We tried again and again. Nothing. We drag ourselves back to the front desk and the night clerk says, “oh, no problem, I’ll just make a couple of new keys”. We get our new credit card keys and head to our room.

The door poops open, just like that, AND SOME GUY IS SLEEPING IN THE BED! He wakes up screaming bloody murder yelling, “What are you doing in my room?”, “What are YOU doing in our bed?” And then it hit us: Our luggage wasn’t in the room. We apologized and ran down to the front desk.

It turns out, the hotel had a room come available so they, moved all of our stuff to the new room – but neglected to tell anyone, including us.

The next morning we had a little talk with the hotel manager. She gave us various explanations; she gave us an armload of excuses, but she never got around to saying, “I’m sorry”.

Repentance is not about being a good person. Repentance is not about being a nice person. Repentance is not even about being a faithful person. Repentance is literally: Stop, go no further, turn around and go the other way. Anyone can do it.