Over the past two years of itineration John Mark and I have spent numerous nights in hotels. I confess that I tend to select hotels based on a combination of price and how good their hot breakfast looks. If the hotel happens to have pump bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the shower instead of tiny bottles on the sink, I see that as an added bonus.
On our way to the hotel tonight I finished listening to the audiobook recommended by our security team. It’s called The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence. The main point was that we should trust our intuition when we feel suddenly afraid but can’t explain why, and we should act accordingly.
As I pressed the nozzle squirting shampoo into my palm tonight I had this random thought for the first time ever, “You know, I should probably check the shampoo and conditioner bottles before I get my hair wet, because who knows, maybe I could get in the middle of my shower and then not have what I need to finish.” Nothing life threatening, I know. Still, wouldn’t you know it? That was exactly what happened to me!!! Having rinsed out the shampoo, I pressed down the nozzle for the conditioner. I must have pressed it 50 times. It spat at me. That was it. Nothing close to sufficient for finishing my shower. I tried pulling the bottle off the wall to turn it upside down, but no luck. It was stuck in the holder. I tried removing the top so I could at least verify whether it was empty or simply broken. No luck.
How crazy was it for me to have thought about there possibly being no conditioner right before I discovered an empty bottle? Never before had I ever encountered an empty bottel in a hotel. In my conscious mind I had zero suspicion of any lack. This hotel seems nice enough, much nicer than some others I’ve been in. I enjoy the tall ceilings. Our room feels spacious, almost twice as big as many, with a love seat and matching foot stool on one end and an arm chair at the other end. The mattress is comfortable with soft pillows and clean white bedding.
Prior to my untimely discovery of an empty conditioner bottle, I had consciously but not intentionally noted the following:
- Based on the ceilings, this building was not originally a hotel, or has at the very least undergone severe remodelling.
- The concrete ceilings in the lobby had a rough texture from having been poured over wooden planks. I first wondered if this was intentional or if the building had been remodeled.
- There are holes in the ceiling of our room that seem to be where a wall once stood, though the room does not look bad. It just looks renovated.
- There are large pillars built into the wall between our room and the next that seem out of place.
- I saw a very small stain, about the size to two drops, on the gray footstool, but the room struck me as clean. No need to check for bedbugs under the mattress tonight!
- I noted a reddish mildew stain along the very bottom of two walls of the walk-in shower. I’ve seen a few hotels that had spots of black mildew stain but never red. The mildew seemed out of place, as the rest of the building looked nice.
Could it be that my intuition had put these things together and reached the conclusion that the supplies may not have been refilled? Was my seemingly random thought about checking for an empty bottle actually random? I expect Gavin de Becker, the author of the book I just finished, would say that my intuition picked up on these things, and that I should not be surprised. Myself, I prefer to think of these things as Holy Spirit at work in my life.
I probably will not always check the containers to make sure they are filled before showering from now on. It’s just not that big a deal. (But thanks to John Mark, who went down to the front desk to get me more conditioner in the middle of my shower!). What I really think is that the Lord allowed this to happen because He wants me to pay attention to what I learned in this book. There may be times coming when I need to trust the Lord by acting on a seemingly insignificant impulse. Between the timing of reading The Gift of Fear and tonight’s shower experience, I got the message.
To the Ends of the Earth 