~DEVOTION~

Many years ago, an elderly man and his wife entered the lobby of a small Philadelphia hotel.  “All the big places are filled,” the man said.  “Can you give us a room?”  The clerk replied that with three conventions in town, no accommodations were available anywhere.  “Every guest room is taken,” he said, but then added, “I can’t send a nice couple like you out into the rain at one o’clock in the morning, though.  Would you be willing to sleep in my room?”

The next morning, as he paid his bill, the elderly man said to the clerk, “You are the kind of manager who should be the boss of the best hotel in the United States.  Maybe someday, I’ll build one for you.”  The clerk laughed and forgot about the incident.  About two years later, however, he received a letter containing a round-trip ticket to New York and a request that he be the guise of the elderly couple he had befriended.

Once in New York, the old man led the clerk to the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, where he pointed to an incredible new building and declared, “That is the hotel I have just built for you to manage.”  The young man, George C. Boldt, accepted the offer of William Waldorf Astor to become the manager of the original Waldorf-Astoria, considered the finest hotel in the world in its time.

When you go out of your way to help someone, they often return the favor.  Even if they don’t, someone else will, and most importantly – God will.  Kindness will always attract kindness.