Dear Lord; Happy Friday Father!<\/p>\n
This morning Lord, I had another one of those inspired geek moments that You grant me from time to time.\u00a0 I was working on a laptop PC that was in for service, with the primary customer complaint being that it was running very slowly.\u00a0 External malware and virus scans had come back clean, so I booted into the operating system to evaluate the situation.<\/p>\n
It was clogged to the hilt with \u201cstuff\u201d starting up automatically every time it booted.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Now, this is something we see pretty regularly.\u00a0 Between the bundled software that comes loaded on new machines, \u201cadd-on\u201d<\/em> downloads that come along for the ride with installs over the Internet, and all the little \u201cextras\u201d<\/em> that get installed automatically with new components like printers and scanners, unless you know what\u2019s safe to remove or deselect, it builds up quickly.\u00a0 The result over time is a computer that takes a long time to boot up, and acts slow and sluggish when performing tasks.<\/p>\n As I started to strip away the layers of unnecessary bloat from the machine, my mind drifted back to yesterday, and the \u201cfog\u201d<\/em> my mind had been in for most of the day\u2026<\/p>\n I was slow\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I was sluggish\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I had problems focusing on tasks\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Your Voice wasn\u2019t as clear as it usually is.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Hmmm\u2026 A parallel maybe?\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Like the laptop in my care, my mind yesterday was filled with unnecessary \u201cclutter\u201d<\/em>. \u00a0Ponderings and concerns about everything from money, to groceries, to laundry preoccupied my thoughts, making focusing on more important matters (like talking with You) much more difficult.<\/p>\n Therefore Father, going into this weekend my prayer is a simple one:<\/p>\n Heavenly Father, please grant us Clarity<\/span>;<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Clarity of focus<\/span> to see past our earthly concerns\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Clarity of mind<\/span> to listen in the Stillness for Your Voice\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Clarity of purpose<\/span> to make choices that best Glorify You\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Clarity of Spirit<\/span> to draw us closer to Your Presence.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Amen.<\/p>\n ~Phather Phil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Lord; Happy Friday Father! This morning Lord, I had another one of those inspired geek moments that You grant me from time to time.\u00a0 I was working on a laptop PC that was in for service, with the primary customer complaint being that it was running very slowly.\u00a0 External malware and virus scans had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[107,82,44,45,1621,1622,1623,1624,1194,1620,425,650,915,546,487,173,628,1171,1615,444,964,593,916,121,475,360,1616,682,880,203,431,506,576,217,205,41,695,1618,748,113,732,817,66,730,761,1617,1619,71,481,49,138],"class_list":["post-1211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-emails-to-god","tag-care","tag-choice","tag-choices","tag-clarity","tag-clarity-of-focus","tag-clarity-of-mind","tag-clarity-of-purpose","tag-clarity-of-spirit","tag-clean","tag-clutter","tag-concern","tag-customer","tag-dear-lord","tag-difficult","tag-earth","tag-father","tag-friday","tag-geek","tag-geek-moment","tag-happy","tag-happy-friday","tag-heavenly","tag-heavenly-father","tag-illness","tag-inspire","tag-internet","tag-laptop-pc","tag-listen","tag-long","tag-moments","tag-money","tag-morning","tag-necessary","tag-pray","tag-prayer","tag-presence","tag-problem","tag-problems-focusing","tag-quickly","tag-safe","tag-situation","tag-start","tag-stillness","tag-thoughts","tag-unnecessary","tag-unnecessary-bloat","tag-unnecessary-clutter","tag-voice","tag-week","tag-weekend","tag-work"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p18mMc-jx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1213,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions\/1213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}