For one, the dust. I still can't figure out how there is so much dust here in an office where the windows don't open, and the nearest dirt road is an hour away. But there was dust behind and under all my stuff, including the keyboard.
After seeing that, I completely cleared my desk of everything, cables and all. I went and found Clorox wipes and went to town on the surface of the desk, the backs of the monitors, and even some of the cables. How these things collect dust like that I'll never know.
Then when I was happy about my new clean desk, I started placing my objects. First was my docking station for my new laptop. As I pulled the cat 5 cable around (network cable) I discovered it was too short to reach the new location. After a few minutes of scrounging through a box of cat5 cables I found one long enough, but had to pull the desk away from the wall to get to the wall plate.
Behind my desk, just to the right of Narnia, is the wall plate for comms. But I was surprised when I didn't find the cable my laptop was plugged into. I was looking for a yellow cable, but no yellow cable was plugged into the wall. Confused, I traced my yellow cable to the one place it should have never been plugged into... the phone! (These are network phones)
I've been at this desk since last November, and the one thing I knew was the phone's pass-through cat5 jack is only a 10MB connection. We learned this when Trevor set his desk up. He made sure his connection was direct to the wall. When we did that, I was confident my cable was plugged into the wall because it went straight behind the desk.
So now here I am looking at the cable plugged into the phone and wondering how long it's been that way. Surely I, a skilled network administrator, would never allow myself to be restricted to the slower speeds of a pass-through port. But in fact, I did!
I promptly reconfigured my cables and placed my docking station on the right port and finished setting up my desk.
Once I booted my system up, I made a startling discovery, my connection was FASTER than it has EVER been here at the office! I was both happy and quite upset at the same time. Happy that I now have a much faster, and therefore more productive connection, but upset of all the hours I've sat here waiting for patches to download/upload.
Then I realized, how many configurations in our spiritual life are actually plugged into the wrong jack? What things in our lives are actually slowing us down from the fast track to God?
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
I was burdened by the pass-through port between me and the true speed of our network. How often are we burdened by our choices to delay our true freedom in Christ?
We all have our distractions, it is when you deny that the distraction exists that it becomes sin, and therefore a burden of sin is keeping you in the yoke of slavery.
For me, I think it's games. I play a few games at night just before I go to sleep to get my mind to stop thinking of the day. What if I stop playing games, distracting me from Him, and do something productive?
I'm definitely going to try.
I leave you with this, ask yourselves these questions along with me:
- What is my distraction?
- What would happen if I read the Word instead?
- How much faster would my spiritual connection be?
- And what dust would I find while I reconfigure my life?
- How much more organized could my spiritual desk be if I could be more efficient in my communications with God?
Looking forward to see just how much faster I can "download" from God on the new configuration!
</rant>
Jon
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