With my soul I have desired You in the night,
Yes, by my spirit within me I will seek You early;

Isaiah 26:9

Often times I will lay in bed at night, unable to sleep. I used to lay awake for hours, thinking about all sorts of things. When I was 12 or 13 I asked my dad about this, and he gave me this advice: “It’s one of three things; an attack by the devil, a prompting from God, or just life. If it’s an attack, then read your Bible. That is exactly what he doesn’t want to happen. If it’s a prompting from God, read your Bible. He may be trying to show you something, or get you to pray for something. If it’s just life, then read your Bible. That will calm you down, and it’s good for you, and it might just put you to sleep.” That worked for quite a while, and in my twenties I finally was able to go to sleep without hours of tossing and turning.

Just recently, my sleeplessness has returned. This is definitely different, however. I spend a lot of time unable to sleep when I go to bed. I mostly just pray, and talk to God about different things. It has been good, but there’s something different about it. I believe it’s because my soul is desiring God.

In the mornings, many times I hear God say “get up”. He’ll tell me to take a shower (yes, God tells me to take a shower), and then whispers other little things to me. No earth-shattering prophecies of who the next president will be, but rather life-shattering revelations of who He is, and who I am in Him. “I love you.” “I desire to be intimate with you.” “I like you.” When I start the day out this way, I seem to hear Him throughout the day. When I ignore the “get up” command, I rarely hear Him the rest of the day.

I believe that there is a difference between your soul desiring God at night and your spirit seeking Him in the morning. There is definitely a difference in my flesh. At night, I can’t sleep. My body cannot go to sleep. So my soul desires God. Not the worst thing to do, in fact, it’s much better than pretty much anything else I could be doing at that time. I also could count swirls on the ceiling (I have excellent night vision) or I could get up and do some work. meh. However, in the morning, my spirit seeks God. That’s pretty cool. Seeking God is one of His favorite games, because then He allows Himself to be found. Your spirit knows how to seek. My flesh, however, is perfectly capable of sleeping in the mornings. I believe that’s one reason God tells me to shower. He has grace. But despite my body and soul not desiring God, my spirit seeks Him. When you subject the soul to the spirit, then your heart is right with God. When your soul is not submissive to your spirit, then your heart is not right with God. And your body just wants to sleep.

Now please don’t misunderstand. I believe it is great for our soul to desire God, AM & PM. I believe desiring Him through the night sets you up for a great game of Hide-and-Go-Seek Seek-and-Then-Find in the morning. And it’s a wonderful game.

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So here I am, day 16 of a 40 day fast. Over the last 5-6 days I’ve really been slacking, not keeping up with my morning readings, not praying, getting to work late, and just generally not being spiritual. Recharging and Resetting by David Sliker is a post where he speaks about the spiritual lull he’s going through, and calls us in similar circumstances to refocus.

So this morning I got up early (5:30 am) and took a shower, got dressed, and read my Bible. That was good, but I’ve been convicted about my lack of bona fide prayer. So I went to pray. This is about 6:30 am, with my intent to be leave for work about 6:50. 20 minutes of prayer should be good. Well, I say maybe two sentences of prayer, and promptly doze off. At 8:12 I wake up and rush off to work. Very frustrating.

I used to judge Peter, James, & John. Yup, I would criticize and condemn the three disciples who were closest to Jesus. Why could you not even stay awake one hour to pray with Jesus? Couldn’t you see that he was going through something rough? What kind of friends were you? Sadly, I know exactly what they were like. They were just like me. Heck, Jesus was asking them to wake up during the night… I can’t even stay awake after getting a decent night’s sleep & a hot shower. If I had been there with them, Jesus would have shaken my shoulder and I probably would not have even budged.

It’s pointless to compare ourselves to other people, whether we’re saying, “I would never murmur and complain like the Israelites if I was being fed manna” or “I could never call down fire from heaven like Elijah.” Both of those comparisons are wrong, and they’re prideful. The first statement is pride in that you’re saying “I’m better than them” and the second statement is false humility, where you’re saying “I’m so bad God can’t do XYZ in my life.” Who are you to limit God? Not only are you (and me!) just like the Israelites, full of murmurings, complaints and backbitings, but we are also exactly like Elijah, “who was a man with a nature like ours”. It’s not that Elijah was great, it’s that the God he served was great. Guess what… we serve the same God.

Be encouraged, men and women of God. You are not alone.

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Warning! Heavy geek speak coming. Do not attempt anything below unless you know how to do a complete restore from backup, including rebuilding your Master Boot Record. If you don’t know what a LUN is (no, not Mr. Lunt) then you need to just move along. This is not the blog post you’re looking for.

The computers at work currently have roughly 20 GB used up for a disk image that we don’t use here at my location. I decided to reclaim this space. For those of you interested, here are my steps to reproduce the System partition extension (assumes Basic Disk on LUN 0 for System Partition, Win XP Pro):

• Delete any partition where current disc image stored (beyond D: drive)
• Delete 2.0 GB D: drive, ended up being ~21 GB unallocated space
• Clean up C: drive; remove cruft, defrag, etc
• Backup C: drive; including system settings, registry, etc
  • I used Windows Backup, selected entire C: drive including system state. Ghost would probably be better.
• Download Gparted LiveCD (Gnome Partition Editor, nice graphical interface to edit all manner of partitions and volumes), boot up with LiveCD.
  • I used version 0.3.4-7. Had some problems using autoconfig boot. Selected second option, and unplugged USB mouse/keyboard. Got to end, video driver did not start. Followed on-screen recommendation to force video start. Gparted then started fine.
  • LiveCD is a bootable CD that loads a small operating system (subset of Gentoo Linux in this case) into memory and gives you various tools without touching your hard drive.
• Extend system partition (LUN 0) into unallocated space.
• Apply changes
• Eject LiveCD and Reboot
• Windows Disk Checker Runs
• Reboot into Windows, check disk manager
• Plug in USB mouse/keyboard, reboot again

End result: 74.53GB NTFS System Partition (40% increase)

FYI - There is another method that involves using the MS utility diskpart, but it involves an NTFS boot disk. We don’t have floppy disks on these PC’s, and I didn’t want to format my USB drive to use as a boot device, though these machines are indeed capable of booting off USB. Using diskpart to extend a system partition is unsupported by Microsoft, however I’m sure using Gparted to extend a system partition is similarly unsupported by Microsoft.

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Worship Night
Grace Fellowship Church
609 Aberdeen Road
Hampton VA 23666
Call Randy: 757.254.8822

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Grace Fellowship is having a worship night June 29. The rest of the info is on this flyer that my lovely wife made. Contact me via email or Randy at 757.254.8822 if you want to participate on stage, otherwise just come and be blessed!

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