My office computers run Windows 10 (I have two offices, therefore two office computers). Recently one of my computers slowed down dramatically. A look at the Task Manager showed that the computer was using 99% of its CPU. That means the computer is thinking really hard. This should only happen briefly when I'm opening a big application or doing a job that takes a lot of computer thought (like editing and encoding video). But I wasn't doing much of anything and it was still happening. I looked for a greedy app hogging all the resources, but there wasn't one. I tried the antivirus scanner but it was taking forever. Everything was taking forever! Finally I googled the problem on my phone and found: Windows 10 High CPU Usage Fixes

I followed the instructions for the first 3 methods. Ordinarily it would have taken 1 minute to accomplish these steps. Since my computer was so "busy" it took it 30 seconds to accomplish every single click. It took me 10 minutes to accomplish the steps and reboot. Problem solved! Finally my computer was free to do what I needed it to do. I suspect that culprit was Method 2 -- P2P Sharing -- because that feature was already turned off on my other computer. And my other computer never showed symptoms of this problem. What had happened was that some little background service was using up all the resources. It took forever to respond to any of my requests and was very slow to do what I asked it to do.

How often does this describe our spiritual lives? We are all so busy these days. We have a million things going on. It often feels that we are running at 99%. But are those things really the things that God wants us to do? In many cases we allow things that should be background applications to hog all our resources. We find ourselves constantly working on things that do not glorify God, build up his kingdom, or even help us be better people.

God, of course, has plans and tasks in mind for us. But when 99% of our resources are taken up already, it's like me trying to get my computer to do important things. It takes us forever to even acknowledge that God has something for us. By the time we get around to starting what God wants, the opportunity may have passed.

Ask yourself today:

• Are the things hogging my resources really the most important things?
• Do I stop and listen for what God wants me to do?
• How can I keep background things in the background, and be more available to listen and respond to what God wants of me today?