Logan and I are praying through what our next step is supposed to be.  I feel a little restless in my spirit and I know a change is coming.  We are not sure what the next year is going to hold but it feels like it is going to be a season of transition and new beginnings.

I changed the theme on Plugged In to Hemingway  and directed it to a sub directory of my main url.  I hope to get things back up and moving within the next couple of weeks. 

Logan and I had a break in on Christmas eve and all of our computer stuff was stolen.  We are in the process of replacing things and getting stuff back up to par, but it is an expensive process for poor college students.Well, that is all for now.  But I will try to post more frequently in the days and weeks to come. 

Kurt 

<… Colorado Springs…Authorities say three to five people were shot on Sunday in the second shooting of the day at a religious organization …>

There were two shootings at religous organizations this morning.  The first was in Arvada, CO, a suburb of Denver.  This shooting occurred just after midnight at a Youth With a Mission location.  YWAM is and international, inter-denominational missions organization.  Two were killed and two injured in this shooting.

The second shooting took place around noon outside of Colorado Springs mega-church New Life Church.  Authorities say three to five people may have been injured in the Colorado Springs shooting.  The suspect in this shooting has been captured.

It is not clear if these two shootings are related.  Arvada and Colorado Springs are about 70 miles apart.

Please be in prayer for the families of those involved in these tragedies.

God TV is brodcasting the whole thing live.  Click here to go to God.tv.

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Take, for example, Microsoft Frontpage.  I do the content management for the website of the place I work.  I did not design the site, but it is one of my responsibilities to make sure all the current information is posted on a regular basis.  When I first started and they asked me to take this over, I was shocked to find out that they had used Frontpage to design the site and the only way I was even able to login to the site was through Frontpage.  It is was very frustrating for me.  I would have been happy editing the content in a basic text/html and just uploading the changes via ftp, but no, that was not allowed the way the account had been set up.

After accepting the fact that I was going to have to use a Microsoft app to do my job, I started looking at ways to run Windows on my Mac.  I tried Parallels and Virtual PC and did not like them very much.  It was actually difficult to even get them to run on my machine.  Then I came across VMware Fusion.  This is a pretty new application and right away I have been pleased.  It is reasonably priced at $79 (there is a $20 mail in rebate until the end of the year) and was a breeze to set up.

All of my peripherals work with the virtual machine.  The coolest part of the program is the way it integrates with the user interface of my Mac  I am able to run Windows apps right on my desktop.  They even show up in the OS X doc.  It is pretty cool.

When I am at home and have my MacBook hooked up to my widescreen monitor, I use the laptop display in full screen mode as my Windows environment and the external monitor as my Mac environment.  It is like running two machines side by side, but being able to control both of them with one mouse and keyboard. 

Here are a few screenshots.

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This one is brought to us by Matt Lockett.  Thanks Matt.

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Humans are always concerned with the outward appearance, but God is concerned with what is happening on the inside.  He is concerned with our hearts.

Jesus says, "You say that it is wrong to commit murder, but I say that it is wrong to even be angry with your brother."

He says, "You know its wrong to commit adultery, but I say that if you look at someone with lust you have already committed adultery with them in your heart."

Time after time He raises the bar on what people consider righteousness.  Why does He do this? 

I think it is to show people that there is a difference in being righteous on the outside and righteous on the inside.  We can live lives that look good and moral and still be dead on the inside.  Jesus is describing to us what life with a new heart looks like.  A new heart produces righteousness on the inside of us.  We are righteous only because God can make us that way.

In the New Testament the saints are called the righteousness of Christ.  When we get saved and Jesus actually takes up residence in our hearts, His righteousness starts to shine forth.  It is not a righteousness that is just an outward appearance.  It is true righteousness that is flowing out of the indwelling presence of Christ.

The external actions may look very similar but the motive is completely different.  Pharisees act righteous because they know people are looking.  Jesus in our hearts allows us to be righteous because the value of being righteous. 

Righteousness is the character of the new man.  When we are saved we are given the righteousness of Christ as a gift of God’s grace.  He doesn’t say that we have to work for it.  He gives it to us.  And then He calls us to walk in the light.  Walk in the truth of His sacrifice.  When we focus on submitting our lives to the Lord and allow Jesus to live His life through our mortal bodies, His righteousness will shine forth like the noon day sun.  People will notice and we can point them to our Father in Heaven.

Prayer:

Jesus, thank you for the gift of your righteousness.  Forgive me Lord for the times when I don’t walk in the truth of your grace.  Help me to submit my life to you situation by situation.  Jesus I pray that you would make your righteousness shine in my life.  God use me to glorify your name.  Thank you for your goodness and your grace.  I thank you that your mercy is new every morning.  Help me to live into you today Jesus.  It is in the name of Jesus that I pray.  Amen

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I would say that I am a man who lives his life in the middle of all of those questions.  There are some days when it is clear to me what the next 5, 10 or even 25 years hold for me.  Then I wake up the next day with the same questions rolling around in my head.  "What are you doing with your life?  What are you going to do after you graduate from college?"

I flip flop between knowing and not knowing what the future will hold.  This is sometimes a frustrating place to be.  The closer I get to graduation the more intense this frustration becomes and the weight of the decisions I will have to make seems to get all the more heavier.

I met a man once who was a great man of prayer.  His name was Wes Tullis.  Wes told me that the goal of the Christian life was opposite that of the pressures of American culture.  The goal of a Christian needs to be to pursue intimacy, not destiny.

It is easy to get caught in a cycle where we continually ask the Lord what the next step is, or what He wants us to do with our lives.  If we continually live our lives this way we can miss the journey of intimacy with the Lord.

Intimacy is a "here and now" kind of thing.  It is not something that we can live off of in our past or wait for in the future.  The only place we can have intimacy with the Lord is right here and right now.

I felt encouraged to pursue the intimacy that God has made available to all of us through the sacrifice of Jesus.  I also know that God orders the steps of the righteous and if I commit my ways to Him he will lead me to the places I need to be.

If we will chase hard after Jesus and follow Him were He goes, we will be living our destiny right now.  We won’t have to look forward to finding it someday.

John 17:3 (Jesus talking) "This is eternal life, that they might know thee, the one true God and Jesus, whom You have sent."  If eternal life is actively knowing God, and I can actively know God right now, then I can experience eternal life with Christ today.  That is the destiny of all man kind.  Oh that we would all receive revelation of this fact.  My destiny is to be with Christ, to live in Him.  And my destiny can only be experienced in the breath that I am taking right now.

Prayer:

Jesus, thank you for your grace that bids me come.  Thank you for the revelation of my destiny in you.  Help me not to waste the breaths you give me chasing my vain ambitions.  Help me to pursue intimacy with you with all the strength and dedication I have.  Jesus enliven my heart.  Pour out the fire of your love in my heart and help me to chase you with reckless abandon.  Teach me to be a man that is satisfied in you.  I ask all these things in the powerful name of Jesus.

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Daniel hears of this command and in request time with the king.  He essentially says, "Tell the king that I would like to meet with him because I can make known to him his dream and its interpretation."  He says, "I can do it."

Daniel then immediately goes back to his house where he gets his boys together and they cry out to the Lord for mercy and ask him to make known to them the dream.  God in his faithfulness reveals the dream to Daniel in a night vision.

The following day, Daniel is able to give the king the dream and the interpretation and save his life and the lives of his friends.  They are also appointed to positions of power in the kingdom.

It is amazing to me the bold faith that Daniel displayed.  He went to the king’s assistant, made an appointment to declare the dream to him and make known its interpretation and he had no idea what either of them were.

He was confident in his ability to hear the voice of God.  He trusted the goodness of God and knew that God would not leave him stranded.  He stepped out in faith and put his life into the Hands of almighty God.  Wow!!!

This is an incredible example of how God wants us to operate in faith.  He wants us to trust that we can hear Him when he speaks, and he wants us to know that He will speak to us because He is a good God who will never leave us or forsake us.

When we put ourselves on the line and trust that God will speak to us.  He will.  He is longing for us to ask Him to come through and show Himself strong on our behalf.

One thing that is important to the story.  Daniel was a man of fasting and prayer.  At this point, he already had a history of hearing God and knowing His goodness.

It is important for us as believers to devote ourselves to prayer and fasting.  These are the tools that God has given us to take His word and let the Holy Spirit breath on it.  This is what gives us knowledge of God’s goodness and teaches us how to hear his voice.

Prayer:

God, thank you for your goodness.  I thank you that you long to speak to me the secrets of your heart.  Teach me how to hear your voice God.  Give me revelation of your heart toward me.  Help me to walk in the Spirit and see you move in power in my life.  Help me to know what intimate fellowship with your Holy Spirit is all about.  Teach me to be like Daniel.  Teach me to have bold faith.  I ask all these things in the precious name of Jesus, Amen.

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