I am a lot like my dog. If I am honest, as I age I am less aware of the moment I inhabit.

My spiritual condition is often lost in nostalgia about yesterday's challenges, victories and defeats. This is no so small problem: in fact it may be indicative that I am missing kingdom opportunities God has for me now. The truth is that aging can take away our spiritual edge. The plain fact is that as we age, we may become more wise, but we are often less available for the daily spiritual opportunities that are passing right in front of our eyes. Can it be that we have "settled" spiritually and that we are unaware of what is happening to us? Is this situation, like my dog's, unlikely to improve?

I have recently realized that it is possible to read the entire Bible as God's attempt to wake us up. He prefers to do this through grace but often it comes through judgment.

34 "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you,
how often I have longed to gather your children together,
as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.
35 Look, your house is left to you desolate. (Luke. 13:34-35a) Isaiah prophesies judgment as God's reluctant way to wake us up.

"In that day Israel's glory will grow dim; its robust body will waste away.
The whole land will look like a grain field after the harvesters have gathered the grain.
It will be desolate, like the fields in the valley of Rephaim after the harvest.
Only a few of its people will be left, like stray olives left on a tree after the harvest.
Only two or three remain in the highest branches, four or five scattered here and there on the limbs," declares the Lord, the God of Israel. (Isaiah 17:4-6)

Judgment is often the one tool God has to get the job done. The results are these: "In that day, men will look to their Maker and turn their eyes to the Holy One of Israel." (verse 7). Failure to wake up spiritually can mean judgment, loss and missed opportunity before the turning back occurs. Even in the last days of Jesus ministry, he wept over the spiritual condition of Jerusalem, a city that had "seen it all" in the person of prophets and "been there done that" with false messiah's and deliverers of every stripe. They were about to miss what was right in front of them. Jesus said, "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace-but now it is hidden from your eyes." (Luke 19:42.) Now we as believers have not missed our Messiah.

We acknowledge and confess him as Savior and Lord. But we can still miss His presence and power and the joy of working with Him by a lack of spiritual awareness.

A friend wrote the following in a prayer letter recently. "The other day, I felt restless and bored all afternoon. I often took breaks, going to the kitchen and opening food cabinets looking for a snack; I was checking my e-mail and Facebook repeatedly, just looking for 'something' to make the bored feeling go away. Finally, I tried journaling my emotions and telling God what I was feeling. Connecting with God's presence helped some, however, something was still trying to shut my heart down and make me want to eat junk food. Eventually, I realized it all started when a contractor came by to give us an estimate and the house wasn't as clean as I would've liked.

This triggered feelings of failure and insecurity in me. Finding the source helped me to give it to God."

She then wrote "The heart is like a garden-there are plants that bring forth fruit but also weeds that can pop up unawares.

It is our job to know what is happening in the garden of our heart and to keep it well tended." The most important truth about overcoming spiritual blindness is that we must be determined to fight it for the rest of our lives. This is a painful but important truth. Professional golfer Charlie Wi was asked last week how he was preparing himself to win his first PGA golf tournament. He said his coach told him he had to "be comfortable with being uncomfortable." That is it exactly. We can never settle, because we will miss so much of what God has for us. We must endure the human disruption of God's agenda. But how do we do it? What must we do to overcome the natural human tendency to remain in spiritual blindness? Very simply, there are four kinds of "awareness" we must cultivate in our lives.

1. Spiritual awareness. This is by far the most important and the one from which all the others flow. The fountain of spiritual refreshment and eyes of spiritual seeing come from God himself.

What we need, what our spouses and friends and the lonely and the lost need above all else is to hear from and to be comforted by God. This is what every person we have ever met really needs, regardless of what is coming out of their mouths. This is why the apostles refused to abandon "the ministry of the word and prayer" in order to wait on tables or be caught up in endless and often mindless activity.

After attempting to be drawn into rabbit trail controversies, Jesus told the Sadducees, "Are you not in error because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?" The power and perspective of God flows from the Scriptures and we must bathe in them daily to rightly identify ourselves and our tasks for the day. We must write and reflect on what God is saying to us and share it with others.

We must allow God to rebuke us in love, rearrange our priorities and drag us out of blind allies we have journeyed down while picking through the garbage cans of the world. He will do this if we are open and allow God's searchlight into the cracks and crevices we so easily attempt to hide from Him and others. We should have no illusions. This is not easy and will be a struggle until our dying day. We must never forget that it is not only worth it but the reason God created us. The lives of others await our obedience.

2. Relational awareness. This is the next critical area of awareness. It flows from spiritual awareness. Among all the people hurtling through our world at breakneck speed, who is God calling us to go deeper with? Among all the chariots on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, how did Philip know to talk to the Ethiopian eunuch? The Spirit said, "Go to that chariot and stay near it." (Acts 8:29.) Philip was a man looking for relational openings and willing to take them as they came.

If you pray for these, God will send them to you in abundance. Try taking the "no vacancy" sign off your soul and placing it with "open for business." It all begins with this question: How can I make the most of this day by being available to enter and serve in the lives of others? Part of this is being open to those He brings along the path, similar to Peter and John with the man begging at the temple. (Acts 3:1). But frankly that is the easier part.

The real difficulty is discerning where you are to place your energies and discerning how to move beyond thinking thoughts and quick prayers to real sustained action in the lives of others. I have learned to focus my attention on two groups that really need help. The first is new Christians/emerging leaders.

These are people who are hungry to grow, want spiritual help and are preparing to take on spiritual responsibility. There are many more of these folks around than there are people to lead them. This was once called "personal work." We need not be fancy or programmed to the hilt. This is rabbinical work. Spending time talking, praying and guiding is what is needed most. If you are going to an event, invite them along for conversation in the car before and after.

Taking people with you can be a great redeemer of time and builder of relationships. The second group are those in pain and crisis. For these people, the shell of pain has opened to reveal the pearl of great price in their lives. If you stand by them now and see them through the crisis, they will be lasting warriors for the kingdom. Look for the hurting and you will gain disciples and leaders for the future.

The key issue in relational awareness is openness to others. If you are truly open, you will be used greatly by God one on one. In a world increasing cut off by technology and anonymity, the fields are white for harvest. The resistance is often less than expected, provoked in our minds more by imagined rejections than by the reality at hand.

3 Opportunity awareness. This is related to relational awareness but is not identical to it. The truth is that in our fast-paced world, we must be spiritually trained to recognize windows of opportunity that are opening and closing all the time before our very eyes. We see it in the new person in our church who may be open to God for a season only to have circumstances change and their soul close down before long.

Years ago, I served a congregation in New England in a blue-collar suburb. There were only four doctors in the town and each of them and their families were well known. One Sunday, I noticed one of the doctor's wives had shown up in church and was lifting her hands in worship. Despite being startled by this, I failed to be opportunistic and follow up with her.

The result was that the "need" passed and so did her hunger for God, at least in the years I was there. We need spiritual antennae to not only pick up on, but act on the opportunities that present themselves to us. Our enemy believes it is fine to think thoughts as long as we never act on them. Jesus sent them out to do.

They talked and thought about it later. In any case, reading "the signs" is crucial to spiritual effectiveness.

54 He said to the crowd: "When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, 'It's going to rain,' and it does. 55 And when the south wind blows, you say, 'It's going to be hot,' and it is. 56 Hypocrites. You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don't know how to interpret this present time? (Luke 12:54-56)

The Scripture calls these moments "kairos" moments. We all have them. They occur when crisis and opportunity meet in our lives. Years ago when at the beach, I noticed small waves which ran counter to each other, kind of like "crisis" and "opportunity." In the place these waves met, the water stood up like walls, similar to the crossing the Red Sea when God delivered Israel. God uses these risky times to take us through.

They can result in "great leaps forward" spiritually or like Jacob, eventuate in hips put permanently out of joint. But the fact is spiritual winds do not always blow favorably. Opportunities come and opportunities go. Emile Caillet came to Christ by walking into a church and picking up the Bible. In his book Journey into Light, he described the Bible as "a book that understands me."

Augustine heard children singing a children's song "pick up and read, pick up and read" near a monastery and picked up an open Bible which fell to Romans 13:14. " ..not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature." But what if Caillet and Augustine had walked by or had been distracted by their I-Phone chirping? We will never, know but one thing is sure. Spiritual opportunities are events we must be trained to recognize and be heavily biased to take advantage of.

Those who look for them the most will see them when they arise. Research tells us that most people make decisions for Christ either before they are eighteen or in a moment later in life when faced with a crisis. This means the church must be heavily involved in youth ministry and crisis ministry. It also means we must develop the spiritual eyes to see and more importantly respond to the open windows in the souls around us. Sometimes they come in the most unexpected places like Jesus and the woman at the well. They can often lead to "fields white for harvest." (John 4:35)

4. Biblical and historic awareness. Why do I add this? Isn't this just an intellectual exercise? Far from it. Have you ever wondered why the preaching in Acts, particularly by Peter (Acts 2) and Stephen (Acts 7) begins so far back and rehearses so much of Israel's history? It is because context is everything. The essence of their preaching was "What you see now is that which was prophesied long ago." Whether the message was the suffering Messiah or the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, the apostolic preaching was biblical and therefore historical.

Jesus taught, "Every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of the house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old." (Mt. 13:52) People today are crying out for someone who can put today's headlines, problems and issues in some kind of compelling context. There is only one compelling narrative in western civilization and it is the story of God's movement through history and the Bible. All other contexts are partial and ephemeral and therefore monumentally risible.

Yes, the stories of Greece, Rome and Great Britain are important but we understand them mostly completely through the biblical lens. How was Martin Luther King able to weave both biblical history ("I have been to the mountain top and I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you...but we as a people will get there.) and the awareness that he was about to die in the same speech in Memphis?

How was Jesus able to know, when he did not know the future completely, that he was going to enter Jerusalem and suffer and die and now was the time? How was Abraham Lincoln able to write and give the Gettysburg Address, the most famous speech in American history, focusing on both the sacrifice offered and the new birth that lay ahead? Because each of them stood within biblical history and their own time to deliver the prophetic narrative.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not asking us to become great orators, preachers or historic figures. I am saying that if we can communicate a biblical narrative that is compelling for today, we will reach many people hungering for both truth and community.

To do it, we must think, we must read, we must pray and we must communicate in love to a world in crisis. If we do these things habitually, we will "still bear fruit in old age. (We) will stay fresh and green" (Psalm 92:14). We will miss fewer of the spiritual opportunities that surround us. More importantly, we will continue to be a vital part of all that God is doing to heal and save a broken world.

---Jay Haug is a member of the Anglican Church of the Redeemer in Jacksonville, Florida. You may contact him at cjcwguy@gmail.com