*Gulp*

In 10 days I'll be up in the air.

People keep asking me if I'm nervous. I'm not nervous; I'm scared out of my wits.

I have never left the country.
I have never flown alone.
I am never alone.
Oh God, I'm never alone.
Can I handle being alone in a foreign country?
Can I handle being a grown-up?

Back in December this sounded like a splendid idea - like a daydream. It's so real now. I will be in Iraq in 11 days. I will be where American troops fought. I'll be where Shane Claiborne traveled in 2003. I'll be in the ancient Mesopotamia, the land of Babylon, near the Garden of Eden.

Holy crap.

I'm excited. I'm not changing my mind or anything. It's just ... real. Not a lot of things I dream up become real. Like that year I really wanted to be on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno - never happened.

What's worse: I cannot be comfortable. I can't even take comfort that everything's been taken care of - because it hasn't. IWU still needs to approve my loan and CitiBank still needs to disburse it. I need a whole lot of money in just 10 days. Oh God, I'm scared. Can you make this happen?

--

God knows what he's doing - I've been signing my emails like that. I solicit your prayers, dear saints in Christ. I can't do it without God; I can't do it without all of you.

--

There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead--as if innocence had ever been--and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is not one but us. There never has been.


Here I am, LORD. Send me.




Ezekiel