Here I am...

It's late at night - midnight-fifteen or so - between Wednesday night and Thursday morning. I've been staring at the blank "compose" box on Blogger for two weeks or more now, trying to figure out how to write a first post.
I don't think I got it right.

These last two weeks - on call every third night for 24 hours at a shift - have been a whirlwind of trying to prepare for something I don't think I'm prepared for. Packing, purchasing, washing, and reading. We have bibles from World Medical Missions - a translation I like, with my name silk-screened onto the softcover. And I've thumbed it and read the passage that was inscribed on the gifting page, and stared at it. And I'm not ready.

I wasn't ready when we knelt in front of the church, with their hands on us and the little one, and prayed for blessings and strength and understanding. But I felt the power there anyway, and the Holy in the touch, and I thought maybe I could be ready. If I had time to think.
I haven't gotten it - that time - there are so many things I have to do before I go that every moment is packed full of doing and there isn't any time for reflection, and now it is Thursday and we leave on Saturday.

Thirty hours in the air: Chicago to LA to Brisbane to Port Moresby to Mount Hagen. We leave at 1900 local time on Saturday; we arrive at 1600 local time on Monday. Somewhere in the air between LA and Brisbane, Sunday evaporates like so much wind, and we land thirty hours and two days later. The idea of this flight - that is real to me, as real as the concrete understanding that we will be seventeen hours with a two-year-old who possesses very few skills that approach logical reasoning in the air. I am terrified by the travel.

I am not prepared for the arrival, for the journey from June 1st to July 2nd, for what is going to befall us in the Highlands. I have not had time to think about it - about the inevitable changes that will befall me, about the challenges that I will face. About what it means to put aside all of the familiarity and comfort of home and go where I am sent.
I am afraid I may not be a very good light on a hill. I am sometimes unsure that I am any sort of light at all, really, coming as I do from a church where evangelism is an uncomfortable and alien term. I find it awkward - frighteningly so - to use the word God in meaningful conversation, let alone to talk about Jesus or salvation or any of those terms from which the modern world has stripped the holiness. They feel empty, trite, as if I am falling into line with an -ology lacking the theos, the sanctity. And so I don't talk about it - I just do what I do and I pray that there is healing in my words and my hands, and I whisper to the Holy in the dark moments and the bright - but I don't talk about it. They want me to talk. To spread the Word that I feel so incompetent to speak about. To evangelize. And I don't know if I can do that.

I know I'm not prepared. I can't quote Scripture and verse. I haven't read the things I wanted to. I'm skimming and cramming for culture while Matt ponders learning Tok Pisin and political and anthropological depths of something I barely comprehend. But I want to go. I want to find myself immersed once again in another world, to feel the power of infinite complexity that shows in all creation. And I have to believe that it's enough that I am willing. I have to believe that the voice within is the voice of the Holy, and that I am a vessel for a love I cannot contain more than one iota of.

Because, after all,

He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
And to walk humbly with your God.

- Micah 6:8