It’s a bird, it’s a plane.  Actually, it is a plane.  Well, a whole fleet of planes — a German airline to be exact.  Why do I know this?  We just bought our first plane tickets for our Round the World journey!

I guess we are really going.  Gulp.

Should I be concerned that I am putting my family of 4 on an airline I’ve never heard of?  Or that I had to purchase the tickets direct from Germany in Euros?  I might have checked the safety ratings of this airline first.  Who can be bothered, though, there is so much to do.

Here’s a travel tip: It’s not easy to purchase airline tickets from Germany at midnight.  I’m just sayin’, maybe it’s better to do this earlier in the evening, so that, I don’t know, you don’t fall asleep halfway through the transaction at 1:30am and beg your beloved spouse to please, please, please stay up and seal the deal.

Seems that my little visa card is very sensitive.  No way was it gonna let me just drop a cool $1600 bucks on plane tickets purchased with Euros (is that currency still valid these days?).  Even if I tried to use my now-defunct college level German to push my way through.

First we tried to make the purchase online: denied.  We tried again.  And again.  Called Condor in Germany on their toll free line.  The German agent informs me it will NEVER work unless I call my credit card company and release the restriction on my card.

1:00 am I call visa.  I request they remove the restriction.  They do.  Or so I think they do.  We try to purchase again: denied.  Back to visa, “yes, yes the restriction is removed, give it a few minutes.” A few minutes?  I don’t have a few minutes, I am propping my eyes open as it is.

I’m going down.  Bad.  It’s an attitude I don’t want my airline to have.

But I  c-a-n-n-o-t  stay awake one more minute. Curtis, who possibly never sleeps, faithfully remains and finishes the transaction. Successfully.

See, it is a bird!

I think I hurled one final comment over my shoulder as I made my way upstairs, “Just stay up and FINISH IT! We have to get that price, it will be gone tomorrow!”  Said with all the love you can imagine.  And clueless that it already was tomorrow.

So Condor it is.  A plane.  To Germany.  Purchased in Euros.  At 3:00 am.

I’m not sure I actually meant to give notice.  I mean, I like my job.  I love the organization I work for.  I kinda wanted to stay, but when there was no option for that, all of a sudden it was do or die time.

Literally, as it turned out.

There’s nothing like telling your boss you are planning a big round the world trip one week, and then retracting it the next.  All because of a good deed.

Since breast cancer runs in my family, I’ve participated in research studies for the past 10 years.  Right now I’m signed up for both breast and ovarian cancer studies.  Routine stuff.  A blood draw here.  An ultrasound there.  Good deeds all around.

But apparently when you give notice, then you get a test result that says, “oh my, your levels are elevated for ovarian cancer.”

What?

Yep, it’s true.  “Can you test me again today? I can come in right now.”  No can do.  Have to wait an entire month to re-test.  Seriously.

Can you hear the brakes on my adventurous adventure screeching?

Tick tock, tick tock.  Waiting never was so much of a wait.

I plan my funeral 5 times over and identify every home improvement that must take place before I leave this world.

Finally the re-test.  Good news, free and clear.

So now it is game on.  I give notice.  I can barely get the words out.  I feel sick to my stomach.  I wonder, “What in the world am I doing?”  But something propels me forward.  Call it sheer determination.  Call it dumb luck.  Call it a dose of fear where you act without knowing you are acting.

And then suddenly everyone knows I’m leaving.  And I realize, it wasn’t that big of a deal in the end.  The world keeps turning.  The work keeps getting done.

The only important thing is to live — really live.  And I couldn’t live in two places at once, I had to choose.  So I chose a lifelong dream and I chose my family and I chose to say yes to all the crazy ways God lives out his life in me.

I think that’s what you really call do or die time.

I’ve often wondered, if I wrote a blog, WWLW – What Would Lori Write?  And then the perfect subject came up: A trip around the world with my family.  Yes,  that will do the trick.

You see, this is my year to take a big leap, and I am fraught with fear and excitement all at the same time over the prospect of traveling the world with my family for 5 months. But I can barely think about it today, as I’m headed to Peru and Ecuador where I will try to wrangle a dozen travelers new to a World Vision overseas trip experience.

I leave in 36 hours, but have I packed?  Um, no.  Most of my stuff is still together from my trip to India 6 weeks ago, thankfully.  Honestly, I don’t think I’ve recovered from that trip.  I find myself brimming with tears at odd times throughout the day — seemingly overwhelmed with emotion.  And when I try to put my finger on it, I think it is the residual of what I saw and experienced in India.  I haven’t adequately debriefed myself from the encounter with that amazing and disruptive country.  I feel the weight of it now more than ever as I get ready for Peru and Ecuador.

Today a friend told me to be ready for the oxygen depletion in Peru, and to see a level of poverty that surprised her when she visited there.  Fresh off a trip to Africa, she thought that Peru would be a breeze, so it took her by surprise.  I take this as a piece of advice I needed — like God dropped those words from her lips to prepare me.  It’s shifting me inside, getting me ready to be swallowed up again in the pain of the world.  Thankfully, whatever I prepare for never prepares me for what I find — amazing hope and new birth and joy and remarkable resilience from people who are duking it out and making life work in ways that I could never have imagined.  God is good that way.  Seeing both sides makes me realize that God is alive and working out His goodness, although with our naked eyes and without His spiritual insight, we might miss it altogether.

So ends my first-ever blog post.  There, that wasn’t so bad.  One little leap at a time.