As he scoured the sea of sand four miles beneath him, Terry was acutely aware that planes like this one were clay pigeons for snipers. This really is dangerous, he told himself, as if for the first time. Of course he already knew it was a hazardous mission, so the thought wasn’t new. But the feeling was. For a good twenty years it had been easier to bury his emotions, to lose them in the whirlwind of preaching engagements, plane flights, and frequent missions into various danger zones around the globe. But as perilous as his previous ministry had been, he realized now that he was just minutes from beginning the most dangerous assignment of his life, and Lyle’s words reminded him that this time it was entirely possible that he might never see his family again.

Where are they? he wondered about the snipers he had heard so much about. With only one commercial flight per day flying into Baghdad International, a private flight like his could draw attention. Then again, maybe they were lying in wait along the highway into town. Surely the General has planned for that, he reassured himself, and fast-forwarded his thoughts to the single purpose of his journey.

How in the world does an American preacher get a Muslim nation to rewrite its constitution? he asked himself for the umpteenth time. In two days he would come face to face with Iraq’s prime minister, to intercede for the people’s right to religious freedom, which, along with the lives of thousands of Christians, hung precariously in the balance. Centuries of hatred and prejudice against “Christ-followers” lay blanketed as thick and widespread as the sands below, and the slightest ill wind could stir up a storm of persecution and wholesale slaughter. Someone had to stop it from happening, to speak up now, while there was still time.

I once made an if-you-go-first pledge to my close friend, Beverly Schmidgall, that “someday” I would sing my song, Soldier, at her funeral. Of course, I didn’t expect someday to come early, but on February 25, 2001, at age 51, Bev died in England, due to complications from radiation exposure at Chernobyl, the toxic Ukrainian town where a nuclear meltdown had occurred fifteen years earlier.

We make such promises, hoping never to have to keep them, not only because we dread a last goodbye, but also because the death of a peer reminds us that our own “someday” might come sooner than we expect.

I met the fiery redhead with hair the size of a ten-gallon hat in February 1969, when thirteen Oral Roberts University students formed a weekend singing group that quickly became an international missions ministry called Living Sound. By the late 70s, we had toured in almost forty countries on five continents, along the way forging the kind of foxhole bond that war veterans try in vain to describe.

When Bev went solo in 1977, she headed straight to the world’s trouble spots was. Among other adventures, she lived in Croatia for a year and hitchhiked with soldiers into the battlefields of Bosnia to pray for war victims. She also traversed nearly all of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s 6,000 miles of track, often disembarking on impulse in some dowdy Russian town, and then whispering the word Xristianski to passersby until she either met a fellow believer or got hauled in for interrogation by the Soviet KGB.

In one city, the secret police took her into an unheated office and made her strip to her underwear while undergoing more than an hour of questioning. It was minus 50 Fahrenheit that day.