After an always exhausting and worrisome trip over the ‘Pond,’ I arrived in London with three friends on August 16 (or, as the Brits say, 16 August).

Exhausting? Yes, because I choose not to go to sleep the night before flights to Europe so that I can sleep on the plane. OK, maybe ‘choose’ is too strong of a word. The reality is that I have so much work to do before I leave for the airport that I don’t have time to sleep. But it’s a great plan for curing jetlag. Of course, if there are crying babies in the vicinity, then my scheme fails miserably. Or if one of our team happens to lose his lunch due to a migraine and turbulence, and if he happens to be my son, it’s hard to fall asleep. It’s also exhausting hauling 17 large pieces of luggage, paying the increasingly exorbitant extra luggage costs, and wondering if we’ll ever see our bags again. If we don’t, the expedition is over before it begins.

But worrisome? I admit: I’m a worrier. I wish I weren’t. I wish I trusted God much more, especially since he has a pretty decent track record with me. I wish I didn’t get heartburn as I park my big derriere in a tiny seat and try to take my mind off of all that we have to do. I wish I could just relax, believing that our gear is going to be OK, believing that we won’t have hassles from the passport folks or the customs agents when we land, believing that the four of us can haul everything to the next vehicle to take us somewhere without incident. I don’t relax until we get to our new home and I see that the gear is still in one piece. Even though it’s all insured, it’s a lot of delicate equipment. Each person is allowed to take one bag for personal belongings; the other 13 are for our work of photographing manuscripts.

I’ve been on flights when my luggage went somewhere else. One time, when I was still in the throes of encephalitis, I got off the plane in my wheelchair. I got up for a few minutes (I could walk up to 100 steps a day), and the airline staff whisked the wheelchair away, thinking it was theirs! It took three days to get it back.

No doubt, many of you will want to give me advice on how not to worry, and think that I’m unspiritual because I do. Think what you want, but please, no advice. The traveling is far and away the most unpleasant and difficult aspect of the work of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM). But the joy of photographing manuscripts well, of preserving them for generations to come, and of discovering manuscripts, is worth the worry. I’m just grateful that I don’t worry about the plane itself. It never occurs to me that the idea of flying six miles above the earth in a metal tube that weights 300,000 pounds should require a lot of faith. I do sometimes think about what I would do if the plane were to go down, but it never creates even a heart flutter. Never been a problem. And I don’t have any advice for you if you do worry about flying—at least not any advice I want to put into print.

We made it basically in one piece from Dallas to Cambridge. The only real incident was getting a bus ride from London to Cambridge. When we were about to board the bus, the driver told us that we could only bring two pieces of luggage each! 17 pieces for four people wasn’t going to work. We asked what we were supposed to do, hoping that he would have some alternative plans for travelers who don’t know how to pack efficiently. Instead, he turned his back and walked away. We went ahead and put our two pieces each in the hold, and carried the rest with us on the bus. He didn’t say a word. When we arrived at Cambridge a couple of hours later, he told us, “Sorry I was so cranky back in London; I just learned today that I have cancer.” When I heard that, my heart sank. This poor fellow was facing death and all I could think about was protecting $60,000 worth of equipment.

After we settled in at Tyndale House—a place for evangelical scholars to live and study—we got to work. First, we photographed Christopher de Hamel’s little old strips of manuscripts. De Hamel is the librarian at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He happens to own five very old fragments of the New Testament. Part of his personal collection. These fragments had apparently been used as binding strips in medieval books to keep the covers from separating from the pages. De Hamel allowed us to take the fragments back to Tyndale House and photograph them there. Then he gave us permission to post the images on our website, www.csntm.org. This was a remarkable first outing in Cambridge!

After de Hamel, we photographed the Greek NT MSS at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Christ’s is famous for two of its better-known graduates: John Milton (author of Paradise Lost) and Charles Darwin. This year is Milton’s 400th birthday; next year is Darwin’s 200th. We photographed the manuscripts in the ‘Old Library’ with a large bust of Milton straddling the two tables we worked at, peering down at us at the turning of every page (a nice feat, since he was blind!). Christ’s also gave us permission to post the images on our website, which we will do in a few weeks (after we return from the UK).

After Christ’s we photographed manuscripts at Clare College, as well as a copy of Tregelles’ Novum Testamentum at Tyndale House. Other doors are opening, even though our time for this visit is gone. We are hoping to return in the spring to photograph more manuscripts at other colleges. In the process of our work this time, we discovered two more NT MSS. If there is one place on earth where new discoveries of MSS would not be expected, it’s Cambridge. The assembly of scholars here is breathtaking. Yet, surprising as it may seem, not everything is catalogued. And there are some crevices of libraries that haven’t been investigated in centuries.

Cambridge has a great and noble history, and we weren’t only photographing manuscripts in our time here. We also had the opportunity to visit some of the historic sites—such at a pub known as ‘the Anchor,’ where the rock group Pink Floyd got its start; another known as ‘The Eagle’ where Crick and Watson announced their breakthrough with DNA and where WWII American flyboys hung out; or ‘the Pickerel,’ which was C. S. Lewis’s haunt after putting in a good day at Magdalene College just across the street.

And while we were in Cambridge, Stephen Hawking gave a speech downtown, just across from King’s College at the end of Corpus Christi. A new mechanical clock had been designed by one of Corpus Christi’s faculty, and it was unveiled two weeks ago. At a price of one million pounds, it is something to behold. A creature dubbed ‘chronophrage’ and looking like a grasshopper on steroids was eating time, making the clock move. All sorts of news agencies were there to validate the significance of the moment. Our own videographer, Andrew, was also there, filming Hawking as he spoke about the intricacies and wonders of time.

Today, we packed up and said goodbye to Cambridge. We’re now in Oxford, and will soon be at a castle to photograph a manuscript there. Quite a bit of traveling this week till we settle down in Scotland for a couple more. There’s so much gear that we needed a mini-van and an SUV to haul it all! And now’s the time my worrying sets in. No advice, please, but I would like your prayers. Whether in poor eastern European countries, the hot sands of Egypt, at what is arguably the intellectual capital of the world, or at a duke’s castle, our mission is always the same: to digitally preserve the Word of God and use the images to help us recover the wording of the original text.