Here am I. Send me.

In the year that King Uzziah died — a year when the throne was empty and the nation was frightened — Isaiah sees the real throne, occupied, with the train of a robe filling the temple. The creatures around it cover their faces and call holy, holy, holy, and the doorposts shake. Isaiah's first reaction is not delight but dread: woe is me, for I am undone, a man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips. Nobody in the Bible who sees God clearly comes away feeling pleased with themselves. A burning coal is brought from the altar and touched to his mouth, and his guilt is taken away — cleansed before he is called, not after. Then the question: whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Isaiah says the sentence that every generation since has borrowed.