This time of year, is almost synonymous with traveling. People go home to see families or having people come visit them. The TSA expects to screen 40 million people this holiday season and AAA estimates another 107 million will be on the roads. I’ve always liked traveling. Probably in part because I traveled what feels like a lot growing up. Mostly to my grandma’s a short four-hour (though it infamously took 8 once) drive from our home in Minnesota to hers in Wisconsin which we did every 6 weeks. It became such a regular thing that my parents would get fed up with the constant questions of “how much longer” told my brother and I to “count the bridges” we went under on the highway and that would tell us how close we were to our destination. We went other places too. Some close like Duluth, or cabins “up north”. Others a little farther like Toronto, Colorado, Thunder Bay and Michigan.
I guess it is fitting then that both of our upcoming readings have a lot of travel in them. Experts estimate it would have been around 80 to 100 miles, and three days of walking each way for Mary to get from Nazareth to the “Judean Hill Country” to see Elizabeth and return home three months later. It then would have been another 90 from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census and birth of Jesus, and eventually it would have been countless miles to flee to Egypt and then return home during Herod’s murder of the holy innocents. In the Gospels it doesn’t seem like Jesus ever stops traveling. He seems to be constantly on the road teaching and preaching everywhere he can find.
Travel can sometimes be a metaphor for something deeper when we read the Gospels or even when we look back and make sense of our own lives. When Jesus teaches while he “makes his way to Jerusalem” it is often read as a double meaning regarding his eventual death and resurrection. Mary and Joseph’s travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem can be seen as a nod to the transition from a world where God isn’t physically present to one where God is. When we look back on going to college or moving out of our family home for the first time we often mark it in our memories as a time of growing up, or becoming an adult.
As we anticipate this last journey towards the manger where are you “traveling” to in your life? And how will you make sense of this time once you get there?
Peace and Travel Blessings,
Corey
P.s. we never did finish counting all the bridges.
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