TRAVELS

I’m tired of searching. Let me stay that right now. It’s been months of wandering almost endlessly across this weary land. Never two nights in the same bed (on those fortunate nights we have a bed at all, that is.) And the looks we get from those inn-keepers. It always seems to end the same way.  Curiosity gets the best of them and they ask where it is we are from. We tell them. There is respect in their eyes when we tell them that. As a man of science and one of some power, I have grown accustom to that look. It’s the other one that always gets to me.

“So, where are you going?”

I no longer even try to answer that one. It always turns that look of respect into an uncomfortable silence. You can almost read their minds as they search frantically for a way to excuse themselves from the conversation. I’ve actually overheard one laughing under his breath…

“Following a star, huh?”

It would be different for them if they only knew what I knew.  It would be different if they too had spent their lives searching the heavens to suddenly see what was not there before. The wonderment!  And then the endless nights searching the writings, and old prophecies, and ancient scripts hoping to find what such a disruption of the very cosmos could possible mean.

…and then finding the answer.

It still burn in my chest to think of such a baby! Only, he must be more than a baby by now.  A toddler, at least. Just what sort of child is it? A messenger? A prophet? A king? Such is unknowable even to my imagination. A king, I should think.  But not such as this world has ever known.

First things first. Let us find this child and then maybe some answers will present themselves. After all, seeing is believing!

Seeing IS believing, right?

Really?

Then why do I now believe, even though I’ve yet to see?

Hope is such a miraculous thing. Nothing in my study or observations, or mission could have ever have prepared me for such as this. The feeling that all of creation’s anticipation has come forth to fruition.  It’s the feeling that the great wheel of time has paused, just for a moment, like in a gasp of awe…

Or a sigh, perhaps.

Still, it rolls on. It rolls on even as we cross these countless miles of deserts, swamps, mountains, valleys.

We’re near, though. This I feel. Tomorrow we shall approach the court of this Herod. Perhaps he has heard news of this child king.  We shall see.

For now, I shall sleep. We travel only by night from tomorrow on.

The star has been….

…slowing.  Acting strangely. No longer can we just take a nightly reading. It’s best to keep our eyes on it.

As I sleep, may this warmth felt inside keep out the bitter cold without.  This great hope that makes no sense to my mind.  This beauty that seems to spring up from my very soul.

To sleep then.

To sleep.

One final though, as I can’t help but notice how still it is tonight. How silent! It’s like creation is at peace, even just for a heartbeat.  Like the world tonight is somehow different than it ever has been.  A place of grace.  A place of love.

A place of hope!