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Um, many of us are traveling people.

We travel a good bit.

Some of, some of you go all sorts of places.

Dee and I have had wonderful opportunities to travel some, to go to places in Europe and, um, places in the Middle East, go to Israel and to Jordan.

Um, some of you have been to more exotic places like, um, s- African safaris or, uh, walking on the Great Wall of China.

My youngest daughter, um, in her wild years, along with her boyfriend, went to, uh, uh, who's now her husband, went to, um, Thailand and l- stayed with a family there, and they ate bees for dinner.

B-E-E-S, bees.

Ew.

Um, uh, that's a little more exotic than I wanna be, uh, I'll, I'll confess.

Maybe you've been a road trip person.

You cram the family in the car, and you go to all the... stop at the national parks and the largest ball of yarn or whatever it is along the way on, on your road trip.

Um, you know, there's all different ways of traveling.

Jesus stayed a- a- all of his life, though, in one area the size of the state of New Jersey, and 200 miles from north to south, 50 miles across.

Uh, the one excursion when he was but a baby in which Joseph took him to Egypt.

But other than that, just this one little area, and yet they called him a traveling rabbi.

He traveled all different places in that area.

And as he did, each of those places were sort of, I guess I would call them micro-cultures.

Each place had a significance, and each place, the specific place that he was mattered.

It, it stood for something in, in the biblical narrative.

And so what we wanna do during this season is, is look at those places.

We'll have a map on every bulletin for you to look at so you can kinda see where we're talking about and, um, and, and begin to understand, so what did those really mean, and how, uh, what do they mean, what does it mean for us as we look at that? And so today we're gonna begin with Bethlehem.