The clock tells me it’s 6:30a.m. I lie in bed wondering why my mind is so active but my body doesn’t want to move. In Mozambique I routinely got up at 4:45; what’s the problem? Jetlag? Two days ago, my body crossed 8 times zones in just over 16 hours, so some internal “confusion” should be expected. Is it the cold? I lie in a warm cocoon of blankets. To get up requires subjecting my body to cold it hasn’t felt in many weeks. The dark? The sun was already up at 4:45 in Mozambique. But this is something more. What? Then, I realize, it’s q-u-i-e-t. The insulation and double-paned windows in my house seal out not only cold, but sound. I listen harder. On my residential street in Minneapolis, at 6:30 in the morning there’s no sound to be heard anyway. No roosters crowing; no geese honking; no birds chirping; no women singing as they walk to the fields to cultivate their crops before the day gets too hot; no insect the size of a golf ball buzzing at the screen outside a window that is always open because of the heat; no sheet metal roof overhead popping and creaking as it expands in the heat of the rising sun. All the cues that tell me it’s morning are missing. It feels like a different world, not just another spot on the same planet that can be reached in a 16-hour plane ride. But it is the same world. And it’s the world Jesus entered as a baby so that he could redeem us from our sin. The world Jesus experienced while on earth was much more like the one in Mozambique that I stayed in for a few weeks than the one I call home in Minnesota. And he calls people from all of the “worlds” on this planet to follow him. So I pray for strength, throw off the blankets, and begin another day of my earthly journey with Jesus.
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