OOPS! EDIT I see Powell already answered while I was thinking what to say! His responses are consistently helpful* and reliable, so you can go with that and just keep asking him questions. My reply is unnecessary now but having two does no harm so I will just leave it as an alternative.
BernieM said:
If the Cosmic background radiation was emitted at approximately 384,000 years after the big bang, and it travels the speed of light, with mattter moving at a slower speed, how is it possible that the cosmic rays are still with us and haven't already passed beyond us 13 billion years later? (assuming a point source creation of the universe).
the quick way to understand that is to google "wright balloon model" and watch a short computer animation of a simplified universe where all existence is concentrated on the 2D surface of an expanding sphere.
You will see galaxies (slowly whirling white things) and photons traveling in the space between the galaxies (colored wiggles).
In that simplified simulation all the things are 2D, and live in the 2D surface. There is no existence inside or outside the sphere, all space and matter are in that infinitely thin 2D world.
Then you still have the problem of mentally extending the analogy to 3D but at least the balloon model gets you on the right track.
In today's space there is no one spot that we can point to and say "expansion started outwards from there----it all started from that spot."
when you watch the animation you will see that the CMB photons never go away. they just thin out as space expands, and their wavelength gets longer. But every galaxy continues to have them around it. At later times the incoming photons just came from stuff that was farther away, so they took longer to get here.
You can also look at the princeton.edu link in my signature at the end of this post. It is a Scientific American article that has helped a lot of people. It is called "misconceptions about the big bang". The idea that it was an explosion of matter outwards from some spot that we could locate in today's space, like a bomb exploding, that is a common misconception that they deal with in that SciAm article and show you how to get out of that mental trap. Popularizations have done the lay audience a great disservice by promoting that exploding bomb idea, it is not standard mainstream cosmology at all.
But try the animation and see if it helps! When you google "wright balloon model" you get
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/Balloon2.html
please let me know if it doesn't work on your computer.
*concise, expert and to the point. Great going! and thanks, if you happen to read this.