A day or two earlier, but nevertheless – Merry Christmas to all of you!  May you have a peaceful rememberance of the day Jesus was born into this world.

Ironically enough, I don’t have a fresh photo of us to attach as a part of the greeting. Perhaps one will come along with the New Year’s post… On the other hand, there isn’t much to update you to either. The days up here are tiringly identical and due to work or study we haven’t been able to afford any adventures outside the house.

Christmas we will be spending with the two of us at home – easy, relaxed and garnished with some unusual and tasty meal. New Year’s is still a bit in the unknown, but we’ll try to celebrate it in a way that won’t force us to go to bed at 1am, right after the fireworks are over. Whatever we do, there will be pictures of it coming later in the first days of January.

Till then – take it easy, don’t make too many big plans for 2009 (it hasn’t even started yet!), and try to catch up with relaxing.

As I’m writing this I’m watching a CNN special on genocide and the world’s indifference to it. It’s not just mind blowing and heart-breaking, it’s not outrageous or whatever else… It’s indescribable before all.

To read more about the show and see overviews, follow this link: http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2008/scream.bloody.murder/

It is beyond final for me that no government or union can stop this from happening again. God alone is our help. God alone is our hope. I’m asking myself the tough question of why did He not intervene in all these cases… But I know that it’s not meant for me to understand fully why God allows what He does.

I’m very interested in your opinions and thoughts… And, please, do watch the broadcast if you have access to CNN. It’s worth to be awaken.

The preacher finished his sermon and before closing the service asked the people before him “Do you want to be with Jesus right now? – Raise your hand if you are.” The multitude raise their hands, except for one man at the back row. The preacher was slightly concerned, so he decided he’d repeat the question. The result was the same. Odd, he thought, maybe the man didn’t hear the question. So he asked a third time, even louder – Do you want to be with Jesus right now? That didn’t do it either.

So after the service was finished he struggled through the crowd to find the man who didn’t raise his hand and ask him what was stopping him from wanting to be with Jesus. When he finally asked, the reply was “Oh, I do want to be with Jesus! But I don’t want to go there right now, I quite like it out here.”

It’s an example I recently heard in a sermon and it bewildered me. So I took a note of it in my mind and gave it some further thought in the days after that. Today, as I think about it again it scares me – because it’s so true. Read more…

UPDATE (as of November 27): The comments option has been enabled again. Hopefully spammers will be filtered properly. Certain announcement posts or pages may have comments disabled when there isn’t much to comment.

Due to an unusually high amount of spam comments and the lack of time on my side to optimize the spam-fighting tools, commenting on the articles is currently and temporarily disabled. If you’d like to drop me a message, please, use the Contacts page instead.

This should be fixed by the end of the coming weekend.

It’s a well known song by Scorpions from 1990 which was written as a tribute to the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emerging freedom among countries from the Communist bloc. I’ve been listening to it in the past days on the radio (Antenne Bayern – awesome station, btw.) and in the context of the growing world economic crisis talk from the past months it struck me with its hope.

Perhaps it’s also the memories I have from my childhood, when in the early 90s people were empowered by hope of free life. Right, things didn’t work out quite the same all throughout the ex-communist bloc, but even that didn’t stop the majority of hoping for a change up till about year 2000/02 (in Bulgaria at least). It was around that time that hope found itself in stagnation in Bulgaria. Enough governments had changed for people to realize that they ain’t finding anything good there. So, since then I have the feeling that politics in Bulgaria exists on air and air alone. But not just politics… people as well. Read more…