If it weren’t for Hebrews 11:1, perhaps the case of blind Bartimaeus would be most fitting. How much further could it get than a blind man’s hope for being able to see.

The Bible says that Bartimaeus was doing the regular daily “exercise” – sitting at the city gates and relying on the pilgrims’ mercy for his dinner. There must have been a decent amount of dust on his clothes… over his body… And the heat certainly couldn’t have made his situation any better. But what else could he do? He’s an outcast after all – a cast out one.

But Bartimaeus isn’t just any outcast. Not just any blind guy. He isn’t just any beggar either. Bartimaeus is a believer, but not just any – a true one he is. The Bible says he heard Jesus approaching and began to shout – perhaps a usual picture given the popularity of the Lord. He was an emerging star for many of his time. The picture becomes unusual when a minute goes by and blind Bartimaeus is still shouting. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Some from the crowd tried to shut him, but apparently whatever he had lost with his sight had now turned into a voice amplifier.

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One of the biggest problems before the Christian faith today is that all Christians claim they believe in God, but not all of them live according to their own claims. In other words, many of us daily call ourselves Christians, but far too many of us don’t live like Christians.

Let’s look at the relationship between a child and his or her parents as an analogue of ours with God. When a child truly trusts his or her parents, he or she waits patiently and faith till their promises come true. When mummy and daddy promise their son a new bicycle he doesn’t immediately run out, seeking for ways to buy it himself earlier than it’s promised to him. Where there is trust in a relationship between two sides, there is also patience and faith.

Between many believers and God, however, the trust is little… so, naturally, many Christians quickly run out of patience and lose faith. God, on the other hand, doesn’t cease caring for us, but how is it possible to feel Him caring if all the time we’re trying to solve our problems on our own and pay more attention to them than we do to God? Read more…

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…