Levski

This morning, October 20, we left Stara Zagora and drove for about three hours through the Redobe mountains to Levski. This is a medium sized town in the southern part of Bulgaria. The Pastor of the church here is Nickoli. As is true of all of the pastors that we have met on this trip so far, he works full time at another job and serves the church for nothing.


As we did yesterday, we distributed some bags of food and clothing to some of the poor people in the town before the seminar. While they were obviously poor, they were not in nearly as bad shape as the people we saw yesterday. It reminds me that, “poor” is a very relative and limited term. The materially “poor” in our country are “rich” by comparison to these people. So of course, “the poor will always be with you” is absolutely a statement of eternal truth. However, the materially poor can still be rich in other ways. The joy of the people we saw yesterday is proof of that.


In contrast to yesterday, this church was a very nice building and the people were clean, well dressed and obviously educated. Most were ethnic Bulgarians with a few gypsies. Once again we taught the first session of our marriage course. It was well received by the people and we were invited back.


Due to our remote location, we were invited to stay at the Pastor’s home which was very nice and quite comfortable. This was a very nice change from hotels.