Our Story
One prayer. Six months. Three machines.
I was four years old when my world shrank to one Latin word.
Morbus sacer. The sacred disease.
That is what the ancients called it, because they did not know what it was — they only saw how a person leaves and returns. Today doctors call it severe epilepsy. For my mother and father, it had another name: a fear that woke up before them every morning.
The medicines began. Heavy names — Lepsiral, Diazepam, Phenobarbital — words a child should never have to know. But I knew them. I knew their taste, I knew their weight in my stomach, I knew the fog they left in my head. Sleepiness instead of play. Confusion instead of school. Fear instead of childhood.
And nothing helped.
The Prayer of a Boy
My parents taught me about faith. They told me that God sees everything. That God hears every prayer. Even the one you cannot speak with words.
For ten years I lived with this illness. Ten years between the hospital and home. Ten years in which my parents prayed, and I still did not know how.
Then I turned fourteen.
That was the day of yet another examination. EEG. The same machine, the same room, the same doctors with tired eyes. I came out, sat next to my parents, and waited. The doctor came out. He shook his head.
— No change.
I saw my mother's face. I saw something in her bend, but not break. And right there, in the corridor that smelled of hospital, I did something I had never done before. I turned to God. Alone. In my own words.
— God, I do not see You. But I believe You hear me. Please — heal me.
It was not a prayer spoken with the mouth. It was a prayer spoken with the soul.
Six Months
And from that day, I began to pray every day.
I did not know how a person prays. No one had taught me formulas. I simply spoke. In my own words. Like a child speaking to his father. In the morning, before I took my medicines. At night, before I fell asleep. On the way to school. In the silence of my own room.
Six months. No one knew. No one saw. Only me and Him.
The Three Machines
When they called me back for another EEG, it was early in the morning. The same hospital. The same fear. I lay down under the machine, they performed the test, and the doctor came out with the result. He stopped. He looked at the page in his hands.
— The machine is broken.
They transferred me to another hospital. A second machine. A new examination. Waiting. And again the doctor, and again the same words in a different mouth:
— This device is not accurate either.
My parents began to panic. No one could understand what was happening. Why two different machines were giving wrong results. Why today. Why with this child.
And I... I said nothing. Because inside myself I knew. I did not understand how. But I knew.
God was at work.
Two Words
They took me to a third hospital. A brand new machine. A final examination. A final hope. The doctor came in to my parents with the result in his hand.
He did not say "no change." He did not say "more tests are needed." He said two words:
— Clinically healthy.
No new medicines. No surgery. No explanation that science could give.
Only as an answer to one prayer that a boy of fourteen had spoken six months earlier, in the corridor of a hospital, in his own words.
Today I am healthy.
I live in England. I drive a lorry. I watch the dawn wake up over the motorways, and every time I pass through a dark tunnel and come out on the other side into the light, I remember that boy in the hospital bed who could not see God but believed in Him.
God did not answer immediately. He answered in the right time. Not through technology, but through His own heart. I was not healed because I am worthy — but because He is merciful.
And when I asked myself "Why me? Why was my life spared?" — the answer came on its own.
Not to live for myself.
But to go back. To find those children who are now where I once was. Children with epilepsy. With autism. With cerebral palsy. With intellectual disabilities. Children who look at the world from the window of a hospital room. Children whose parents pray as mine prayed.
This is how the Foundation "Jesus Christ For Everyone" and the model "Ray of Hope" were born. To 150 children from Plovdiv, from Pazardzhik, and the villages around them. Children whose names I now know. To their families. To the community that is learning not to hide them, but to embrace them.
I am not a hero. I am simply proof.
Proof that He hears. Even when you are silent. That He sees. Even when you are in darkness. And that He acts. Even when everything seems broken.