Greetings everybody, this is Simon Gilber with Inspired and I just want to wish you a massive happy Christmas.

If you're watching this on YouTube you can see my ridiculous turkey hat on and look at this tasteless. How's that for horrendous top?

Anyways folks, it's Thursday and that's when Inspire comes out and it's also Christmas Day so we've decided not to put one out this year.

But I just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you for

journing with us over the last year do you know what this I have an incredible job and

we get to impact hundreds of thousands of lives but but the context is huge

suffering it's grimness it's poverty it's starvation Burundi the hungriest country

in the world I think you know this comes out under the auspices of Great Lakes Outreach. And what has been so beautiful is so many of you have backed us in terms of monthly or one-off donations throughout this year. It's spectacular. That has led to us to be able to sport about five ministries out there. We sport 30 ministries and things are so tough right now a few weeks ago.

The M23 rebels Congo took the village up, the town opposite and tens of thousands of people

fleeing across. So mates who don't own their own house have been kicked out of their homes

because suddenly there's a supply demand issue on rentals. The spill it's the spillover is absolutely devastating. And Christmas

is that time of year, isn't it? Where there's, well, I mean, it's winter for many of us,

listening to this, although we're a global, you know, north, south, lots of people in the

summer on the other side of the world. But, you know, it's, for me,

it's cold, it's dark, and it can seem like a bleak time. And then, no, the Christmas message is one of hope. It's one of hope. I was preaching a couple of, well, it was 10 days ago at a carol service and I told them the story about Kitty Genovese and she was a bartender in Queens, New York in 1964. And it's, I mean, it is a

horrendous story because what happened was that she came back, it was it two o'clock in the

morning and a man attacked her. And what happened was that she was at the bottom of her block

of flats. And over the next 45 minutes, 38 people looked down, hearing her screens, came up on their balconies, watched.

Everyone assumed that someone else was doing something about it.

The attacker went off, having done horrendous stuff to her.

And then actually, because the police didn't come, he came back and he ended up after violating her,

he ended up murdering her and sociologists coined the term bystander effect. Just a horrific

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