The Last Shortwave Signal From Bucharest

On Christmas Day, 1989, Romanian radio crackled to life with words no one had dared speak in forty-four years: "The dictator has fallen. You are free." In the city of Timișoara, where the revolution had begun ten days earlier in the courtyard of a Reformed church, people poured into the streets weeping. Pastor László Tőkés, whose refusal to be silenced had sparked the uprising, heard the broadcast from the apartment where he had been under house arrest. Neighbors who had hidden behind locked doors now flung open their windows. Strangers embraced on icy sidewalks. Church bells rang without permission for the first time in a generation.

What changed in that moment? Not the facts on the ground — Ceaușescu's regime had already crumbled. What changed was that the news reached the people who had been living as though the old tyrant still reigned. The messenger's voice made liberation real to those who could not yet see it.

Isaiah saw this same scene centuries earlier — watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem crying out together, voices breaking with joy: "Your God reigns!" The Almighty had not just acted in some distant throne room. He sent messengers with beautiful feet to carry that victory into the streets where His people still lived under the weight of exile.

The good news of God's salvation always needs a voice, a runner, a broadcast — someone willing to speak freedom into places still gripped by fear.