My first hunting trip

Hi everyone! Yesterday was my first hunting trip so I wanted to let in on the news. I've been fishing ever since I was 4th grade and it is the one hobby I enjoy a lot. But now, after years of just "thinking about it", I actually got to go on my first ever hunting trip. No, I didn't get to shoot down anything. But thanks to my new-found friends here in Minnesota, I was able to get a bite of the experience. The man with the plan was Connie-Paul Anderson. He came along with his son Tim and their 1 year old pup Duke (pointing lab). The others were Steve and Jesse, who are part of Connie and Becky Anderson's fellowship in Osseo, Minnesota. The guys made a for a great company indeed. We got to the Glendorado Preserve around 1 pm and hunted until 4:30 pm. All in all the guys brought down 6 pheasants and were generous enough to send me back home with two of them, even through I didn't shoot down any. May be next time. I think I need to get some practice with shooting may be. You can see the Flickr photo set

here

.

Season's greetings and update!

Dear friends of our ministry from around the world,

this has been one fast going year. I can still remember well what I did in January and February. Is it possible that 12 months have gone by so quickly?

Last year around this time, the Lord spoke to me that if we ask, this will be a year in which He will give us wisdom like never before. Boy, did I need wisdom! I don't think I ever before have been so conscious of my need of a Saviour and His wisdom for my life and the apostolic mandate God has entrusted me with. I have to be honest with you, at times I feel overwhelmed. There's so much I want to see happen and there's such limited time and resource I can output in the process.

All in all, this has been a very hard year and yet it's been a year of advances. It seems like I've poured much effort into launching our ministry in cyberspace. We now operate close to 20 different web sites which are regularly read by literally thousands of people from around the world every month. And this is just a small beginning.

The work in Bulgaria is advancing to an even higher and deeper level. So many things are going on there. It's so hard to be away from there and yet we're so confident that we are where we're supposed to be by the word of the Lord.

Our apostolic access in Macedonia became a fact this year as well. Very significant and serious developments there. Much work to be done if we want to see progress in this nation.

A new beginning in Slovakia this year. And it has been awesome to watch the church there grow and the ministry to go forth.

In Vienna, Austria, it seems like pastor Peter's ministry has really taken off to a new level this year, while helping in a very practical way with the ministry and the development of the church there.

In London, the U.K. Kalin and Stanislava had their first baby (Emmanuel) and even though I wasn't able to travel there in December, the work there has come to a new level as well. New and quality people are getting saved and we're very excited about that.

At the end of the year the Lord surprised us with Belarus and our involvement with New Life Church in Minsk. It has been an incredible experience and privilege to be part of something like this.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN 2007?

One thing I really missed this year was not being able to go back to Sri Lanka. I can't tell you how many times I thought about this. I can only trust that pastor Jacob and his ministry are continuing to hold on to the covenant we have in the Lord. I'm very much looking forward to going back to Sri Lanka and impacting the Church there again.

While we continue to work in the nations where HBN is involved, there are new doors that I sense the Lord is opening and those are:

Spain

Zambia

Hungary


Wanda and I want to thank you for your friendship, covenant commitment and Kingdom obedience! We're blessed to be part of such apostolic family! Our kids are doing very well academically and in every other way. Thank you for all your prayers, faithful support and love for us. We're ordinary people called to do extraordinary things in God!

Yours for Kingdom breakthrough on all levels,

George P. Bakalov

Arafat day

Hey everyone!

Watching the stats of this site is making me feel both good and bad. Good, because to my amazement this is now the second most visited site I publish. And bad, because it's the least maintained and updated. Lots of travel for me in the last two months. My trip to London got canceled (Northwest are becoming increasingly difficult to deal with) but this will give me a chance to put some energy into the Arafat Day. This is a prayer initiative that came from the Middle East. You can find out all about it at our official web site at

www.gohbn.com

or by clicking directly

here

.

Dreaming for living

First of all, welcome again to all of you who are stopping in once in a while. When I compared the traffic of this one and most every other site I publish, this one appears to be now the second most visited site of all of our sites. This my personal online journal, unlike some of the others which are topically oriented. That's why in my one-liner I advertise this site by the simple "meet me there" line. Have you ever thought of the New Testament epistles...from what I can gather, they can easily fit into a modern blog format with several subsections such as theology, real life, worldview and so on. Oh, and I think Paul would have had a "personal" section there too, where he would share his thoughts, feelings, etc. That's how we know so much about the man, after all. He was indeed a great communicator. Long before Ronald Reagan was called that.

Recently, with my upcoming trip to Europe, I've been working on the average of 10 hours a day. Yesterday I did 12. It has been quite a challenge to organize this. The end result: 13 flights in 14 days. 5 nations, 7 hotel hotel nights. Thankfully, I'll spend 5 of those 14 days in Sofia in what used to be my own bed. Now being one of the two "own beds" I have. One in Minnesota and one in Sofia. Throughout the trip I'll be communicating through the gohbn.com newsletter for the general audience and the other mailing lists for internal HBN communication.

I have this quote from Steven Spielberg on the wall by my desk:

"I don't dream at night, I dream all day. I dream for living."

I don't know if all of us can actually afford to dream for living. But Mozart wrote operas for living and yet it didn't stop him from dreaming and being great.

Spielberg's saying has a special significance for me. I can totally relate to this kind of thinking. I'm horrified by the idea of trying to serve God without dreaming. In fact I'm horrified of the idea of trying to live life without dreaming.

What kind of life would that be?

Site update

Alright, for all those of you who are following the development of this site. I had to make a difficult decision and switch publishing the site to a different platform. Check out the links to my other sites and let me know what you think. If you're asking yourself: "Why all the web sites? Has this guy gone mad?", well...thank you for the question! The simple answer is this: positioning! I remember reading this many years ago: don't pray for open doors, pray you're ready when the door opens. It's amazing how unprepared are most people when the doors open up. The door to communicate your message. The door to influence others and propel them to action.

In fact, if we live without the expectation of open doors, we dry up.The open doors I see are the opportunities to communicate the word of the Lord with this generation through the power of media. Then, there are different issues to address. And it only helps to have a defined platform for a well defined message.

Shocking North Korea interview

Hey everyone,

I caught this documentary on CNN the other day and it’s quite something. It was on Anderson Cooper’s 360°, but the program was really good. Actually there was someone else sitting for Cooper...not that that really matters. I guess I'm trying to convince you that I'm not really a fan of Cooper's show :)

In the documentary they show how North Koreans are suffering under the communist regime there. They use authentic video from people who film what’s going on and them smuggle it to South Korea, China and other places to broadcast on the Internet and in every other way.

Then the other thing these dissidents do is to actually film movies from the West and South Korea to show people in North Korea how folks live in the West and how their loony dictator has been feeding them lies all along.

The dissident movement’s first weapon of choice is media. They actually believe this will be indeed the greatest way to bring instability to the regime and to bring an end to it.

Amazing stuff!

I pray to God one day I’d be able to go to North Korea and just bless those people in some way, whether it’s through the ministry of the Word of God or through a humanitarian action or both. I believe this exciting moment is coming.

I hate communism as much as I hate satan’s kingdom of darkness! Don’t you?

You can watch the video here.

(give the clip time to load, especially if you have a slower connection)

Back from Europe

After two months in Bulgaria, we’re all back in Minnesota. The trip back was amazingly smooth. We flew from Sofia to Amsterdam and stayed over night in Amsterdam, which allowed us to make a short trip there and get a dinner. Our hotel was in this smaller town about 25 km south of Amsterdam.

We didn’t really have time to walk through Amsterdam, just kind of drove through part of it and went in to have a dinner at this Irish restaurant. The next day we had to get up at 4.30 am and so we had to go to bed on time.

The challenge next day was the fact that my green card had expired on August 28th and the Dutch authorities didn’t want to let me on the airplane. Then they called this guy who seemed like he was an American working for the INS. He made a call to the INS office in Minneapolis and made sure we would be able to get back to the US safely. Now I have to renew my green card and also to apply for US citizenship as well. It’s about time. In the mean time another problem came up. KLM couldn’t find three of our electronic tickets into their system.

So we didn’t make our original flight and had to say at the airport for 6 hours and wait for another flight. In the mean time, KLM confirmed our tickets, etc. It all worked well, since our new flight was now a direct one to Minneapolis, vs. the original reservation, which was to take us first to Detroit and then change planes to Minneapolis. I crashed at the airport in Amsterdam (and Jenny took this picture of me), which helped me later on with the flight. When we got to Minneapolis, the INS had to do this check on me and then they let us go. Katherine (Wanda’s sister) was there to meet us and helped with the whole process of getting back home. It’s good to be back home, thanks everyone for your prayers and support during this time.Our kids are so good when flying. We were blessed to have three seats on one row for them.

Our day at the zoo; what Bulgaria needs

Well, this is the first post in what I think I’ll use from now on as my truly ‘personal’ official blog spot on the web. Ever since we hooked up Reformation Cafe to kingdomfirst.tv, I haven’t really had a ‘personal’ blog online. And with over 13,000 visits in 3 months for the English and the Bulgarian versions combined, it seems like the content there is picking up momentum.

This is not what I’m after here. It’s actually of little importance how many people read this journal. I think what’s important for me here is who reads it. I’ll be journaling mostly for you, my friends all over the world.

Still, everyone else is welcome to listen in, too.

I’m with the kids in Sofia. Wanda left last week on Tuesday to go back to Minnesota and be with her father in what the doctors are saying are his last days. All of us miss her a lot and can’t wait for her to be back.

Today we went to the zoo here in Sofia. We actually joined some families from church, who had organized themselves to do the zoo thing. It was really a lot of fun and I think both the girls and I really enjoyed it. Jenny was taking pictures and later in the day when we were going through them, she said that this one looks like I’m preaching to the them again...ha-ha.

In actuality I was telling them about the book The World’s Most Dangerous Places and my very own real story of how few years ago one Nigerian pseudo-minister was trying to get me to go to Nigeria, possibly to abduct me for a ransom.

What you don’t see in that picture is some of the strangers who were sitting on the benches not far from our group, how they were listening to our conversation. I remember the heavy, kind of serious looks on their faces.

Earlier we had stopped at one of the concession stands to buy some treats. The girl who was selling the stuff was young woman, may be in her early 20’s and also had this same heavy look. Even Abigail noticed and asked me why is the lady so serious. Around lunch we stopped at another stand to get something to drink and then Jenny said: “Everyone here is so silent and so serious...”

People ask us if we think Bulgaria has changed. Changed as in improved, that is. In some ways we have to say, yes. After all, they are finally filling up some of the infamous street craters, commonly called pot holes. But beyond that, I’ll sum it up using my daughter Abigail’s words from few days ago. She was playing in the living room on the floor while I was watching the news. The Bulgarian Prime Minister was speaking of what Bulgaria needs in the wake of her admission to the European Union in January of 2007. The man went on and on and on telling the journalists how Bulgaria needs this and that.

Abigal looked up to me and said quietly, but firmly in Bulgaran: “Bulgaria needs God!”.

Right on, Abie!

Because programs and money from the EU won’t bring purpose, peace and joy to all those people with the heavy heart and serious faces. Rather, the same Jesus, who flooded my being with life 17 years ago, is the same Jesus everyone in Bulgaria needs, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, social status and economic potential.