by David Hosaflook
A mighty river flows through the Albanian Alps, fed by innumerable streams of melted snow. Over time, the streams assert their will upon the mountain, carving gorges into the faces like wrinkles on a patriarch. Trickle by trickle, the river takes form, rising, rumbling, rushing into three dams anchored in the [...]

4:30 every morning. In a city on the banks of the Nile River, the azaan, the Muslim Call to Prayer, blares into Pastor Jeremiah’s bedroom. The noise comes from five mosques bristling with loudspeakers, which purposely were built around his home. The Muslims despise the fact that there is a little church [...]

“Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves.” Luke 10:3
It was Saturday morning in late October. The sun was already burning off the morning mist over a grove of cocoa trees near the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Four teenage girls were on a familiar path through the [...]

“I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18)
A century ago in a work called The Glory of the Impossible, Samuel Zwemer, the leading voice for missions to the unreached Islamic world, wrote of Afghanistan.
Listen to the story of the conversion and martyrdom of Abdul Karim, the [...]

There is a spot near the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, a little marble circle that marks what the ancient Chinese believed to be the very center of the universe. Today this cosmic bulls-eye is just a place for grinning tourists to stand and have their picture taken. However, many ancient peoples had [...]

Not long ago a friend and I visited Washington’s Crossing, Pennsylvania.  That day the Delaware River was a perfect mirror reflecting a crisp blue and white sky—the silver glass waters rippled only by lolling, lazy geese shaking off a nap as we slipped down to the river’s edge.  There, giant sycamores shade the bank where [...]

They beam with joy, these mountain girls whose fate would have otherwise been a life of continual sighing.
In the mountainous Tropoja region of Albania, sons are preferred. Pregnant women are greeted with the expression me një djalë (may it be a son). To ask someone how a job interview went, or whether they were [...]

After a late supper at the end of a long day, I am trying to catch up on some writing.  We just returned from a Mongolian meal served at a seedy restaurant with greasy tables arranged beneath a grimacing portrait of Genghis Khan.  The thick air was mixed with cigarettes and steamy Hohot hot pot, [...]

Beads of rain race along my window as our express train speeds through the mist back to London.  My mind and pen are racing too—so much I have seen and heard in London and Bunyan’s Bedford.
Arrived yesterday from Kiev and was met at Heathrow by Roger. We have corresponded over the years but had [...]

Took the highway near Jalalabad, a stretch of road popular with suicide bombers.  Afghan Army and police were everywhere setting up checkpoints here and there.  Smaller but beefier NATO units supplemented the security force.
After the gauntlet, we reached the town by early afternoon.  Saw a clan of Kuchi nomads spread out over a barren [...]