The Brooklyn Bridge, which links Brooklyn to Manhattan Island, is one of the most famous bridges in the world. Today there are many bridges across the globe surpass Brooklyn Bridge in engineering features, but in 1883 it was unthinkable. Bridge-building experts throughout the world told the designer, a creative engineer by the name of John Roebling, that his idea wouldn’t work. Roebling...
It is a bit of a long process to produce one tin of Coke-Cola. It starts with the mining of bauxite in Western Australia, on the Murray River. Then crushed and washed with hot sodium hydroxcide, heated and became eventually became aluminium oxide. The alumina is dissolved in cryolite, mined in Greenland and turned into pure aluminium. Them it is loaded on a ship at the port of Bunbary – for sale...
Wagner Dodge faced the cost of introducing counterintuitive thinking with his fire crew during the Mann Gulch fire in 1949. His crew of fifteen smokejumpers was tasked with fighting a fire on a 97-degree day in high winds. The fire was so hot that they couldn’t get within one hundred feet of it. While trying to figure out where to start fighting the fire, it turned on them and quickly they were...
“New kinds of churches really are the hope of the future,” says Australian missiologist Mike Frost. On his weblog, he shares the tale of two Anglican dioceses, one in Sydney (Australia), the other in Leicester (UK). Long considered “a last bastion of growth and vitality of Anglicanism in Australia”, the Diocese of Sydney now sees a decline in church attendance. Looking for reasons for the...
Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch lady that became well known after WWII and preach the gospel in many nations. She and her sister Betsie were in a family that was hiding Jews during the war. They were sent to the infamous concentration camp in Ravensbrück. There were times when Corrie Ten Boom felt cut off from the Lord. In such a time of despair, she once said to the Lord, “Have you forgotten your...
Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. Philippians 1:12 A Vietnamese brother, Daniel*, was led by the Lord to the minister in the north where he soon found himself in the midst of a revival. The inevitable soon happened and Daniel was sent to prison, his “training school,” for three years. He shares his experience...