Nathan Graves is an American career missionary and author with over 30 years of experience, primarily in the Balkans. Growing up in southern Indiana, he was saved around 1977 and felt a divine call to missions at age 15 while a high school sophomore in 1979, inspired by a geography book image of an Albanian farmer during a sociology class. His father returned to faith after fleeing from God for 14 years, influenced by the Great Blizzard of 1978. Graves pioneered missionary work in Albania, arriving in January 1994 to reach an unreached Muslim-majority country, and has also worked extensively in the Republic of North Macedonia. He directs Antecessor ministry, associated with Christar (ID #322), focusing on innovative outreach to least-reached peoples, disaster response, virtual networks for churches, and emergency responder training. He organized strategic conferences, such as a 2014 gathering of over 200 Christian leaders from 11 nations in the Balkans to address radical Islamization and evangelism. Graves has responded to multiple refugee crises, establishing a relief center in Tirana during the 1999 Kosovar war (distributing aid to ~700 refugees), aiding Syrian refugees transiting the Balkans (2015-2016), and conducting outreach in Iraq's Nineveh province (2017). He maintains personal journals chronicling emotional encounters with traumatized refugees, emphasizing God's redemptive purposes in catastrophes for church growth and Muslim evangelism. Graves views disasters as biblical mysteries fulfilling end-times prophecies, urging strategic preparation and a new generation of missionaries for hard places. He co-authored 'The Mystery of Catastrophe: Understanding God’s Redemptive Purposes for the Global Catastrophes of the Last Days' (2018) with Joel Richardson. He received a love for writing from his high school coach and English teacher James Beery. Married to Lorraine Graves, whose parents served nearly 40 years among a primitive endo-cannibalistic people group in Brazil's jungles starting in the early 1950s, Nathan and Lorraine have two sons: Josiah and Justin.