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Every Christian’s Most Essential Gifts

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Wills Point, Texas – GFA ( Gospel for Asia ) – Discussing the most essential gifts the Lord God has given Christians everywhere for use in His service. “We could read every book ever written on prayer, but that won’t make us people of prayer. We learn to pray by doing it.” —Dr. KP Yohannan, “Learning to Pray” The Bible is very clear in 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4 that the Lord has given all believers gifts to use in His service. The gifts He gives us are chosen by Him to equip us for sharing the His love with people who need to know of His love and sacrifice and for building up the body of believers. What an honor and privilege to know that the Lord God has given you and I individually selected gifts for use in His service! Without a doubt, however, He has given each of us at least three gifts that are more important and far greater than all those listed in 1 Corinthians and Ephesians. These gifts are given to every believer. They are essential to our relationship with the Lord an...
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7 Things You Didn’t Know About Gospel for Asia Supported Bridge of Hope Centers

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Wills Point, Texas – GFA ( Gospel for Asia ) – Discussing how GFA-supported Bridge of Hope centers change the lives of children, their families, and in turn their communities. 1.8 million Indian babies succumb to death annually from effects of malnutrition and diseases. 150,000 infant deaths per month 34,615 deaths per week 4,945 deaths per day 206 deaths per hour The sad plight of the surviving children living in poverty in South Asia is impossible for our minds to comprehend unless we have seen it with our own eyes. These children wake up every morning in squalor, waste, rubbish and odors—not unlike survivors of a tornado, hurricane or earthquake experience. The major difference for these children is that every morning is the same. For these children and their families, there is no likelihood for a better future. There is no hope. GFA-supported Bridge of Hope centers have been changing the prospects for the lives of tens of thousands of children every year since 2004. Most people fa...
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Gospel for Asia: Widows Worldwide Face Tragedy, Discrimination (Part 3)

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Wills Point, Texas – Gospel for Asia (GFA) Special Report – Discussing widow’s plight worldwide as they face tragedy, discrimination, as well as the efforts and opportunities extended to them to give them hope. Hope to Overcome the Challenges of Widowhood “For millions of widows in Asia, life is incredibly difficult,” says Dr. KP Yohannan, founder and director of GFA. “Many are forced into begging or prostitution to survive. There are 46 million widows on the streets and in slums. There are stories of thousands of widows committing suicide because they have no hope.” Another widow whose story was featured in “Veil of Tears” faced rejection from her husband’s family after he died. Her nephews refused to give her food, forcing her to beg from passing strangers. Once, when she got sick and suffered from diarrhea for two days, no one would even approach her. Members of a GFA-supported Women’s Fellowship took her to the hospital for treatment, provided her food and found her a home. Most o...
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Gospel for Asia: Widows Worldwide Face Tragedy, Discrimination (Part 2)

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Wills Point, Texas – Gospel for Asia (GFA) Special Report – Discussing the plight of widows worldwide – raising awareness of the problems of widowhood as they face tragedy, discrimination, and suffering. A Day for the Plight of Widows Raises Awareness In response to stories like these , the Loomba Foundation organized the first International Widows Day in 2005 to raise awareness of the problems of widowhood. The foundation selected June 23 for the observance because on that day in 1954 the mother of the organization’s founder, Lord Loomba, became a widow. By the sixth year, 10 nations held observances. In December 2010, the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted June 23 as International Widows Day, calling on member states, the UN system and other organizations to give special attention to the situation of widows and their children. [ 1 ] Considering the average widow has three children and six other family members, the wider impact affects more than a billion people, about o...
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Gospel for Asia: Widows Worldwide Face Tragedy, Discrimination (Part 1)

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Wills Point, Texas – Gospel for Asia (GFA) Special Report – Discussing the plight of widows worldwide as they face tragedy, discrimination, and suffering. Accounts of the humiliations, insults and indignations suffered by widows worldwide would make anyone cringe. Gulika, a widow in Asia, experienced helplessness after the people in her village turned their backs on her after her husband’s death. A woman in Nigeria was harassed by her brother-in-law asking for documents of her house before her husband’s body even left for the funeral home—and then insisted she had to leave. Another Nigerian woman’s husband lay in a hospital bed when her sister-in-law demanded a huge amount of money from their bank account. When the wife refused, her in-law swore she would regret it. “Three days after, my husband died, his family descended on me, took his cars away and emptied the house.” In connection with last year’s International Widows Day, CNN spotlighted the cases of seven widows, ranging from a w...
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Saving Lives at Risk from Open Defecation (Part 3)

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Wills Point, Texas – Gospel for Asia Special Report (GFA) – Discussing the troubling problem of the lack of toilets – basic sanitation, and open defecation for millions throughout the world. What If You Didn’t Have a Toilet? So I remind myself of toilet scenarios I do know about, then extrapolate some personal situations out to extreme what-ifs. Our home, in which we have lived for 38 years, has its own septic system. During that time, when we had extreme storms, the power would go out. This meant that no water could be pumped from our underground well, and this electric outage disabled our showers, our faucets and our toilets. I used to store plastic bottles of water so when things went black we could brush our teeth, get dressed by candlelight (since there are no windows in any of our bathrooms), and—get this—flush our toilets. If the power did not come back on for a couple days, the frozen food thawed and an excess of detritus threatened to overflow the toilet basin. So I extrapola...
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Saving Lives at Risk from Open Defecation (Part 2)

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Wills Point, Texas – GFA Special Report (Gospel for Asia) – Discussing the troubling problem of open defecation and the lack of basic sanitation for millions throughout the world. Talking Openly About Open Defecation Another key dilemma in this discussion—open defecation, hardly a dinner-table topic or a mission committee agenda item—is the fact that accessibility to toilets does not always indicate usage . Changing habits is mostly a matter of changing mindsets in the face of the stranglehold of deeply entrenched beliefs. Elizabeth Royte, in a comprehensive August 2017 National Geographic Magazine article , reports visiting Parameswaran Iyer, India’s secretary of drinking water and sanitation, in 2016. A hand-numbered sign on his wall tracks progress. “You see that?” he asks. “One hundred thousand is the number of villages that are ODF today.” (ODF is the acronym for open defecation free). Royte reports working the internal math: “Just 540,000 to go, I note; three years before Modi’s...
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