After moving to its new location in Wills Point, Texas, Gospel for Asia (GFA) adopted a two-mile stretch of a local highway and has spent a few days a year cleaning it up.
Daniel Punnose, vice president of GFA, initiated adopting part of the highway.
“Although we normally focus on Asia,” he said, “we wanted to contribute to the local community and show people practically that we genuinely care about Wills Point. We saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate Christ’s love to the people we love here.”
Helping out in the Wills Point community is an outflow of Gospel for Asia’s core value of serving sacrificially. One of our driving motivations is to reflect Christ well and bless the people around us—even if that means a fun day of picking up trash that litters the sides of a highway.
Throughout Christ’s ministry on earth, He served. He knew that was His God-given purpose. As He says of Himself in Mark 10:45, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
Jesus washed His disciples’ feet; He fed the hungry; and whenever people asked Him to heal their diseases, give them eyesight, free their children from demon possession, He responded. He served. Giving His life was the ultimate act of sacrificial service for you, for us, so we may have fellowship with God, our Heavenly Father.
If we are Christ’s, then our lives, too, should be marked by service—and that’s what the GFA world seeks to live out.
“For our partners on the mission fields in Asia,” Punnose said, “[serving] is something they do regularly. They will help clean bus stations or train stations, or they’ll clean up an entire area of road. They are doing that because they really want to demonstrate Christ’s love in a practical way. Having that same kind of heart for Wills Point, TX … it’s kind of neat to be able to have our people practically engage in the same thing that our partners on the field do, but be able to do it here, locally.”
So come next Adopt-a-Highway cleanup, we’ll join our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world in serving the local community because as one GFA staff put it, “picking up trash is more fun than you think.”
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