From Paper to the Word of Life

Thanks to the prayers and generous gifts of believers around the world, GFA's four printing presses produce 50 million pieces of Gospel literature each year that are used to share the Good News with millions of people who have never heard. The following story recounts a visit by a GFA friend to our headquarters in India.

In the setting sun I sit under a jackfruit tree and breathe in the warm, welcoming air. I am on a Gospel for Asia Vision Tour and have just arrived at GFA in Kerala, India.

Just inside the iron gates leading to the headquarters building, a truck shifts gears and groans up the incline toward us with a tarped load overhanging its flat bed.

One GFA leader standing with me in the garden answers my unspoken questions.

"That's tomorrow's paper," he explains. "Every evening they come about this time with paper for our four printing presses."

"Wow," I think, "That's the Word going out all over Asia."

And the next day I get to see that paper become New Testaments in the Oriya language-passports to eternal life for people long locked in bondage

In the first room we enter, GFA's web press hums in production. Standing around the giant machine, seven press workers busy themselves checking print quality and alignment, fixing paper jams, and shuffling and sorting stacks of printed paper.

A huge web, or roll, of paper weighing about 660 pounds unrolls into the mouth of the press and comes out the other end, still in one long sheet but now printed on both sides. The paper then feeds into a cutting-and-folding machine, and piles of 32-page segments emerge.

The segments are compiled, checked for completeness, and then bound with covers. As a last step, the Scriptures are stacked into a cutting machine. Here the outside edges are sliced off so the covers and pages line up evenly.

A man in blue coveralls smiles and hands me the finished product-a New Testament in Oriya, the language of approximately 34 million people in eastern and central India. I hold the book in my hands and flip through pages filled with odd—looking characters.

I remember stories I've heard about the impact of the printed Word:

A man dying of cancer picks up a discarded GFA tract. He reads it, believes in Jesus and is healed. As a result, others in his village also come to Christ and a church is born. A pastor gives a New Testament to a teenage girl. She reads it, comes back to ask questions, receives Christ and now attends a GFA Bible college.

The "swish, swish" of the cutting machine draws me back into the room and the New Testament written in a strange language. I can't understand it, but someone can-someone out there who desperately needs to receive it. What I hold in my hands is a passport from death to life for someone I may never meet until heaven.

Mary McDonald and her husband, Craig, are faithful friends of GFA. Mary wrote this article after visiting India